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Spin (novel)
Encyclopedia
Spin is a science fiction
novel
by author Robert Charles Wilson
. It was published in 2005 and won the Hugo Award
for Best Novel
in 2006. It is the first book in the Spin trilogy, with Axis
(the second) published in 2007 and Vortex published in July 2011.
. However, the membrane displays a faux-sun on its inner surface, maintaining a relatively normal day-night cycle for the inhabitants of Earth.
The novel is told in the first person
, from the viewpoint of Tyler Dupree. Tyler is a close childhood friend of Jason and Diane Lawton, twins of E. D. Lawton (a wealthy industrialist). As children, Jason, Diane, and Tyler witness the dramatic arrival of the "Spin", as the phenomenon comes to be known, when the stars suddenly disappear one night. Initial experiments by the world’s governments show that the membrane is permeable, allowing space probes to pass through, but that time on Earth has been dramatically slowed to a rate of roughly 100 million years per Earth year, or about 3 years outside for every second inside. Thus, it is deduced, within the time of one generation on Earth the rest of the solar system will age 4 billion years and Earth will be destroyed by the expanding Sun.
The story follows four primary protagonists, each of whom respond to the Spin and to the knowledge that humanity is doomed in distinct ways. E.D. Lawton founds a low Earth orbit satellite company (using high-altitude balloon technology) and profits spectacularly. Jason becomes a scientist with his father's political and financial backing, and devotes himself to trying to understand the "Spin" and who or what is behind it. Diane joins a religious cult who views the Spin as part of God's plan for the end times. And Tyler, the narrator, becomes a medical doctor who immerses himself in his work, but suffers through a series of existential crises related to the Spin and its obviously alien purposes.
When huge technological constructs are detected outside the Spin, hovering in orbit above the Earth’s poles (in seeming defiance of orbital physics), it becomes clear that the Spin can not possibly be some peculiar natural phenomenon, but the act of some unknown agency. The possible beings behind the Spin are dubbed, appropriately enough, "The Hypotheticals", and attempts are started at discovering who they are, why they are covering the Earth in the Spin membrane, and how to disable the membrane before it's too late.
The first attempt is to destroy one of the pole-floating devices with a thermonuclear explosion. The attempt briefly causes the Spin to become partially transparent, which incites mass panic as the population of Earth is suddenly able to see the astounding speed at which stars are "spinning" in the sky (due to the time differential). Soon after, the Spin membrane goes back to normal, and there seems to be no further effects; the floating pole device is undamaged.
The second attempt to stave off extinction happens when the world powers decide to terraform
Mars, something possible now thanks to the vast rate at which time progresses outside Earth. Several automated rockets seed Mars with biological material, to begin the terraforming. Human colonists are then sent to Mars to start a new civilization. Though only a matter of weeks pass on Earth, millennia have passed for the Martian colonists, who have flourished into an entirely separate and ancient culture that has developed science far ahead of Earth's. After 100,000 years, the Martian government sends the scholar Wun Ngo Wen to Earth, just as Mars is engulfed by its own Spin membrane.
Wun provides Earth with the technology to send Von Neumann machines
out of the Spin membrane that will self replicate
and expand throughout the galaxy in search for information about the Spin’s creators and broadcast it back to Earth and Mars. However, within a few years of Earth time, the signals become weaker, contradictory or corrupted. Wun also brings a collection of advanced medical technology, including a drug that brings about an upgrade in human beings known as the "Fourth Age".
The final explanation behind the Spin is that it was created by self-replicating machines similar to those humans sent out, but a far more advanced self-conscious
galaxy-spanning collective entity
that is billions of years old; the “Hypotheticals”. The earlier corruption of the Earthly information-seeking machines was caused by them being both materially consumed by the more ancient network of self-replicating machines, as well as technologically assimilated by it. Before it's fully absorbed by the Hypotheticals, the human-created network returns evidence that other planets outside the Solar system have been contained by similar Spins, but ultimately it is the technological assimilation of one network by the other that allows humans to indirectly detect the Spin-creator network and infer its objectives, at least as far as humanity is concerned.
What is inferred is that the Spin-creator network puts planets with sentient species into a state of almost suspended animation as soon as it detects they've entered a phase of unsustainable growth that will destroy them and their home planet due to resource depletion. While these planets are suspended, the machines construct huge wormhole
-based gates
connecting planets of similar conditions to those that were suspended, in a long chain of interconnected planets of similar environment and habitability. This is supposed to compensate for the inefficiencies of space travel as a mean of propagation, saving those sentient species from their own self-destruction by providing them greatly expanded means of development.
At approximately 4 Billion AD
, a few years after the Hypotheticals have shut down the time-warping properties of the Spin membrane (although not the membrane itself, since the Sun, having already expanded by then, would kill life on Earth were the Spin completely disabled), Earth's governments start to hunt down humans who have gone through the Fourth Age treatment, fearing the potentially culturally disrupting effect of Martian biotechnology. Jason is long dead, but Diane, being a Fourth, must hide. Tyler, who is with her, also undergoes the process of becoming a Fourth, and by the end of the book both run away from the governmental persecution by leaving Earth, going through the wormhole gate to the next Earth-like world in the sequence.
The first half of the story is told in the form of notes and memories written by Tyler during his Fourth treatment, which encompasses the "in the present" chapters of the first half of the book, as well as a substantial part of the second half.
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by author Robert Charles Wilson
Robert Charles Wilson
Robert Charles Wilson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.Wilson was born in the United States in California, but grew up near Toronto, Ontario. Apart from another short period in the early 1970s spent in Whittier, California, he has lived most of his life in Canada, and in 2007 he...
. It was published in 2005 and won the Hugo Award
Hugo Award
The Hugo Awards are given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was officially named the Science Fiction Achievement Awards...
for Best Novel
Hugo Award for Best Novel
The Hugo Awards are given every year by the World Science Fiction Society for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was once officially...
in 2006. It is the first book in the Spin trilogy, with Axis
Axis (novel)
Axis is a science fiction novel by author Robert Charles Wilson, published in 2007. It is a direct sequel to Wilson's Hugo Award-winning Spin, published two years earlier. The novel was a finalist for the 2008 John W...
(the second) published in 2007 and Vortex published in July 2011.
Plot
Set in the near future, Spin begins with the sudden and mysterious enveloping of the Earth in an artificial membrane that blocks out the sky, including the stars and moon. The membrane selectively filters incoming electromagnetic radiation, blocking out the view of anything beyond minimal low Earth orbitLow Earth orbit
A low Earth orbit is generally defined as an orbit within the locus extending from the Earth’s surface up to an altitude of 2,000 km...
. However, the membrane displays a faux-sun on its inner surface, maintaining a relatively normal day-night cycle for the inhabitants of Earth.
The novel is told in the first person
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
, from the viewpoint of Tyler Dupree. Tyler is a close childhood friend of Jason and Diane Lawton, twins of E. D. Lawton (a wealthy industrialist). As children, Jason, Diane, and Tyler witness the dramatic arrival of the "Spin", as the phenomenon comes to be known, when the stars suddenly disappear one night. Initial experiments by the world’s governments show that the membrane is permeable, allowing space probes to pass through, but that time on Earth has been dramatically slowed to a rate of roughly 100 million years per Earth year, or about 3 years outside for every second inside. Thus, it is deduced, within the time of one generation on Earth the rest of the solar system will age 4 billion years and Earth will be destroyed by the expanding Sun.
The story follows four primary protagonists, each of whom respond to the Spin and to the knowledge that humanity is doomed in distinct ways. E.D. Lawton founds a low Earth orbit satellite company (using high-altitude balloon technology) and profits spectacularly. Jason becomes a scientist with his father's political and financial backing, and devotes himself to trying to understand the "Spin" and who or what is behind it. Diane joins a religious cult who views the Spin as part of God's plan for the end times. And Tyler, the narrator, becomes a medical doctor who immerses himself in his work, but suffers through a series of existential crises related to the Spin and its obviously alien purposes.
When huge technological constructs are detected outside the Spin, hovering in orbit above the Earth’s poles (in seeming defiance of orbital physics), it becomes clear that the Spin can not possibly be some peculiar natural phenomenon, but the act of some unknown agency. The possible beings behind the Spin are dubbed, appropriately enough, "The Hypotheticals", and attempts are started at discovering who they are, why they are covering the Earth in the Spin membrane, and how to disable the membrane before it's too late.
The first attempt is to destroy one of the pole-floating devices with a thermonuclear explosion. The attempt briefly causes the Spin to become partially transparent, which incites mass panic as the population of Earth is suddenly able to see the astounding speed at which stars are "spinning" in the sky (due to the time differential). Soon after, the Spin membrane goes back to normal, and there seems to be no further effects; the floating pole device is undamaged.
The second attempt to stave off extinction happens when the world powers decide to terraform
Terraforming
Terraforming of a planet, moon, or other body is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology to be similar to those of Earth, in order to make it habitable by terrestrial organisms.The term is sometimes used more generally as a...
Mars, something possible now thanks to the vast rate at which time progresses outside Earth. Several automated rockets seed Mars with biological material, to begin the terraforming. Human colonists are then sent to Mars to start a new civilization. Though only a matter of weeks pass on Earth, millennia have passed for the Martian colonists, who have flourished into an entirely separate and ancient culture that has developed science far ahead of Earth's. After 100,000 years, the Martian government sends the scholar Wun Ngo Wen to Earth, just as Mars is engulfed by its own Spin membrane.
Wun provides Earth with the technology to send Von Neumann machines
Von Neumann universal constructor
John von Neumann's Universal Constructor is a self-replicating machine in a cellular automata environment. It was designed in the 1940s, without the use of a computer. The fundamental details of the machine were published in von Neumann's book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, completed in...
out of the Spin membrane that will self replicate
Self-replicating machine
A self-replicating machine is an artificial construct that is theoretically capable of autonomously manufacturing a copy of itself using raw materials taken from its environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. The concept of self-replicating machines...
and expand throughout the galaxy in search for information about the Spin’s creators and broadcast it back to Earth and Mars. However, within a few years of Earth time, the signals become weaker, contradictory or corrupted. Wun also brings a collection of advanced medical technology, including a drug that brings about an upgrade in human beings known as the "Fourth Age".
The final explanation behind the Spin is that it was created by self-replicating machines similar to those humans sent out, but a far more advanced self-conscious
Sentience
Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences. Eighteenth century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think from the ability to feel . In modern western philosophy, sentience is the ability to have sensations or experiences...
galaxy-spanning collective entity
Group mind (science fiction)
A group mind, hive mind or group ego in science fiction is a single consciousness occupying many bodies. Its use in literature goes back at least as far as Olaf Stapledon's science fiction novel Last and First Men ....
that is billions of years old; the “Hypotheticals”. The earlier corruption of the Earthly information-seeking machines was caused by them being both materially consumed by the more ancient network of self-replicating machines, as well as technologically assimilated by it. Before it's fully absorbed by the Hypotheticals, the human-created network returns evidence that other planets outside the Solar system have been contained by similar Spins, but ultimately it is the technological assimilation of one network by the other that allows humans to indirectly detect the Spin-creator network and infer its objectives, at least as far as humanity is concerned.
What is inferred is that the Spin-creator network puts planets with sentient species into a state of almost suspended animation as soon as it detects they've entered a phase of unsustainable growth that will destroy them and their home planet due to resource depletion. While these planets are suspended, the machines construct huge wormhole
Wormhole
In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that would be, fundamentally, a "shortcut" through spacetime. For a simple visual explanation of a wormhole, consider spacetime visualized as a two-dimensional surface. If this surface is folded along a third dimension, it...
-based gates
Interstellar teleporter
An interstellar teleporter is a hypothetical technology appearing in science fiction, typically in hard sci-fi, which teleports people and/or other objects over interstellar distances instantaneously...
connecting planets of similar conditions to those that were suspended, in a long chain of interconnected planets of similar environment and habitability. This is supposed to compensate for the inefficiencies of space travel as a mean of propagation, saving those sentient species from their own self-destruction by providing them greatly expanded means of development.
At approximately 4 Billion AD
Anno Domini
and Before Christ are designations used to label or number years used with the Julian and Gregorian calendars....
, a few years after the Hypotheticals have shut down the time-warping properties of the Spin membrane (although not the membrane itself, since the Sun, having already expanded by then, would kill life on Earth were the Spin completely disabled), Earth's governments start to hunt down humans who have gone through the Fourth Age treatment, fearing the potentially culturally disrupting effect of Martian biotechnology. Jason is long dead, but Diane, being a Fourth, must hide. Tyler, who is with her, also undergoes the process of becoming a Fourth, and by the end of the book both run away from the governmental persecution by leaving Earth, going through the wormhole gate to the next Earth-like world in the sequence.
The first half of the story is told in the form of notes and memories written by Tyler during his Fourth treatment, which encompasses the "in the present" chapters of the first half of the book, as well as a substantial part of the second half.
Awards
- Hugo Award winner, 2006
- John W. Campbell Memorial Award nominee, 2006
- Locus Award nominee, 2006
External links
- Spin at Worlds Without End