A novel of breathtaking cosmic scope--and the very human people who must live through it.
One night, when he was twelve, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives. Eventually, probes reveal that the barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier--more than a hundred million years per year on Earth. At this rate, the death of the Sun is only forty years away.
Now a promising young scientist, Jason works to avert this apocalypse. Diane marries a cult leader who's forged a religion out of the fears of millions. Earth sends terraforming machines, then humans, to Mars . . . and in an eyeblink, a wizened ancient Martian human returns with thousands of years' tales about the settling of Mars. Then an identical barrier appears around Mars.
Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.
This new Tor Essentials edition of Spin includes a new introduction by John Scalzi, Hugo Award-winning author of Redshirts, Old Man's War, and many others.
'Robert Charles Wilson is a hell of a storyteller.' --Stephen King on Spin
'The long-anticipated marriage between the hard sf novel and the literary novel, resulting in an offspring possessing the robust ideational vigor of the former with the graceful narrative subtleties of the latter, might finally have occurred in the form of Robert Charles Wilson's Spin....Wilson does so many fine things, it's hard to know where to begin to praise him.' --The Washington Post
