Spin (2005)

by Robert Charles Wilson

Spin is an expertly crafted science fiction novel presenting provocative technological ideas in a thoughtful and empathetic work of literature.

Wilson’s novel explores two questions, both thoroughly examined with the help of the “Spin” technology:

1. What is humanity’s place in the universe?
2. What is one’s place amongst others?

The scale of the ideas presented becomes steadily larger as the book progresses and the reader is led carefully up a ladder where only near the top is it clear where it is heading. This derivation from first principles of an end so unfathomably immense introduces a new technological concept every few chapters large enough to warrant its own book. Time dilation, Martians, the Fourth treatment [1], von Neumann probes, up to the final reveal of the endless chain of uncultivated worlds that is momentous if not for its novelty then for its delivery — Wilson ultimately constructs a future more fantastical than technical using building blocks that pass the “hard SF” smell test.

The time dilation of the Spin was for me the most exciting idea presented. The utterly inhuman and oppressive scale of the universe can be a roadblock for SF as a genre, overcome in various works through wormholes, FTL travel, stasis, generational endeavors, time travel, biological or technological immortality… but each of those paths are, to me, well-trodden and useful as an enabling factor in a story centered elsewhere but uncompelling as central technologies. Spin’s dilation achieves the goal of humanizing geological and astrological timescales in a way that pleases my inner critic and lights my imagination on fire.

Spin shines equally brightly as a novel about people. Where there is a clean answer (within its fictional universe) in the final chapters for question #1, no such answer can be found for question #2, save for the droplets of wisdom interspersed throughout the novel. A fictional technology sufficiently answers the question of our place in the universe but even between the covers of an SF novel it is up to each of us as an individual to find our place amongst others. Through stories of religion, apathy, paralysis and perseverance in the face of the apocalypse, Wilson depicts an amplified version of the struggle with our own mortality that each of us endures in the real world.

I started Spin without expectations and finished with the undeniable realization that my all-time top SF novel rankings had been shaken up. Spin wholly deserves its Hugo and is now my go-to recommendation to anybody claiming that SF can’t be both technologically thrilling and literarily and emotionally substantive.

[1] I have to wonder if the Martian “fourth” treatment — a DNA-repairing biochemical agent capable of curing incurable diseases, extending lifetimes and expanding consciousness — is an homage to the senescence treatment in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, a series even mentioned by name in Spin.