Tyler was twelve the night the stars went out, watching the sky with his best friends, twins Jason and Diane. It's eventually learned that the earth is now behind some sort of barrier, and that time is proceeding much more slowly inside than it is outside. The time distortion is so great, in fact, that there may be as little as 40 years of Earth time before the sun dies, incinerating the planet in its final expansion.
Wilson follows his three lead characters through those 40 years, as Tyler becomes a doctor, Jason heads the research teams seeking an answer, and Diane turns to one of the many cults which arise after the barrier's appearance.
Tyler narrates the story, with occasional chapters leaping out of the chronological sequence to a point near the very end. That can be tricky to pull off; it's difficult to write the chapters that take place near the end, when the narrator knows all of the secrets that the author hasn't yet let us in on, without the narrative becoming annoyingly coy or resorting to awkward phrasing to avoid telling us things that the author isn't ready to reveal yet. But Wilson does the job very nicely, and the out-of-sequence chapters never feel awkward.
Spin is about (among other things) the power and importance of friendship, and the relationships among the three main characters are complex and sharply observed. There are a lot of interesting ideas in Spin, but those ideas and the strange situation never dominate the book at the expense of the characters. This is a fine piece of writing, and I will be surprised if it doesn't appear on the major SF awards ballots next year.
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