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Binding: Mass Market PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 813.54 EAN: 9780765348258 Edition: Reissue ISBN: 076534825X Label: Tor Books Manufacturer: Tor Books Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 464 Publication Date: July 01, 2007 Publisher: Tor Books Studio: Tor Books Related Items: Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Not just for Sci -Fi fansI picked up 'Spin' in an act of desperation; I needed to find something to read late at night and was forced to look through my son's science fiction collection. The cover and the blurb did not inspire confidence, and I expected turgid prose full of technical terms, uninteresting square-jawed heroes and an incomprehensible slow-moving plot. But... the story was enertaining and intriguing, and fairly rocketed along. You did not need a physics degree to understand what was happening and the necessary explanations were well-integrated into the story. 'Spin' read like a 'proper' novel, not like a fantasy for those who enjoy reading computer manuals. Sometimes a little dramatic tension was diminished by the constant switching between past and present, and the female character was not fully realised but these are minor criticisms. I read this with great enjoyment, and would happily read another novel by this author. Rating:  - Creative and originalA very interesting premise, good characterisation and moves along at a good pace - not too slow, nor so fast as to seem occasionally forced. When what's been going on is finally made clear it is perhaps a little too magical for my tastes, but that doesn't detract from the book much. Rating:  - Not as dizzying as it could be.Science fiction, particularly the `hard' variety, is often criticised for its lack of character development. Whether fair criticism or not, any writer who aims to address this matter is to be applauded. Wilson devotes a lot of time and energy to this end. Unfortunately it's here that he's at his weakest. SPIN covers a long stretch of time over which we follow the main characters as they grow from adolescence into adulthood and on into middle-age. Sadly, these characters fail to convince. The interaction between them is contrived; they speak to each other in a language reserved for scientific exposition and melodrama. There's no true depth to these people and hence they fail to arouse empathy or real interest. They're too clichéd and portentous, and come across as little more than cyphers deployed to progress the narrative and drive the story arc. As a result their motivations and emotional ties never really satisfy. It's the concept behind SPIN that makes it worth reading. Once the mysterious phenomenon appears you need to know more. Here, once again, Wilson succeeds only in part. Maintaining the enigma over such a lengthy arc stretches his prose too thinly. He fills the gaps with a family saga (so many larger-than-life, troubled people!), that is irritating and feels like the padding that it is. Here we have a superb idea marred by a clumsy but brave attempt to create personal drama on a heroic scale. It would have been more interesting to hear this story told, in half as many words, from an everyman's point of view. Rating: - BrilliantSome SF writers use deliberately obscure language to presumably enhance the complexity of the ideas or the plot. The more difficulty you have undestanding what's going on, the more technically/scientifically complex the story is supposed to be. What happens, in fact, is that you plod through virtually unintelligible text to hopefully glean some kind of meaning. What I appreciated in this novel is that it reads like a novel. It is clearly written, it respects the reader and it is very exciting!! Rating: - Time in a Bubble`Hard' science fiction novels, all too often, get bogged down in their `gee-whiz' science, to the detriment of their story and characters. Happily, such is not the case here, as the characters of Tyler Dupree and Jason and Diane Lawton are well depicted, and their story, of just how they react when all the stars suddenly disappear one night, remains front and center throughout this book. The `gee-whiz' science here is the `Spin', a membrane folded around the earth that slows the time rate experienced by its denizens by a factor of 100 million versus the `normal' universe. This has an implication: in just 40 Earth years, 4 billion years will have passed on the outside, our sun will be nearing the end of its life, and will have expanded to the point that an unprotected Earth would be immediately fried. Where did this membrane come from? Who put it there, and perhaps more importantly, why? What can be done about it? Wilson's characters, in one way or another, attempt to answer these questions, an involvement that shapes much of their lives, and the lives of everyone on Earth, who are effectively facing a true end of the world scenario. Wilson presents his science in fairly small, well explained chunks - you don't need to be an actual rocket scientist to grasp what he is presenting, and this presentation doesn't interrupt the story flow, unlike all too many books that belong to this sub-genre. While all the above is quite good, I found I was disappointed in the final answers the book provides. I saw most of the answers long before they were directly shown - not good for a concept of this grand scope. Nor was I greatly impressed by the philosophical points raised. In these two areas, I expected more from a book that took the Hugo award over some other books that are just as inventive and possibly have a deeper level of meaning than this one. The Martian, introduced about the middle of the book, was not characterized very well, nor was his described culture very believable - probably because his function was that of deus-ex-machina device, a way for Wilson to get to his `solution' space. An entertaining read with some good concepts, but for my money the Hugo should have gone to John Scalzi's Old Man's War. --- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)  Try searching the Internet for "Spin" or Ebay for "Spin". You might also be interested in the following great products:
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