After the heaviness that was The Light Ages I was very in the mood for something lighter and more fast paced. So when I returned Ages I looked through the new fiction shelves and came across Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. After reading the synopsis on the jacket I was very intrigued to say the least and went ahead and checked it out.

Spin was my first Wilson novel, and, I was not disappointed. The exploration of what had befallen the Earth was very intriguing; I could barely put the book down. There were a couple of slow stretches, which were really only slow by comparison to the rest of the book.

What was it that intrigued me so quickly about Spin you ask? Well, as the dust jacket advertised, in the early 21st century the Earth is surrounded by a membrane inside of which time runs a hundred million times slower. Okay, so why’s that so bad? Instead of billions of years until the sun becomes a red giant and engulfs the Earth, now only decades are left.

The story is told in two threads, both from the perspective of Tyler, the childhood friend of Diane and Jason. The first thread follows the time forward from their childhood and through what appears to be Earth’s last decades. The other thread takes place near the end of the expected 40 year lifetime of the Earth and revolves around Tyler and Diane, who are married now, and running for some reason from the government while Tyler undergoes some mysterious transformation.

Jason is, in a nutshell, a genius who, with his father, ends up essentially running the future NASA and thereby are involved in the various attempts to save humanity, learn about the membrane, and so on. Diane is very intelligent too, but her life is mainly a reaction to her brother and father, and most it occurs off screen, so to speak.

Tyler falls in love with Diane as a child, but, because of the life Diane chooses to lead, rarely sees her over the next few decades. He is close to Jason most of that time and ends up working for him at NASA.

Part of the reason I spent a little time describing the three main characters was to illustrate a point – is was very easy to do so. They’re none of them too deep, and this is my only major problem with Spin: weak characterization. Lackluster characterization is hardly unknown in hard scifi, and frequently, because of strong plots and storylines, they can get away with this. Spin does. And really, after Ages I didn’t mind this as much as I might have otherwise. It’s a good novel, not great, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone that enjoys scifi.