Spin
One night in October when he was ten years old, 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. The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk--a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside--more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future. Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses. Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars.
Stats for nerds
23recommend
29mentions
25people
2011–2026years
93% recommend7% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Vernor Vinge has some hits and some misses, but A Deepness in the Sky (best to just take the plunge and read it without googling — it's good either way, but better if you don't even read the back of the paperback).
Then, a bit further afield but for me, at least, exercised what I liked in The Culture series, even though stylistically different: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.
- Am I wrong to assume those are LLM slop?
But ya, I love that genre. eg Haldeman's The Forever War, Scalzi's Old Man's War, Robert Charles Wilson's Spin
- Here are some which, though perhaps not the best, haunt my memory through unique nostalgia.
Glory Season, David Brin. Ok, this is one of the best. A heartrending saga of epic scale.
Carve the Sky, Alexander Jablokov. Scifi feudalism.
All of an Instant, Richard Garfinkle.
Vita Nostra, Marina & Sergey Dyachenko. Though very different, it somehow reminds me of Roadside Picnic.
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson.
Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling.
Interstellar Pig, William Sleator.
The Carpet Makers, Andreas Eschbach
The Threshold series (Peter Clines) doesn't really belong in this list, but it is excellent and from what I gather, commonly overlooked by fans of Lovecraft.
I'd also throw in The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russel, if it wasn't so well known already.
In a different vein, if you seek good-old action-packed, kick-ass never-ending fun, pick anything by Larry Correia. Even if it appears fantasy, it might turn out to be scifi...
- The Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is magnificent. Set in a contemporary setting, the sun and stars are replaced by projection shield that simulates them, and as the topic suggests it’s because the sun has died, but who did it???
- If you're interested in series, I recommend the one beginning with Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton. It's only two books, but it's a great space opera to dive into.
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is also good. I haven't read the sequel(s) but the first book can be treated as a standalone, and has some big ideas.
Finally, the Algebraist by Iain M. Banks remains one of my all-time favorites.
- > As an SF writer, it's pretty interesting, though, to think of the weird shapes a society would take when your astronauts are outliving entire civilizations.
Spin, a novel by Robert Charles Wilson, touches on this from a planetary perspective. Quite the interesting read, though I won't say more here for fear of spoilers.
