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(note - satirical spoiler alerts ahoy)

Robert Charles Wilson appears to be paid by the word - how else to account for such passages, and they are legion, as this :

The day I left Perihelion the support staff summoned me into one of the now seldom-used boardrooms for a farewell party, where I was given the kind of gifts appropriate to yet another departure from a dwindling workforce : a miniature cactus in a terracotta pot, a coffee mug with my name on it, a pewter tie pin in the shape of a caduceus.

Yeah right so the world is about to end and there are millenial cults trashing the place which the woman he loves has married into one of them and his friend the genius has a grim disease and there's this stuff about a man from Mars but let's suspend all that and get the pot, the mug and the tiepin down, don't want to let that stuff go by unrecorded. Yeah they're little human touches amongst the catastrophes but let me tell you, Robert Charles Wilson, the pot, the mug and the tiepin are boring and if I may say so, so is your protagonist, a guy you'd rather jab needles into your sinuses than share a railway journey with, Doctor Humourless Dullard should be his name, not Tyler Dupree, which sounds like a guy who made two blues records for Paramount in 1928, but anyway, I'm straying from the point - what was the point? Oh yeah, a 450 page Hugo Award winning novel about the usual stuff - The End Of Life As we Know It. For most of the 450 pages the world's going to end, and by page 350 as I read I was thinking "come on, end! End now! End! Put us out of our misery!" but the world kept not ending and by page 390 this became distressing. Maybe I'm a bad person. So maybe if there has to be an Apocalypse we'd all vote for the kind where you have time to buy each other terracotta tie pins. It's just that it's more exciting reading about the other kind.

Sings with guitar accompaniment :

"I could've bought you a tiepin, didn't mean to be unkind
But tiepins were the last thing on my mind"


Two and a half stars.

*

Two bad tempered thoughts - the final Big Idea in Spin can also be found in Clifford Simak's lovely 1959 novella called the Big Front Yard. That one won the Hugo in 1959. And - there's a quote on the front cover of Spin which must be the worst marketing quote ever. It says "The best science fiction novel of the year so far" - Rocky Mountain News. So far? How do we know whether that review was in the February issue and they were expecting much better stuff next month?