Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Following the resounding success of my Locus Quest, I faced a dilemma: which reading list to follow it up with? Variety is the spice of life, so I’ve decided to diversify and pursue six different lists simultaneously. This book falls into my HUGO WINNERS list.

This is the reading list that follows the old adage, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I loved reading the Locus Sci-Fi Award winners so I'm going to crack on with the Hugo winners next (but only the post-1980 winners, I'll follow up with pre-1980 another time).

Spin was my first meeting with Robert Charles Wilson and I came away impressed and disappointed in equal measure.

Glowing reviews from Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ members had raised the bar of expectation... too far.

Let’s start with the good: the premise is excellent, a really original and compelling idea. What would happen if one night the stars just went out? Some hypothetical alien race (or God?) has wrapped the Earth in a bubble, a membrane � an event, christened by us Earthlings as the Spin. The membrane is sophisticated, it allows sunlight through to enable our biosphere to survive and it allows us to send probes, etc, out to investigate its nature. But it doesn’t take long to realise that the bubble is messing with time � it’s flowing a lot faster outside the bubble than inside... like a million times faster.

Some hypothetical alien race (or God?) has put Earth on slow-mo, like a museum exhibit, while the universe grows old around it.

I think that’s an amazing idea! It throws up so many questions and I’ve never read anything like it before. So from pure premise, we’re at a 5-star start.

So next we need our human lens on this story � if it was put to me, I’d have probably suggested multiple protagonists spread around key countries, to give a sense of the varied reactions and consequences to this global predicament, with a matter-of-fact tone, in the style of Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

Wilson prefers to keep the lens a little tighter � he focuses on one family, specifically twin boy-girl siblings who are teenagers at the time of the Spin. The boy, Jason is a physics genius destined for great things � and their father is a big player in the American aerospace industry. So Jason grows up as one of the key thinkers in the human reaction, a leader in the fight. His sister, Diane, takes the opposite path � throwing herself into the religious reaction, apocalypse is coming, etc. Good idea, very interesting to see the different stages of that journey. Again, if we’re talking concepts, with an editor hat on � so far, so good � I can see this all working.

And then... and then Wilson takes an additional step which I didn’t understand and didn’t like. He brings in an additional character as the narrator. Dr Tyler Dupree. Tyler is the son of Jason and Dianne’s housekeeper. He lives in the cottage on the corner of their estate. He’s their friend as they grow-up. He’s a decent, smart, everyman. He’s been placed in the story to give readers an easy ride, to give them someone they can relate to and experience this madcap world with. He’s supposed to ground the story. Where Jason and Dianne represent the extremes, Tyler is just a normal guy trying to make the best out of things and muddle along.

I hated Tyler. No, wait, hate is too strong a word. I was bored by Tyler. I pitied Tyler. Tyler is nothing to this story... Jason is a world changer, and Tyler is his tag-along buddy. Dianne is an emotional rollercoaster and Tyler is her childhood sweetheart. Tyler himself is an emotional vacuum, paralysed by circumstances outside of his control playing it safe every step of the way.

For me, this story would have been far more dramatic, tense, emotional, vivid, gripping � all the good things I look for in a story � without Tyler. Why couldn’t we just follow Jason and Dianne first-hand, rather than hearing a reduced and diluted version of their tales through wet-rag Tyler? We could have been seeing the life that inspired Jason’s schemes (and those schemes are brilliant!) rather than the every day tedium that is Tyler.

I’m going to quote the book and Paul’s review here � because he nailed it:

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?

So I’m not alone with my gripe here, even if I’m swimming against the tide. A lot of people found the Tyler-device to be stonking success � it helped non-sci-fi geeks to get a handle on this very human, very accessible story. I can see that � I can � but I’m not that reader. I am the sci-fi-geek, and I found it unnecessary and irritating. Far too much drivel amidst the gems for anything more than a three-star rating, and far too many gems amongst the drivel for anything less.

After this I read: A Squash and a Squeeze