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. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, a 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 year on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Stephen King raves, “Robert Charles Wilson is a hell of a storyteller,” and The Washington Post writes of Spin, “Wilson does so many fine things, it’s hard to know where to begin to praise him.”