introduction
by JOHN SCALZI
I’m writing this introduction to Robert Charles Wilson’s novel Spin on April 20, 2020. On this day, I am on the first day of my sixth week of quarantine, forced inside, along with everyone except essential workers and the foolish (two almost entirely separate categories, to be sure) by the COVID-19 coronavirus, which as of this moment has killed almost 50,000 Americans and has put the life of the nation in suspension.
(This relates to the novel I have the honor to write this introduction for. Walk with me for a moment. We will get there.)
What is remarkable about this current state of affairs is how quickly it happened. For me, everything changed while I was away on a cruise—one of the very last cruises to go out, as it happened, and one of the very last to come back before sea cruises were shut down indefinitely. We boarded our ship from a world where people were still going to work, congregating in restaurants and bars and attending conventions and sports events (and, well, going on cruises). We came back a week later to a world where none of that was true.
My indication everything had changed came when my editor e-mailed me in the middle of the cruise to inform me my April book tour, along with every other book-related event (and indeed, pretty much everything) had been cancelled. “You have no idea what it’s like back here,” he wrote, in the early hours of a Thursday. “It’s been four months since Monday.” I checked the news, which I had been avoiding because I was on vacation. He was right: In three days the world had changed. In the two days it would take us to get back, it would change even more. That Saturday, when we disembarked from the ship, the Fort Lauderdale airport was jam-packed with vacationers trying to get home. A week later, that same airport was a ghost town.
We came home, counted our toilet paper rolls, and six weeks later, we’re still there. The world is definitely not the same as it was six week ago, and the wrenching change was so sudden and for everyone but the scientists, so utterly unexpected, that the best way to describe the feeling of the nation and world is, simply, shock. Were we not the masters of this planet? Had we not tuned our world to run the way we wanted it, no matter what? Then this … thing, this virus, this inhuman actor which we had no control over and which almost none of us understood, had without consent or consultation taken our understanding of our place in the grand order of things and, almost casually, turned it completely upside down.
Which brings us, inevitably, to Spin.
Spin is about people and how they respond to change—not small-scale change, like changing schools, or divorce, or even the death of a loved one, but the sort of global change that even if not understood cannot be ignored. Change that affects everyone. Change without apparent cause or motivation that anyone affected by it can understand. Change that permanently alters society on a national and planetary level. Change that doesn’t care how you feel about it, can’t be argued with, and won’t respond to your political or social arguments. Change that is an irresistible force, and no matter how immovable you think you are, will unmoor you and set you adrift.
In Spin, that change happens early on in the book: A barrier of some sort is placed around the planet Earth, blocking out the stars. What it is and, more importantly, why it is, are not immediately apparent to anyone. Communications beyond terrestrial broadcast are disputed, and for the first night, no one is even sure the sun will rise the next morning; an existential terror that’s not exactly easy to imagine or describe. The bewilderment and confusion of a whole planet is a hell of a thing. What follows from there for the characters, in terms of dealing with the immediate repercussions of the planetary barrier that would become known as “the Spin,” sounds rather intimately familiar to anyone living in this very moment.
Which brings up the question: Was (and is) Robert Charles Wilson some sort of prophet? Does he have access to some sort of time machine?
The answer (I think) is no. For one thing, Wilson didn’t need to look into the future to see how humans deal with wrenching global change. Lord knows we have enough examples of that in our own history. Since 1900: World War I, the Great Flu of 1917–1919, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Fall of Communism, and 9/11 are the easy ones, all of which happened before Spin was first published in 2005. Wilson had recent(ish) history and his own life experience to work from. None of it was directly on point to the wrenching change he posited (as far as we know no global shield has ever been put on the sky), but it doesn’t have to be in order to be useful and for Wilson to understand what happens to human when events out of their control sweep them up and carry them along.
For another thing—and this being the thing that distinguishes Spin and I think carried it over the line for its well-deserved Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006—Wilson actually understands humans and understands how to write them, the latter not always known (fairly or otherwise) as the forte of science fiction writers. The novel follows three primary characters—siblings Jason and Diane and their close friend Tyler—from childhood on through the decades of the Spin. Each of these characters has an archetype they play into—Jason the brilliant but difficult scientist, Diane the searcher for truth, and Tyler the ordinary person caught up in extraordinary events.
Copyright © 2005 by Robert Charles Wilson
Introduction copyright © 2020 by John Scalzi
