Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, a Virtual Discussion
The Beamers leave the possible apocalypse of Louise Erdrich‘s Future Home of the Living God for the very different but still very possible apocalypse of Robert Charles Wilson‘s Spin.
Watch the video for the day and time of the Beamers’ discussion.
One night in October, the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier.
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. 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 day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.
Hugo Award winner in the Best Novel category, Spin has also won the French Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, the Japanese Seiun Award, the Israeli Geffen Prize, and the German Kurd Lasswitz Prize, among others. A Locus Bestseller.
Here’s a book that features speculative conceits as brash and thrilling as those found in any space opera, along with insights into the human condition as rich as those contained within any mainstream mimetic fiction, with both its conceits and insights beautifully embedded in crystalline prose. — The Washington Post
Spin is many things: psychological novel, technological thriller, apocalyptic picaresque, cosmological meditation. . . Another triumph for Robert Charles Wilson in a long string of triumphs. — Locus
If you’d like to participate in the discussion, please contact us through the About the Beamers page. We’ll send you all you need to connect to the virtual meeting.
We look forward to seeing (and hearing) you.
- Posted in: Book Club ♦ Science Fiction
- Tagged: robert charles wilson
Beamer Books 
The math as best as I can see it:
4 times 10 to the ninth is 4 billion (4,000,000,000) A.D. = when our sun exhausts its hydrogen fuel and goes into expansion as a red giant.
Page 40 says in 5.5 years on earth, 500,000,000 years passed outside. When 4 billion years have passed outside, how many years will have passed in earth?
Consider 5.5 is to 500 million as X is to 4 billion.
By cross multiplication, 5.5 times 4 billion = 500 million times X. Use math to solve for X.
So 22 billion divided by 500 million = 44. Thus 40 to 50 years before solar fuel exhaustion.
I may be wrong, but I thought (someone in) the book used 100 million as the ratio. If so, I think we can safely infer that the Hypotheticals used base 10 in their numeric system. What would that imply?
Yes, in Kirkus Reviews they say, “time passes one hundred million times more swiftly outside the barrier, so that the sun itself may last only another 40 subjective years.” I was just trying to play a bit more precisely (though the structural point is the same) with Jason’s information on page 40 of my Kindle edition (chapter “Time Out of Joint”).
Ny review notes:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6257073975