Spin starts with an utterly fascinating premise. One day, in the near present, the stars go out. The moon is hidden, sunlight is filtered. Earth is cut off from the universe by the Spin barrier, and one year on Earth equals 100 million years in the universe. Time is literally passing humanity by, and within one lifetime the sun will expand to encompass the Earth.

The story follows Tyler Dupree, a family confidant of the intelligent and powerful Lawton family. The twins Jason and Diane, two years older than Tyler, serve as windows on the human reaction to the Spin. Jason becomes a scientist, in charge of the aerospace program to find a way around the barrier. Diane falls in with a millenialist Christian movement as she and Tyler lead the broken lives of star-crossed lovers.

The scientific side of the story is one of the boldest and coolest bits that I've read in a while. Jason Lawton learns to use the Spin as a temporal weapon, terraforming Mars and founding a new human world that hopefully can find a solution. Later, Oort-cloud inhabiting nanotech serves as a Von Nuemann probe network, mapping the cosmos over billions of years to discover what force created the Spin. The Martian technology and Martian envoy, Wun, are also high-points in the story.

The human side of the story, around Diane, is not nearly as satisfying. The romance is realistically tense and awkward, with all the burning of high emotion, but not very satisfying as a story. The Christian millenialists are mostly generic, people who deal with mystery by falling into ancient Greek, rather than technical equations, their fervor muted by Dupree's distance as a protagonist and Wilson's style as an author. The Spin is a slow motion apocalypse, and people go mad, but it's all a very ordinary kind of petty crime and alcoholism with a dash of despairing suicide.

The final bit, the meaning behind it all, is entirely unsatisfying. The Spin was created by a hyper-advanced galactic intelligence, one that lived in the Oort cloud and "thought" on timescales too slow to interact with biological beings. But it hated seeing the mayfly lives of planetary civilizations as they hit their resource limits, and so embarked on a scheme to protect all planetary civilizations in Spin barriers, until they can create a massive set of artificial planets linked by wormhole gates, where planetary civilizations can expand indefinitely. The story ends with our protagonists sailing into a new world, empty and free.

The ideas are grand, amazing, but a story needs some character, some plot. I ask myself, did Tyler learn anything over the course of the story? Did anybody's knowledge or faith or sacrifice make a difference? And the answer is a resounding negative. This is a wonderful Out Of Context Problem story, but is even weaker in characterization than Rendezvous with Rama, something I believed to be impossible.