Appreciation :

Summary
One night the stars go out. From that breathtaking “what if,” Wilson (Blind Lake, etc.) builds an astonishingly successful mélange of SF thriller, growing-up saga, tender love story, father-son conflict, ecological parable and apocalyptic fable in prose that sings the music of the spheres. The narrative time oscillates effortlessly between Tyler Dupree’s early adolescence and his near-future young manhood haunted by the impending death of the sun and the earth. Tyler’s best friends, twins Diane and Jason Lawton, take two divergent paths: Diane into a troubling religious cult of the end, Jason into impassioned scientific research to discover the nature of the galactic Hypotheticals whose “Spin” suddenly sealed Earth in a “cosmic baggie,” making one of its days equal to a hundred million years in the universe beyond. As convincing as Wilson’s scientific hypothesizing is–biological, astrophysical, medical–he excels even more dramatically with the infinitely intricate, minutely nuanced relationships among Jason, Diane and Tyler, whose older self tries to save them both with medicines from Mars, terraformed through Jason’s genius into an incubator for new humanity. This brilliant excursion into the deepest inner and farthest outer spaces offers doorways into new worlds–if only humankind strives and seeks and finds and will not yield compassion for our fellow beings.

My review

The story is told by Tyler Dupree as an adult, starting off with the end, and is developed through many flashbacks. The mystery and suspense are maintained by this nifty use of flashbacks, we first learn about how the Spin appears, with no much unveiled, and then we progressively get into the past and life of the characters, their childhood before the Spin, their relationships.

Speculation is a great part of the novel, in such domains as politics, psychology, human, social, scientific. That is what I do love in Hard Science books ! How would we react and live if we had the knowledge of the future, if we knew that we have only 50 or 60 years left ? How the men and women born before and during this period would live, think, plan their life ? What about the worldwide economy ?

The main subject is fascinating and very well handled, the characters get by in a weird and disturbing world ruled by unavoidability, where the thirst for knowledge is the only hope. Tyler, Jason and Diane are  interesting and endearing characters, also human, imperfect and realistic. The plot is rich, with complex relationships, and the story turns out to be just amazing, and the finale announces a sequel, Axis, that I hope to read soon !