Spin

Three children are in a field one October night when the stars go out. A barrier has been placed around the Earth, and behind it time now runs at a different rate: roughly a hundred million years pass outside for every year that passes on the ground. The sun is ageing fast. In about forty years it will expand and destroy the planet, and everyone alive knows this.

The novel follows the three of them across those decades. Tyler Dupree becomes a doctor and the narrator. Jason Lawton, brilliant and driven, takes over his father's aerospace empire and starts using the time differential as a tool, terraforming Mars in a human lifetime by throwing seed craft at it and letting the outside centuries do the work. And Diane, Jason's twin, joins an apocalyptic religious movement, because that is what a large part of humanity does when told the world has an expiry date.

What makes it work is that Wilson is far more interested in the people than in the phenomenon. The physics is real enough, but the book is about a friendship, an unspoken love, and the specific texture of living through a slow catastrophe while still going to work.

The Mars sequence is the best hard science fiction set piece of its decade. A crew leaves, and by the time the ship is out past the barrier the colony they were sent to found has had a hundred thousand years to develop, fail, and become something that sends its own message back.

Tyler tells the whole thing in retrospect from a hotel room in Padang while undergoing a treatment he may not survive, so the reader always knows roughly how far the story has left to run.

Around four hundred pages and unusually readable for a novel with an idea this big. It stands alone and most readers should stop here.

Best for readers who want cosmology at the scale of one ordinary life, and a good first hard science fiction novel for someone who normally reads literary fiction.