In this outstanding sequel to Wilson's Hugo-winning Spin (2005), we are taken to the mysterious planet Equatoria, a world apparently engineered for humanity by the inscrutable machine intelligences known as the Hypotheticals. Turk Findley, a man with a criminal past, runs an aeronautical charter service on the newly settled planet. Lise Adams, who hires Turk, is a would-be journalist searching for her vanished father, a scientist obsessed with the Hypotheticals and their illegal life extension technology. Meanwhile, young Isaac, genetically manipulated by rogue scientists so that he may become a conduit between humanity and the AIs, is coming of age, and something enormous and unknown is assembling itself far underground. The various science and thriller plot elements are successful, but this is first and foremost a novel of character. Turk and Lise, who might well be played by Bogart and Bacall, are powerfully drawn protagonists, and their strong presence in the novel makes the wonders provided all the more satisfying. Those unfamiliar with Spin may flounder a bit, but Wilson's fans will be ecstatic....

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....

Spin ended with the alien Hypotheticals setting a vast Arch over the Indian Ocean. Those who sailed under it found themselves on Equatoria, another planet entirely. In Axis, a secretive Equatorian community of Fourths - humans who've had their lives extended by illegal Martian technology - raised a boy, Isaac Dvali, to communicate with the Hypotheticals. They built the same technology into Isaac that had, back on Earth, allowed Jason Lawton to make contact with the Hypotheticals, before it killed him. But Isaac's fate proved stranger. Interstellar clouds of tiny fragmented Hypothetical nanomachines rained down on Equatoria, and some of them began to grow. He and Turk Findley, a tough bush pilot and former drifter, were absorbed - the Fourth's word for it is "remembered" - by a vast concatenation of those growths. Now Turk Findley has awakened ten thousand years later, to be collected by the people of Vox - an Equatorian group that's obsessed with the Hypotheticals, and who evidently know the timing whereby the "remembered" will reappear. And they've been waiting for Turk and Isaac a very long time, because they think Turk and Isaac can tell them what the Hypotheticals are, what they want, and what the're going to do. Turk Findley has no idea. Isaac may have an inkling, but to the extent that he understands the Hypotheticals - a galaxy-spanning network of self-replicating Von Neumann machines that "thinks" very, very slowly because its mental processes are limited by the speed of light over interstellar distances - he's an alien as they are. But this is not what the poeple of Vox, under attack by the other nations of Equatoria, want to hear. Meanwhile, the story of Turk Findley and Isaac Dvali among the people of Vox is being told in scrawled netbooks by a disturbed man being held in a hospital on Earth in the years immediately following the Spin....

In 1912, the entire European continent and all of the United Kingdom mysteriously vanished during the Miracle, replaced by an alien landscape known as Darwinia. Darwinia seems to be a slice of another Earth, one that diverged from our own millions of years ago and took a separate evolutionary path. As a 14-year-old boy, Guilford Law witnessed the Miracle as shimmering lights playing across the ocean sky. Now as a grown man, he is determined to travel to Darwinia and explore its mysteries. To that end he enlists as a photographer in the Finch expedition, which plans to steam up the Rhine (or what was once the Rhine) and penetrate the continent's hidden depths as far as possible. But Law has brought an unwanted companion with him, a mysterious twin who seems to have lived--and died--on an Earth unchanged by the Miracle. The twin first appears to Guilford in dreams, and he brings a message that Darwinia is not what it seems to be--and Guilford is not who he seems to be....

This is the novella that introduces the much longer tale to be told in Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century. Julian: A Christmas Story was a finalist for the 2007 Hugo award in its category. The link at the right takes you to the PS Publishing site where the gorgeous limited first edition is for sale -- autographed, and with an introduction by Robert J. Sawyer. Julian: A Christmas Story has also been reprinted in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction and Jonathan Strahan's Best Short Novels. It's 2176 and, following a global technological collapse, the United States has reverted to a pre-electronic age of limited scientific understanding and Puritan social mores. The Sixty States of the Union are ruled by a coalition, the Church of the Dominion, headed by the autocratic President Deklan Comstock. The Union comprises three social groups: the aristos; the "leasing class" of tradesmen; and indentured labourers. Julian tells the rites-of-passage story of low-born Adam Hazzard and his friendship with the nephew of the president, the aristo Julian Comstock, relating how Adam's social conditioning is subtly undermined by Julian's heretical ideas: Darwinism, Einsteinism and DNA. The first-person narrative maintains an uneasy balance between reverence for the status quo and a fearful acknowledgment of the wonders of the past, while the text eschews sensationalism in favour of a thoughtful account of personal change and a skilled evocation of a feudal future. As Robert J Sawyer says of Wilson in the introduction to this fine novella, "He's sui generis: a hard-SF writer with the soul of a poet."...

In a top-secret government installation near the small town of Two Rivers, Michigan, scientists are investigating a mysterious object discovered several years earlier. Late one evening, the local residents observe strange lights coming from the laboratory. The next morning, they awake to find that their town was literally cut off from the rest of the world...and thrust into a new one! Soon the town is discovered by the bewildered leaders of this new world—at which point, the people of Two Rivers realize that they’ve arrived in a rigid theocracy. The authorities, known as the Bureau de la Covenance Religieuse, have ordered Linneth Stone, a young ethnologist, to analyze the arrivals and report her findings to the Lieutenant in charge. What Linneth finds will challenge the philosophical basis of her society and lead inexorably to a struggle for power centering on the mysterious object that Two Rivers’s government scientists were studying when the town slipped between worlds. ...

In his first story collection, Robert Charles Wilson, one of the most distinguished SF authors of his generation, weaves a tapestry of tales set in and around the city of Torontoa haunted, numinous Toronto of past, present, and future, buzzing with strangeness....

Robert Charles Wilson, says The New York Times, "writes superior science fiction thrillers." His Darwinia won Canada's Aurora Award; his most recent novel, The Chronoliths, won the prestigious John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Now he tells a gripping tale of alien contact and human love in a mysterious but hopeful universe.

At Blind Lake, a large federal research installation in northern Minnesota, scientists are using a technology they barely understand to watch everyday life in a city of lobster like aliens upon a distant planet. They can't contact the aliens in any way or understand their language. All they can do is watch.

Then, without warning, a military cordon is imposed on the Blind Lake site. All communication with the outside world is cut off. Food and other vital supplies are delivered by remote control. No one knows why.

The scientists, nevertheless, go on with their research. Among them are Nerissa Iverson and the man she recently divorced, Raymond Scutter. They continue to work together despite the difficult conditions and the bitterness between them. Ray believes their efforts are doomed; that culture is arbitrary, and the aliens will forever be an enigma.

Nerissa believes there is a commonality of sentient thought, and that our failure to understand is our own ignorance, not a fact of nature. The behavior of the alien she has been tracking seems to be developing an elusive narrative logic--and she comes to feel that the alien is somehow, impossibly, aware of the project's observers.

But her time is running out. Ray is turning hostile, stalking her. The military cordon is tightening. Understanding had better come soon....
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