Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson

[lightreads]

Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


And this trilogy goes out with a . . . let’s be a teensy bit generous and call it a muffled bang.



So one of the main reasons I loved Spin so much was it paralleled a people story with a cosmic story in this remarkable way. It gave us sweeping epochs of galactic time and the daily quotidiana of an incestuous bunch of people in the same breath, and didn’t lose the scale or the wonder of either. And it was really good at making the cosmic scale stuff so urgent, so interesting because it was so urgent and interesting and inexplicable to the people, and I got really invested in everything they did to try and figure out the fuck was happening to the human race.



This book explains what was happening. And it’s . . . I . . . hmm. It’s a really nihilist answer. “And now the stone had rolled away, revealing only the weakling prophet of a mindless god,” as one of the characters describes a similar moment, in a classically Wilsonian turn of phrase. Painfully so, for me, because the explanation rendered unto dust all the best parts of Spin the way they struggled individually and societally, how fucking smart they got when they had to, and how scared. That was hard.



Except Wilson knew that. And this is what leaves him a cut above the other guys writing stuff in the same ballpark as him. Stephen Baxter never would have brought this book back around in the moment of its deepest nihilism, and rested a quiet, gentle counter-argument on the tiny actions of one person, spreading to another, to another. And make it actually work for me. Make it move me over what happens to two or three people on one random summer night in Texas, while the main bulk of the story is taking place at the heat death of the universe (not a metaphor).



So yeah. It’s not a perfect book. The first half is really slow, and he throws around a lot of important words like “conscience” and “agency” in this slapdash way where I kept snapping at him to fucking define his terms! But he pulled it out in the end, yeah. Spin is still the best of the trilogy by a lot, but this is not disappointing.





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Comments

[livingbyfiction]

Spin needs a sequel like a fish needs a bicycle. Agree or disagree?

Incidentally, I'm 10% into Wilson's Julian Comstock, which is shaping up well.

[lightreads]

Yeah, if he'd never written sequels I might have grumbled about never getting to find out all the finicky details, but it would ultimately have been okay with me. And as it is ... well. I'm starting to suspect that was the book of his life, and there just aren't any others like it in there.

Julian is good, though personally I eventually got irritated with the built-in constraints on the narration, all the things Adam can't/won't understand.

[ecaterin]

if he'd never written sequels I might have grumbled about never getting to find out all the finicky details, but it would ultimately have been okay with me.

Yup. This. Totally this.

[treewishes]

Hmm. Read or don't, decisions, decisions...

[lightreads]

I think you'd like Spin. There's some cool bits with science geeks figuring out clever ways of getting at information from technology so far out of their reach, they can't even understand what it does.