“Spin”

 October 24, 2022

Spin

When I found the book Spin in an airport bookshop, I had no idea at first it would be one of the top 10 books that changed my life. It looked like a relatively mundane sci-fi award winner, so much like another and another I had seen before, that I almost didn't get it. But I did, and I read it over and over again, and my life and my thinking has never been the same.

Some books make ordinary life pale in comparison to them. This book made ordinary ideas pale in comparison to it, such that this book could qualify as a scientific man's Bible to come to grips with the era of science at the end of the space exploration, moon landing, age, and the beginning of the climate science age.

The book contains within it all the tension between science and religion that came along with this age of scientific being. It contains also the whirlwind of intellectual frenzy that accompanies those on the cusp of two ages of human progressive endeavor. And it includes a very enlightening commentary on the nature of our treatment of those that are solutions to our problems, and an intriguing idea about the nature of some of the knowledge about humankind that could emerge from this era of human scientific striving. In short this book is more in content than just another sci-fi novel.

The opening premise of Spin is the one that fascinated theoretical physicists for years: time travel; but time travel, that follows the rules of physics. One day as the protagonists are teenagers, the night sky of stars suddenly disappears. The Earth has been wrapped in a sort of envelope blocking out the night sky. The classic example of the time travel that follows the rules of actual physics is as follows: consider a bubble floating on the surface of your coffee as you stir it; if the bubble is in the middle of your drink, it will not move as fast as the coffee around the edges. And so it could be with time itself in certain cases. And the hypothetical posed at the start of this novel is: what if this happened, to the whole Earth; if time on Earth passed more slowly than outside it in space? This is a type of hypothetical that could please a hard-boiled type of scientific mind: not time travel exactly, but a time discontinuity.

One of the three protagonists, Jason, spends his adult life from that moment on grappling with the scientific implications of no longer being able to use space and space exploration in the same geopolitical and scientific way that it once was able to be used before the time anomaly known as the Spin was erected around Earth. We get to see the tender appraisal of a scientific genius tortured into greatness by the interesting times that he lives in and the harsh idolizing relationship between him and his father. It is an unsparing portrait of a man driven wild by the captive need of the state and the endless possibilities of a new era in science. 

But the hard emotional, psychological, and biological core of the story is the relation between Jason's sister, and their childhood friend Tyler, who idolizes and loves Jason's twin sister Diane. It brings to the foreground several of the book's core themes, which linger on in the mind even longer than Jason's eventual heroic sacrifice. Although never requiting Tyler's love as children, there is a strong emotional pull of history that nothing "the times" can do will keep Tyler and Dianne apart for a long period. Like that feeling that keeps calling you back to some events and people in your past, Tyler and Diane exercise a certain gravitational pull on each other, such that they constantly return into each other's company. Diane, unlike Jason, is drawn to the Millenarian aspect of the new scientific age that has suddenly been forced on people through the Spin, and joins a cult. Those who are paying close attention to the dire needs of the climate right now know that it is still often hard to discern, for example, Native American and indigenous rhetorics from actual avenues of political or ecological action through indigenous knowledge. Millenarianism is part of the fashion cycle lately. But it's the combination of the back-to-the-land millenarianism in the tired old Biblical millenarianism that infects Diane, and she becomes involved in a problem on one of these communes related to mad cow disease. The book properly treats this like it is no joke, because mad cow disease could be like a zero-day attack on the entire American agricultural system, should it actually happen here. But it troublingly notes that an attitude of Millenarianism, whether that is from climate change or another existential threat, could make us lose sight of the importance of forestalling dangers like these. It is not only the actions of another of Tyler's girlfriends, who suicides by pills on the day of a launch of a mission to escape Earth and the Spin by rocket ship, that reasoned policy should prevent, but also the slow surrender away from the rational scientific approaches that govern our daily lives. Millenarianism can take many forms. But its most damaging aspect is this erosion of rational norms.

It is through Jason that Tyler manages to rescue Diane from this dangerous Eco-La-La of a Millenarianist cult, that has many resemblances to contemporary Eco-millenarianism; but Jason, whose health was already fragile, has become worn out above his years trying to solve the problem of the Spin, and he invites Tyler to be his personal physician. While working for Jason, Tyler meets a wonderful man from Mars that may have the key to saving the human race. But these "Martians" are descended from humans themselves, due to another trick of the Spin's time discontinuity: if time passed faster outside the Spin, then in one human lifetime we humans could terraform Mars. And so on. Over time, what returns from Mars is one man with a medicine to extend human life. It unlocks in "adulthood it beyond adulthood", a "Fourth Age" so to speak, and has the potential, only, to produce humans who have the wisdom to see a way out of the predicament they are in. Because the sun, in this Soin paradigm, will eventually expand to destroy the Earth as it dies the death of all other stars. This man descended from human settlers of Mars comes as a diplomat, walking the very fine line between educating people, and not pausing alarm, because in time, Mars, populated by humans, has gotten its own Spin around it. The central aphoristic notion to the story is the one about boiling a frog in water: if you turn the heat up ever so slowly, it will not notice in time to hop out of the pot. And the slow-motion crisis of the Spin has very slowly started to boil this water. The human from Mars knows this, knows the danger, but goes public anyway, and he is yet eventually killed by a person with a random grievance. The deeper human message of this episode in the books narrative is that human beings still would rather kill a presumed Messiah figure for not being a Messiah, even if he explicitly says he is not one. Like the frog escaping away from a wooden spoon put in to rescue it from the slowly boiling pot, you might also say… 

For Jason, human populated Mars now having its own Spin is just more evidence of a larger mystery, because at this point, it has become for Jason almost a one-on-one war between him and the Spin. Hardly acknowledging the death of the man from Mars, he embarks on a further scientific quest that represents what may be the zenith of human space exploration in this contemporary age: populating the known universe with self sufficient, replicating, von Neumann machines in an attempt to find the origin of the Spin "out there". But to do so, he madly betrays all his contractual obligations with the US government and makes his own brain the receptacle for all the information beamed back by this network of colonizing machines, using Martian biotechnology brought over from the humans settled there. In this "glorious betrayal" for the sake of scientific knowledge, he also gives the Martian drug to induce the Fourth Age to Tyler and Diane, and this induces the grace by which they escape, as does humanity its eventual dire fate. He also gives them his record, of the secret he has found: that the von Neumann machines are of the same type as what has caused the Spin, which means, that there must have been an extraterrestrial intelligence out there, either long past or still extant; that the Spin itself was proof of; and thus perhaps it is the fate of any intelligent species in the universe to eventually create such a Network, that could even one day create its own spin. As Tyler rests in the state of misery, pain and graphomania, ruminating on this and reminiscences of his life with Jason and Diane, who is now with him and administering to him the Martian drug, this thought creates quite an impression: a memory of Jason flying downhill on a runaway broken bicycle as a teenager, too large in frame even then for the broken machine…

What are we to make of this novel? Perhaps that our intellect and our ideas are more important in the end than our biological personhood. But also, perhaps that new scientific paradigms scatter the threads of our previous being throughout the known universe before turning us to our new reality. Perhaps more.