Spin

Spin is the 2006 Hugo Award winner. I picked up that book by chance in Sun Way bookstore. I turned a few pages, but I don't understand it at first. When I come back to Sun Way bookstore the next day, they've changed the place of that book. I turned to Theatre by Maugham. After finishing the whole book of Theatre, I suddenly found that Spin has been piled in the corner of one of the bookshelves. I had to start the whole book again, for I forgot everything I had read already. After finishing the whole book, I found the reason that why I was totally confused at the first reading. This book is one of the books with interwined time line. I mean, it's a book like The Time Traveller's Wife, past, future, and present are intermingled. The readers have to rebuild the normal time line and put single events in like filling blanks. Fortunately, it's a common way of telling of telling stories in science fiction that I'm familiar with.

It's a smart book, in the sense that this book is trying to dealing with the final question of who we are, where are we going. Everyone of us will face death one day, but this book has put the race of human being at the verge of extinction. Facing death every day will drive a single person crazy; under the pressure of the ending of the world, human beings are separated into different groups searching for their own salvations. Three protagonists in the book respectively represent three different types of attitudes when facing the extinction of human races. Jason believes in science. He is searching for the answer of the nature of the film wrapping the earth. Diane choses religion, but she does not get inner peace that she needs. Tyler, as the one who writes all the story down, may be the one who can peacefully face every single event. However, as a reader, I doubt if he still has emotions as a normal person.

Whatever the story is, the books seems to promise a bright future like what has been suggeted by Mount Cristo. What the most interesting is, the book implies that human beings may be saved by Science, for Jason discovers the truth using science, and Science helps Tyler and Diane evolve into a new type of human being. At the same time, the book also admits that there's a God-like creature outside our own planet that controls our fortune. So what is the final salvation? Science or religion? The book might not give its readers a definite answer after all.