Enjoyable follow-up to _Spin_ if not as epic or quite as good

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	• Axis Robert Charles Wilson Tor Books, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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Good book but the ending left me fealing empty

Axis starts out as well written as Spin, and just like spin I could not put this book down once I opened it. But unlike Spin the ending left me feeling very empty. The ending seems very rushed. As many people have stated this must be the 2nd book in a trilogy, but I would almost recommend waiting until the 3rd book comes out before I read this one. That being said its still a good book, and its one where I really felt connected to the characters.

A disappointing follow up to a Hugo Winning Novel

Axis is the second novel in a trilogy, the sequel to the Hugo award-winning novel Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson.

I loved the first novel in this series (although I thought at the time that it was a standalone), which sets one of Wilson's classic Big Ideas in motion and takes us through it with interesting characters. What if unknown aliens put a time bubble around the Earth, so as to slow its aging relative to the rest of the universe?

At the end of that novel, the shield changes subtly, and a gateway to another world appears, a chance for a new world, a new life, and a new opportunity.

Axis takes us to that world, and continues to develop the universe of the Hypotheticals, once again through the eyes of his characters.

Honestly, though, this suffers from middle book syndrome. It's clear that Wilson hasn't written many series (any, I think) and the book's pacing suffers for not being a self-contained work. It relies heavily on the first book (reading this one without the second is futile) and the characters and events don't sing like the first novel. This one is much more reliant on the interesting ideas (a la Mysterium) than the actual writing and characters themselves. The characters (even one from Spin) aren't as well developed as the ones in Spin. In this respect, the book is a disappointing step backward for Wilson.

Its predecessor won the Hugo award for best novel, I do not expect this one to be nominated, except perhaps in a weak field. It's not a terrible book, merely an average one.

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'Axis' Not As Good As Brilliam 'Spin'

Robert Charles Wilson's Axis (2007) is the sequel to 2005's Spin, (see MadProfessah's review) which was the winner of the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction novel, and one of my 2007 Chrismakwanzakkuh presents. It has recently been released in paperback.

For some reason it is quite difficult to blog about books soon after one has read them.

I have been meaning to put down my thoughts about this book for quite awhile. Unfortunately, my impressions are not as favorable towards Axis as they were towards Spin.

Necessarily, most of the characters that animated the story in Spin are not present in Axis, but the story does again revolve around the presence of a gigantic physical anomaly which affects the world.

However, in addition to demonstrating how society would react to another cataclysmic event, Wilson has also included a major storyline involving genetic engineering and communication with implacable alien intelligences.

The main problem I had with the book is that the main characters of Lise Adams and Turk Finley are really not compelling enough to sustain a reader's emotional connection, which reduces the overall impact of the novel as a whole despite the brilliance of the central concept.

GRADE: B.

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Enjoyable follow-up to _Spin_ if not as epic or quite as good

_Axis_ is a sequel to Robert Charles Wilson's absolutely excellent novel _Spin_, which to me is one of the finest science fiction novels ever written. Picking up with events several years after the end of _Spin_, the novel took place entirely on the shores and deserts of Equatoria and its chief (and pretty much only) city, Port Magellan (Equatoria being a vast largely arid continent on the Earth-like world that the extremely mysterious Hypotheticals linked to Earth by the poorly understood Arch).

The novel does not - at first - involve any of the characters from _Spin_ but rather introduced the reader to a new cast. The main protagonists included Lise Adams, a young woman trying to research the disappearance of her father twelve years ago, a quiet family man whose interest in the mysterious Fourths (products of - on Earth - illegal Martian biotech, essentially products of drugs that greatly extend human life and reshape the body in many ways) may have lead to him either dropping out of sight and off the grid and joining them, or perhaps an unfortunate early demise by those opposed to the Fourths. Other characters included Turk Findley, a down on his luck bush pilot and former sailor and drifter, struggling to make ends meet, who had a brief romance with Lise years ago on an earlier attempt to uncover what happened to her dad and who gets caught up in her quest once again; Brian Gately, Lise's ex-husband, a earnest man who works for the Department of Genomic Security, which among other things is assigned to keep tabs on and shut down operations relating to and producing the illegal Fourths; Avram Dvali and Anna Rebka, two Fourths living in a cloistered community in the remote Equatorian desert, who have raised a strange boy by the name of Isaac, hopefully to communicate with the Hypotheticals; and Sulean Moi, a Martian on Equatoria (unknown to Earth authorities or anyone in Port Magellan), who is seeking out Isaac. All of these individuals have their fates intertwined when a mysterious ash-like precipitation rains down over Port Magellan and Equatoria, a bizarre substance that is soon discovered to be remnants of the Hypotheticals, a weird, alien "snow" or ash-fall from deep space.

The novel lacked the hugely epic quality of the earlier novel and didn't quite have its breathless pace, but it was still very enjoyable. Those there were still many questions left unanswered as to what the Hypotheticals are, why they did what they did, and how they operate or are constructed/evolved, some answers are provided. Mostly though the mystery deepened and perhaps that is not an altogether bad thing. I would have liked more fleshing out of the nature of the Fourths and of the Martians, though I liked Wilson's portrayal of Equatoria, of what it was like on the continent both in terms of human settlement and native fauna, flora, and climate.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

Wildly praised by readers and critics alike, Robert Charles Wilson?s Spin won science fiction?s highest honor, the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Now, in Spin?s direct sequel, Wilson takes us to the "world next door"--the planet engineered by the mysterious Hypotheticals to support human life, and connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian Ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world--and, predictably, fiercely exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria.

Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance ten years earlier. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometimes-drifter. They come together when an infall of cometary dust seeds the planet with tiny remnant Hypothetical machines. Soon, this seemingly hospitable world will become very alien indeed--as the nature of time is once again twisted, by entities unknown.

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