Spin

The Hugo Award-winning novel Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is a breathtaking fusion of a small-scale, very personal narrative with a cosmic "what if."

Tyler Dupree, then eleven years old, stood in his garden one October night and watched the stars fade. All of them burst into sudden brightness, and were replaced by a black barrier that was empty and flat. He had seen what became known as the Big Blackout together with his closest friends, Jason and Diane Lawton. Their life would be shaped by it.

The impact is global. The sun is no longer an astronomical object, but a featureless disk that generates heat. Even with the moon gone, tides still exist. The artificial satellites of the globe have not only descended from orbit, but their retrieved remnants show signs of age and pitting, suggesting that they were in space for far longer than their actual lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane become older, a space probe finds out a startling truth: the barrier is made of enormous alien artifacts that are artificial. On Earth, time is moving more quickly outside the barrier than it is inside—by almost 100 million years annually. The sun's last phases will only be upon us in around 40 years at present pace.

Now a bright young scientist, Jason dedicates his life to thwarting this glacially approaching doom. Diane devolves herself to hedonism and marries a menacing cult leader who has created a brand-new religion based on the anxieties of the general public.

In order to allow time to perform its job and render Mars green, Earth sends terraforming devices there. They then dispatch people. They promptly receive back an ambassador who has tales of the Martian settlement spanning thousands of years. Subsequently, the Earth's probes discover that a similar barrier has materialized around Mars. Desperate, Jason plants self-replicating devices close to space so they may spread copies of themselves away from the sun and report back on what they see.

Things are about to become very bizarre on Earth.