Spin
Robert Charles Wilson
 The story opens when Tyler Dupree is twelve years old. Tyler and his mother live in a guest house on the property of aerospace millionaire E.D. Lawton and his alcoholic wife Carol. Tyler is friends with the couple's fourteen year old twins Jason, a brilliant student who is being groomed to take over the family business, and Diane, whom Tyler is in love with. One night while stargazing, the three children witness all the stars simultaneously disappear. Telecommunications suffer as every satellite falls out of orbit simultaneously. It turns out that an opaque black membrane, later dubbed a "spin membrane" has been placed around the entire earth. Eventually it is determined that the membrane has slowed down time so that approximately 3.7 years pass outside the membrane for every second within. The membrane is permeable to spacecraft, but protects the earth from the harmful effects of concentrated stellar radiation and cometary impact. A simulated sun on the inside of the membrane allows for a largely normal life cycle to continue on earth. However, the greatly increased passage of time outside the membrane means that all life on earth will end in a few decades when the sun's expansion makes that region of the solar system uninhabitable. The membrane is apparently being controlled by a pair of city sized objects floating over both of Earth's poles. A Chinese attack on the devices using nuclear weapons causes a brief visual disturbance of the membrane but not change in the time dilation and other attempts to interfere with it are called off. In the wake of what becomes known as "the Spin", Jason studies science and joins his father at Perihelion an aerospace research firm which eventually gets folded into the government and coordinates efforts to deal with the Spin. Tyler, attends medical school and becomes a doctor, while Diane marries a man named Simon and deals with the Spin through a newfound religious faith. Jason eventually rises to run the day to day operations of Perihelion and hires Tyler as staff physician. Jason explains that Perihelion intends to terraform Mars by releasing bacteria and plant seeds to change the habitat into one that is survivable by humans. Because of time dilation this process, which will occur over millions of years, will be finished in a few months of subjective Earth time. When the terraforming is complete, Perihelion and its counterparts in other nations launch manned colonization missions to Mars. While months pass on Earth these colonists will have hundreds of thousands of years to build a Martian civilization and possibly discover more about the Spin and the alien Hypotheticals responsible for it. A mere two years after the terraforming process begins, they receive satellite images confirming the existence of sophisticated human civilizations on Mars. Soon afterwards Mars is enclosed in its own Spin membrane. Before the membrane went up the Martians sent their own manned mission to Earth. The Martian ambassador, Wun Ngo Wen, is part of a civilization hundreds of thousands of years old which has been experimenting with high end biotechnology for centuries. Jason, who has developed an acute form of multiple sclerosis which is incurable by terrestrial medicine, takes a Martian bioegineering product which extends his life by decades, putting him into a fourth stage of life past adulthood. Jason and Wun Ngo Wen then intend to seed nanotechnology through the outer solar system. This technology will eventually expand to other star systems over the course of millions of years and search for other worlds enclosed by Spin membranes, hopefully discovering why they were created and if anything can be done to stop them. Wun Ngo Wen is accidentally killed shortly after this, but the plan moves ahead. Tyler leaves Perihelion after being betrayed by his girlfriend, and moves to California. There he gets a desperate call from Dian's husband, Simon, stating that she is terribly sick. Diane and Simon had moved from mainstream religious belief to join a more cult like fringe movement which was trying to hasten the second coming through genetic engineering of cattle. As Tyler heads to meet Diane the Spin membrane seems to falter and fail, allowing the stars to return to the sky. The next day, the sun rises huge and red in the sky causing terrible heat and high winds. Thousands across the world panic as the apparent end has come. Tyler finds Diane suffering from a fatal cardiovascular disease which crossed from cows to humans. The only cure is to give her the same treatment that Jason has taken. He and Simon drive Diane back to Diane's childhood home where Tyler had hidden some of the biotech along with notes from Wun Ngo Wen. He discovers that Jason is there, dying of a mysterious ailment. Jason explains that he has become a human receiver for the nanotechnology which they have seeded throughout the galaxy. He also explains his conclusions about the nature of the Hypotheticals and the Spin. The Hypotheticals are intelligent von neumann machines which were spread throughout the galaxy billions of years previously. Horrified at the rise and fall of biological societies they saw around them they devised a plan whereby they would enclose planets on the verge of societal collapse in Spin membranes to slow their advancement until a way could be found to save them. Jason dies shortly after explaining this and has Tyler mail copies of the information to trusted informants. Tyler gives the Martian treatment to Diane, who recovers. Shortly after the membrane partially reasserts itself, allowing the stars to be seen, and synchronizing earth time with that of the universe, but filtering the solar radiation to a survivable level. It's discovered that the Spin membrane had been retracted in order to let a massive ring shaped object descend and embed itself in the Indian Ocean. The "Arch", as it becomes known, acts as a portal to another world, one engineered by the Hypotheticals to give mankind a new chance at life. A decade after the appearance of the Arch, Diane and Tyler, now married, flee from agents of the US government who seek to arrest them for possessing forbidden Martian technology. Tyler takes the same cure the Lawton's did, becoming a "Fourth" himself, and the two pass through the Arch with a group of Indonesian refugees.