Robert Charles Wilson, Axis [Library of Babel]

I'm taking the unusual step of tarting up a booklog entry with a cover image, just for the "Advance Reading Copy-- Not For Sale" box on the cover. A few weeks back, when Kate and I were in New York, we dropped by the Tor offices to meet Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and I was admiring the cover on the book display in their front office.

"Actually, we just got a box of the ARC's in," Patrick said. "Do you want one?"

I was a huge fan of Spin, so of course I said yes. And I was almost halfway through the book before we left The City the next afternoon...

Axis is a slightly indirect sequel, taking place a few decades after the climax of Spin. The acceleration of the Earth through time has stopped as mysteriously as it began, and a giant Arch has appeared in the Indian Ocean that allows boats to pass onto another world. The New World has been colonized, and is busily being exploited for its natural resources, chiefly the oil and gas found in the western deserts of the main continent.

The main story of Axis follows Lise Adams, a young woman who is searching for an explanation of her father's mysterious disappearance ten years earlier. She returns to Port Magellan (the main city on the New World) on the trail of a mysterious academic thought to be running a remote commune of some sort, and resumes her relationship with Turk Findley, a bush pilot she had an affair with some time earlier. As they're getting re-acquainted over dinner, though, a mysterious "ash" starts to fall on the city, containing odd remnants of alien machines, and soon they find themselves in well over their heads, contending with mysterious alien events, hunted by menacing government agents, and trying to discover the results of an ethically dubious attempt to communicate with the alien Hypotheticals.

In many ways, this is a more straightforward book than the other Wilson novels I've read. Lise and Turk are not movers and shakers in their own right, but they find themselves at the center of events in a way that the characters in Blind Lake and The Chronoliths are not, and their primary concerns are closely aligned with the central alien mystery, unlike the characters in Spin. The personal mystery Lise needs to solve is closely related to the cosmic mystery that the reader wants to solve, and the plot proceeds in a relatively straightforward manner.

I say "relatively straightforward" because this is, after all, a Wilson novel. They're little people caught up in big events, and Wilson doesn't feel overly compelled to explain the details of what's going on. He creates a very nice sense of looming dread concerning exactly what the Hypotheticals are up to, and while the explanation at the end is clearer than some of his other books, it's not quite what you expect, and it leaves open almost as many questions as it answers.

This book doesn't have the same scope as Spin, which spanned both decades and eons. The entire plot covers only a few eventful weeks, and the cosmic mysteries are confined to a single planet, unlike Spin, where the terraforming of Mars is basically a footnote to the main action. As with all his other books, though, the characters are well drawn, and the central mystery is nicely worked out.

I'd rate this a notch below Spin, mostly because the central conceit isn't as impressive and new. It's still an excellent book, though, and I recommend reading it when it comes out in September.