Book description
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in
his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into
brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black
barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what
became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives. The effect
is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk--a heat source, rather
than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not
only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their
recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space
far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow
up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial,
generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the
barrier than inside--more than a hundred million years per day on Earth.
At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in
our future. Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to
working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into
hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion
out of the fears of the masses. Earth sends terraforming machines to
Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green.
Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with
thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then
Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around
Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines
that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun--and report
back on what they find. Life on Earth is about to get much, much
stranger. Robert Charles Wilson (1953 - ) Robert Charles Wilson was
born in California in 1953 but has spent most of his life in Canada,
acquiring citizenship in 2007. He has won the Hugo, Theodore Sturgeon,
Philip K. Dick and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, and has been
described by Stephen King as 'probably the finest science fiction author
now writing'. Robert Charles Wilson lives near Toronto in Canada.
