Axis

Robert Charles Wilson

Sep 2007 · Spin Book 2 · Sold by Macmillan

About this ebook

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 Axis, 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.


At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Ratings and reviews

A bit plodding at the start with a lot of exposition in the last 1/3 or so, still an interesting story and some great ideas of how intelligence may exist on a long time scale.

For hard sci fi fans, the subject is very interesting but the plot is pretty predictable and boring. I couldn't put Spin down but found Axis to be sluggish.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, and the fact that it is written in a different style than its predecessor "Spin". The characters are looked at deeper here I find, and I am excited to read "Vortex".

About the author

Robert Charles Wilson's novels include Darwinia; The Chronoliths and Blind Lake, which were finalists for SF's Hugo Award; and Spin, which won the 2006 Hugo for best novel. He is a winner of the Philip K. Dick Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He lives in Toronto, Canada.