Damek.

I just finished reading Axis by Robert Charles Wilson. This is a pretty good review that I agree with.

It’s a sequel to Spin, which was surprisingly complex and exciting. Wikipedia tells me there’s another sequel to be published, perhaps Axis suffers slightly from being a semi-detached “middle book of a trilogy” - those often have trouble. However, I find it’s a bit of a sleeper that is deeply satisfying in the longer run, which is a nice surprise.

(I’m cutting this here because my other thoughts are a bit spoilery, perhaps, so don’t click through if you don’t want to know anything more about the book.)

It was interesting the way he fleshed out the idea of humans finding themselves living in a universe where “the singularity” happened somewhere else, long ago, perhaps more than once, which is actually a really fascinating concept if you think about it, and unique in sci-fi where most such books involve a human-begun singularity. The closest would be, I think, Charles Stross had a human-born singularity that was “not unique” and connected with existing alien singularities elsewhere…

Anyway, I also liked the idea of a sort of mindless “organic” one that just keeps itself going and functions to sort of “remember” the universe. And I loved the way Wilson connected it to human life. There’s one line that stuck with me, repeated a couple times in the book: “what cannot be remembered must be rediscovered.” And it’s true. We forget things. And we should. So we can do over again, and do differently, and so others can follow us and do their own thing.