Axis | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Charles Wilson
Publisher: Tor Science Fiction
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy New: $3.38
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New (29) Used (14) from $3.03
Avg. Customer Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 31110
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0765348268
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780765348265
ASIN: 0765348268
Publication Date: June 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. Delivery is usually 5 - 8 working days from order, International is by Royal Mail Airmail
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Product Description
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 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
What happened? July 29, 2008
What happened here? I was expecting AXIS to be at par with the first book, SPIN. I was anxious for this book, and even bought the hardcover version. However, after having read AXIS, I have to say it disappointed me a lot. SPIN succeeded in touching the hearts of readers and bringing the them to the world of the characters. AXIS simply propped up some stereotypical characters just to get the story along. You just can't seem to get involved with the characters. It was also repetitive at times - especially in describing the central mystery of the book. SPIN didn't dwell on the mystery - it simply made you experience the life of people in a world that has gone beyond their understanding. If you have read SPIN, I suggest you hold buying/reading AXIS until the third book comes out and you get reviews. You won't miss a lot.
 Meh July 22, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Meh,
That was my reaction after the conclusion of Axis. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't all that good either. The story builds along quite nicely with a sense of a very strange building mystery all throughout. The characters are typically well-developed, a Wilson handle. But when I got to the end, to the big reveal, to the conclusion that all the gravitas and consternation has brought us to, my reaction was - Meh.
And there is no excuse for that.
After the first novel, Spin (which won a rightfully deserved Hugo) Axis had to be awesome. The ending had to be awesome. It had to be a game changer, like the huge planet joining, magic wishbones were at the end of the first book. Instead, we got a whole lot of buildup and in the end, what we find is just a new insight in to the life processes of the omnipotent beings known as hypotheticals. It was a reveal about as exciting as the changing of seasons. A natural process they go through every 10,000 years. The molting of synthetic onmi-beings. Meh.
So in the end - nothing has really changed, sure for the characters, something has changed. I guess having your soul eaten by a giant time-machine is pretty much a big deal on an individual level - but what we needed was to have something analogous to the world-next-door event at the end of Spin. A big change for everybody. We got none of that.
From what I hear, Axis will tee up a 3rd book, which I will surely read, but I have a funny feeling that the events of this book will have little impact on the whole story. I also found some of the content of this novel derivative. It was sort of like 2001 meets Dune. There was one scene in particular, when Isaac is talking about his "double-vision" when it seemed like one of the inane inner dialogues ripped from one of the later (crappier) installments of Dune. I think it was Sand Bores of Dune.
Anyway, so that's the bad, but luckily, Wilson can write really good characters. I enjoyed spending time in his universe until about the last 40 pages. I then sort of got the sinking feeling that I was going to be disappointed but the story arc and that thought came true. But Wilson's gift for putting you on a different world is just stunning. He's a master at making a place and making people.
But in the end, I wanted bigger ideas and a better aftertaste.
This will hopefully be a forgotten middle child.
A disappointing follow up to a Hugo Winning Novel June 28, 2008
Axis is the second novel in a trilogy, the sequel to the Hugo award-winning novel Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson.
I loved the first novel in this series (although I thought at the time that it was a standalone), which sets one of Wilson's classic Big Ideas in motion and takes us through it with interesting characters. What if unknown aliens put a time bubble around the Earth, so as to slow its aging relative to the rest of the universe?
At the end of that novel, the shield changes subtly, and a gateway to another world appears, a chance for a new world, a new life, and a new opportunity.
Axis takes us to that world, and continues to develop the universe of the Hypotheticals, once again through the eyes of his characters.
Honestly, though, this suffers from middle book syndrome. It's clear that Wilson hasn't written many series (any, I think) and the book's pacing suffers for not being a self-contained work. It relies heavily on the first book (reading this one without the second is futile) and the characters and events don't sing like the first novel. This one is much more reliant on the interesting ideas (a la Mysterium) than the actual writing and characters themselves. The characters (even one from Spin) aren't as well developed as the ones in Spin. In this respect, the book is a disappointing step backward for Wilson.
Its predecessor won the Hugo award for best novel, I do not expect this one to be nominated, except perhaps in a weak field. It's not a terrible book, merely an average one.
Good book but the ending left me fealing empty June 27, 2008
Axis starts out as well written as Spin, and just like spin I could not put this book down once I opened it. But unlike Spin the ending left me feeling very empty. The ending seems very rushed. As many people have stated this must be the 2nd book in a trilogy, but I would almost recommend waiting until the 3rd book comes out before I read this one. That being said its still a good book, and its one where I really felt connected to the characters.
'Axis' Not As Good As Brilliam 'Spin' June 26, 2008
Robert Charles Wilson's Axis (2007) is the sequel to 2005's Spin, (see MadProfessah's review) which was the winner of the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction novel, and one of my 2007 Chrismakwanzakkuh presents. It has recently been released in paperback.
For some reason it is quite difficult to blog about books soon after one has read them.
I have been meaning to put down my thoughts about this book for quite awhile. Unfortunately, my impressions are not as favorable towards Axis as they were towards Spin.
Necessarily, most of the characters that animated the story in Spin are not present in Axis, but the story does again revolve around the presence of a gigantic physical anomaly which affects the world.
However, in addition to demonstrating how society would react to another cataclysmic event, Wilson has also included a major storyline involving genetic engineering and communication with implacable alien intelligences.
The main problem I had with the book is that the main characters of Lise Adams and Turk Finley are really not compelling enough to sustain a reader's emotional connection, which reduces the overall impact of the novel as a whole despite the brilliance of the central concept.
GRADE: B.
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