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Axis
Axis
Axis
Audiobook9 hours

Axis

Written by Robert Charles Wilson

Narrated by Scott Brick

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

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, Axis, 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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 18, 2008
ISBN9781427205414
Axis
Author

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson was born in California and lives in Toronto. His novel Spin won science fiction’s Hugo Award in 2006. Earlier, he won the Philip K. Dick Award for his debut novel A Hidden Place; Canada’s Aurora Award for Darwinia; and the John W. Campbell Award for The Chronoliths.

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Reviews for Axis

Rating: 3.3865436295514515 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

379 ratings15 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This may be more about me than about the book, but this book didn't hold my attention as well as the first one. I'm not sure if I'll read the third one.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is the second volume of the trilogy after Spin.This one is set on a different planet from Earth, entered through a portal in the Pacific Ocean. The portal, places by the entities that placed the barrier between Earth and the stars in Spin, is an arch that rises hundreds of miles up (and presumably miles down into the sea).The new world is being settled by refugees from Earth, and is still a frontier world being developed by humans, its rich natural resources being exploited. Will humans make the same mistakes they made on Earth? Will they ever figure out who placed the barrier, who created the portal, and why? This is set some years after Spin ended, but there is some (minimal) character spillover.I liked Spin better than this one, but this was still a good read.3 stars
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    When Scott Brick starts to sound like Charlie Brown's teacher, it's time to quit. Book just did not hit me like the first and the series won't get the chance to do #3.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Axis is almost a 4 star book but I can't quite give it that, primarily because it never rose to the level that Spin did. Spin was a 4 1/2 star read - not a perfect novel by any means but an excellent, engaging one. This is more like a very good one. The author tries, I'll give him that, but most characters just never got their hooks into me, and the story builds on the first novel but does not have any "WOW" to it for me - there's stuff that might wow some readers, but not me. I've seen a number of comments saying it suffers from middle book syndrome and that the final book "Vortex" is the payoff. The author throws some big ideas out here (and in Spin), that appeals to the science nerd part of me. He doesn't explain them though, explain in the sense of how is that even remotely possible. The big idea in Spin was not explained. We were told about it in various ways, but there is no way it could be explained. What seems to be the start of an explanation here gets a little woo-woo, and I've pretty much given up on seeing an explanation for what happened - but there's always the chance that "Vortex" the third book will deliver something believable.I am very glad to have read this though. It is a bit better than what I consider an average science fiction read, and there is a lot of stuff in here to think about. I'll be reading the next one before long.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I read the first novel in this series, Spin, a year or so ago and enjoyed it quite a bit. While it left quite a few questions unanswered, it played out well and logically to it's end and I was looking forward to the next books in the series. Jump forward to just recently when I finally managed to pick up Axis, the next book in the series. This starts not long after Spin ends, but with a mostly new cast of characters. More action, more conflict and more human relational interactions than with Spin, this was an enjoyable read. Still not many more answers were revealed and this added some unresolved questions to the mix. Not as good as Spin, but still worth the time to read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A sort of sequel to spin with more action and consideration of what it means to be human and to love.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This series starts well, but gets more and more disappointing as it progresses.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A fun sequel that thankfully went in a new direction that the original novel while still holding true to the basic questions laid out in Spin. The new characters introduced I found enjoyable, though not quite as likable as the original, and a lot of the dystopian world ending future of the original kind of had the air let out of it in favor of your standard big brother government out to get you. Still, many of the same interesting ideas are presented and moved forward, making for an exciting middle book for a trilogy with a great ending.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Axis is the sequel to the excellent novel Spin. Just to give a little background, the premise of Spin is that the world has been mysteriously encased in an opaque membrane by an alien force termed the "Hypotheticals." This membrane allows Earth's time to pass normally, while the rest of the universe ages billions of years. At the end of what is essentially a planet wide time travel, a bridge appears on Earth that leads to another world. There is a lot I'm leaving out, but that's the basic plotline. Axis is the somewhat less successful sequel, taking place a few decades later, as Earth colonizes the new planet termed Equatoria. Spin focused on three friends who first witness the blotting of Earth's stars as children and grow up during this crises., Because one of them, as an adult, comes to play a large part in Earth's reaction to the planet's encasing, the plot is revealed on two levels: The personal and the global. That was its strength. Axis attempts to do the same. But where it worked in Spin, it falls flat in Axis. The overarching story is supposed to be a revelation on the origin of the Hypotheticals and their exact nature. Not only does the book fail to reveal this in the end, but the build up is slow and agonizing. Similarly, the individual story deals primarily with characters who have no connection to Spin. I tried to care about these characters, but the realization that the characterization was so much superior in Spin left these second raters feeling shallow.Ultimately, I feel Spin should have been a stand alone novel. Axis, while a decent novel, undoes a lot of best elements of Spin. Because Spin was so great, Axis is so poor.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sequel to Spin. Not as good as the highly original first volume but still a good read....
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Meh. I really liked "Spin", to which this novel is a sequel, but "Axis" didn't do it for me. Days would go by and I wouldn't be interested in reading on, the only reason i think I finished it is because Christmas is coming, and with it my To Read pile will grow unmanageably large. There's nothing wrong with the book that I can put my finger on, other than it just didn't engage me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In this sequel to Spin, Wilson has moved things forward by a number of years, and lets us glimpse a little of what has happened on Earth, Mars, and Equatoria. The build-up was good, and yet, at the end I wanted more resolution. Still, there's always room for another book in this universe...
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    In this sequel to Spin, a group of Fourths (humans who have taken an illegal treatment to extend their lives) have genetically altered a boy named Isaac to enable him to communicate with the mysterious Hypotheticals, the beings (?) who held Earth in stasis for a million years, while the rest of the universe aged. As a series of strange, Hypothetical-driven events cause havoc on Equatoria, a planet linked to Earth by a Hypothetical-built arch in the ocean, various people find themselves thrown together, all trying to discover different answers and truths.
    Anyone looking for answers to the mysteries raised in Spin will be disappointed - the Hypotheticals remain as strange and obscure as ever. Wilson is an excellent writer and effortlessly leads readers through a compelling story - but still, it was a bit of a disappointment after the astounding events of Spin.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I loved Spin. I really, really like Robert Charles Wilson. But this is not his best work. The premise is that odd things are happening in the world attached to Earth post-Spin by the Hypotheticals. A group of advanced humans have bred a child that they hope will communicate with these Hypotheticals and in doing so will help us understand these powerful beings. Unfortunately this experiment has been done before on Mars with disastrous results. Unfortunately when the story is finished we know no more about the Hypotheticals than we did before. And in the course of the book we spend it with many unpleasant people. I know it is a temptation to return to the worlds of a previous success, but I think I would rather see a different subject explored next time. Or if Robert Charles Wilson must write about a previous world, I'd rather explore more of Blind Lake.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Disappointing sequel. Still good, but not even beginning to reach Spin.