Spin discussion

Spin is probably my favorite book, ever. And I was damn lucky that I started reading it without any kind of background check (All I knew was that it had got an award some years back.)

Because the description here on GoodReads (and also on Amazon) just gives away the whole story. The whole sci-fi aspect of the book - that is revealed over decades, late in the book - is just written down... As a preview?!

Did anyone else notice this? I know that the characters, their relations, the whole apocalyptic feeling and all the other fine details aren't there, but still. The spine of the story is the sci-fi mystery and how it unveils over the course of more, than 3 decades, and it is all just summed up in the description. Spoiler as hell.

Yeah, that's a lot more than is on the back of the book. It should be edited down.

why is it still unchanged? the synopsis is a gigantic spoiler!

I tried to find something better to paste in, but even the publisher's site has this one!

I'm a volunteer librarian here on goodreads. I just went and cut out the whole middle part of the description. As best as I remember from when I read this years ago, what's left should be ok. Please check.

Also, if you know any language besides English, and can tell me what to do about the editions in other languages, please do tell me.

Spoilers in the descriptions are definitely not ok. Whenever you find a book like this, please post in the Librarians Group here to ask someone to edit it for you.

You can tell them "please cut out the third paragraph for spoilers" (for example) or you can offer a description that you wrote from scratch and don't mind sharing. If you offer a description from a publisher or author paste the URL so the librarian can say where the description came from. Please do not use a description from a bookseller because we don't want to worry about issues related to copyright.

Georg, the reason it's unchanged is because no librarian knew it was supposed to be changed. I only read this thread accidentally.

thanky you for changing the synopsis. i couldn't find a german edition here at goodreads so no suggestion from my side regarding Spin.

Thank you for your help. I didn't know where to report this so I just opened this thread. I'll know what to do next time.

I think the Hungarian edition's official description is okay. It only has some teasers about the barrier:
- it's built by some aliens species (kind of inaccurate :))
- all artificial objects that fell down are older than they are supposed to be...
- ... so scientists figure out that time runs faster outside, thus our Sun (and humanity) has no more than 50 Earth-years left.

But nothing serious, and nothing about the characters or the world-wide effects, just enough to get sci-fi fans worked up.
It's a good synopsis I think.

(Though there is a mistake there. At the end it says for every day on Earth, a 100 million years pass outside. It's not every day, it's every year. Guess you can't fix that for copyright reasons.)

Hmm, yeah, I better not just fix that. But I could delete a sentence or paragraph, if that would help. Let me know. :)

To change the subject a bit, has anyone read the next book? Should I? If I do, should I read Spin again first, considering that the description doesn't sound very familiar to me?

the second was rather boring but it had its moments.
the third i never started.

Second is a bit mediocre. The storytelling is not as interesting as in Spin (you know, switching between present and past through flashbacks, covering decades), it's kind of a straight-forward book with some mystery being sought by the characters and found out in the end.
You don't have to re-read Spin to understand it, it's not a direct continuation, characters are different too.

This is all you have to remember from Spin:
(view spoiler)[- The Hypotheticals: vast network of self-reproducing machines, scattered around the whole galaxy, maybe more. Helping sentinel species for some unknown reason.
- Jason, using Martian pharmaceutical, tried to connect to this network for knowledge, died because of it
- Before Jason died, he sent out a lot of Martian technologies (including the Forth drug) to many of his friends, so it wouldn't be kept hidden by the government.
- The Hypotheticals made an archway, connecting Earth to a very Earth-like planet. (hide spoiler)]

The book is about 10 years after Spin, and other than the mystery, it's about the side-effect of Jason's actions. How some cults consider the Hypotheticals as God himself, and try desperately to connect to them.


The last book is better and the story is more interesting, kind of the mixture of the first two. Vortex kicks the sci-fi up a notch, the ending especially. You have to read Axis before, though. And it's still not as good as Spin.

Thanks for the information! I'll add them to my 'to hopefully read someday' list. :)

The back of the paperback version of Spin that I have has pretty much the entire plot written out. Luckily I caught on before having read more than a few lines.

Just finished this and really enjoyed it, but agree with the above (from 4 years ago...) about the back cover comments.

I always re-read the back cover after finishing a book (I guess everyone does that?) and thought, Wow, it gives the whole plot away more or less.

Luckily for me, my memory is terrible, so even though I would have read it before starting, I had obviously forgotten most of what I read. I still think it's terrible that books do this though.

But the Goodreads description is ok now, right?

Yes, the Goodreads description is perfect and what should be on the book itself!

I agree. Someone got a bit too excited back then to put that plot summary on the back of the book.

(5 years flashback conversation)