Spin

Spin is a sci-fi trilogy by Robert Charles Wilson, featuring the novels Spin,Axis and Vortex.

The first book in the series, Spin, follows narrator Tylor Dupree and his childhood friends, twins Jason and Diane Lawton. As children they witness the strange phenomenon that alters the course of human history: the night the stars disappeared from the night sky. As they grow up, the world slowly discovers the truth: the Earth has been covered by a membrane (dubbed "The Spin") that slows down the flow of time on our planet. A lot.

So much so that after about fifty years on Earth, over four billion years will pass outside. By that time the sun will expand into a red giant and destroy the planet.

Trying to find out where The Spin came from, and looking for ways to survive the destruction of Earth, forms the plot of Spin.

This novel provides examples of:

 * Belief Makes You Stupid: The twins, Jason and Diane, take two different paths in life. Jason becomes an influential genius scientist, working to decrypt the mysteries of the Spin and possibly save the world. Diane, on the other hand, turns to religion and goes off the deep end, eventually ending up in a cult in the middle of desert in Arizona, playing subservient housewife to her Perpetual Smiler Wide-Eyed Idealist husband. A husband who later lets Diane nearly die after she contracts a serious illness because he thinks the rapture will be happening soon and there's no point in getting her any sort of treatment.
 * Benevolent Alien Invasion:
 * Big Dumb Object: The Archway, a gargantuan arch stretching across the Indian Ocean and reaching out of the atmosphere. Near the end of Spin it's discrovered that the Archway is.
 * Bio Augmentation: The "Fourth Age". Available to the protagonists late in the story, it is a nano-augmentation that fundamentally changes the user in both physical and neurological ways. Dubbed by some as "the adulthood beyond adulthood" due to the mental clarity and maturity that a Fourth exhibits. Also
 * Black Sheep: Diane, whose father and brother are contemptuous of her new religion.
 * Child Prodigy: Jason Lawton. His oppressive father, E.D. Lawton, realized Jason's potential and spent his entire life grooming him for power and feeding his potential, intending Jason to take over the family business after he dies.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: Jason and Diane's father, E. D. Lawton, who cares more about making money off strategies to deal with the Spin than whether or not those strategies are actually effective.
 * Faster Than Light Travel: Averted by Played straight with the, but only because
 * First Contact: Not so much. "The Hypotheticals" that are presumably responsible for the Spin membrane never directly speak with humanity or even explain their motives.
 * Inadequate Inheritor: Jason's father feels this way about handing off control of Perihelion, the government agency responsible for managing the Spin, to Jason.
 * Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness: Medium to hard.
 * Nanomachines: Used as a gigantic data gathering network, intended to span multiple star systems.
 * No Conservation of Energy: Due to the time differential, the people on Earth would normally be subject to three year's worth of sunlight every second. The Spin somehow absorbs all this energy to keep people safe, but where exactly this energy goes is never explained (it isn't radiated away, at least).
 * Maybe it goes towards maintaining that time dilation field.
 * Portal Network:
 * Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Averted - Outside the Earth's Spin membrane, 4 billion years pass during the events of the book, enough to
 * Starfish Aliens: The only character who manages something resembling "communication" with The Hypotheticals ends up dying from the episode. Without the aliens even realizing.
 * Terraform: As our sun expands, the habitable "goldilocks" zone around it expands, leading to Mars starting to warm up enough to become Earth-like. The humans on Earth take advantage of this, and combined with the Time Dilation of the Spin membrane, are able to easily terraform Mars into a habitable refuge.
 * Simply load up a rocket with simple bacteria. Shoot it out of the Spin membrane in the direction of Mars. Wait a day (hundred thousand years outside). Load up another rocket with more advanced bacteria. Shoot it at Mars. Load up a final rocket with some colonists...
 * The Stars Are Going Out: Happens at the beginning of Spin, as the Spin membrane goes into place.
 * The Stoic: The main character, Tyler Dupree, though he occasionally verges into The Spock and Extreme Doormat. He's perfectly fine with people treating him like crap, taking it all with hardly an eyeblink, and is able to give humble and reasonable explanations later on for why he acts certain ways. Instead of getting angry, he simply cuts someone to their core with his words. As a love interest later in the novel (bitterly) puts it: "If reasonableness was a knife, I'd be lying on the floor and bleeding out"
 * Time Dilation: What the Spin does.