Robert Charles Wilson is a Canadian-American
Science Fiction author focuses on medium-to-hard science fiction. Several of his works have been nominated for
Hugos, with one (
Spin) actually winning it.
His works include:
- A Hidden Place (1986) - Set during The Great Depression, young Travis lives with his uncle and aunt. Upstairs lives the mysterious Anna. Anna says she's going to be "changing," and she needs Travis's help...for purposes she won't explain.
- Memory Wire (1987) - Raymond is hard-wired as a human "black-box" to record dispassionately whatever happens during combat. After his military service, he accepts a mission to Brazil to recover some extraterrestrial memory-stones encoded with the technology of an advanced race.
- Gypsies (1988) - Karen White can open "doors" between universes. This power, which she shares with her brother and sister, has been suppressed since childhood. But now it appears in her teenage son, Michael, who is approached by a mysterious figure known only as the Grey Man, a figure who has haunted Karen's dreams for decades.
- The Divide (1990) - Genetically designed to be a prototype for the next stage of human evolution, John Shaw faces the flaws in his artificial personality as he begins to devolve into two separate individuals, each facing enemies that threaten the people vital to his/their continued sanity.
- A Bridge of Years (1991) - Tom Winter thought the secluded cottage in the Pacific Northwest would be the perfect refuge; a place to nurse the wounds of lost love and happiness. But Tom soon discovers that his safe haven is the portal of a tunnel through time. At one end is the present. At the other end: New York City, 1963.
- The Harvest (1992) - Offered immortality by the aliens circling the earth, most humans accept, and Dr. Matt Wheeler, one of the few who does not, is left to watch humankind transform itself into something less than human.
- Mysterium (1994) - In a top-secret government installation near the small town of Two Rivers, Michigan, scientists are investigating a mysterious object discovered several years earlier. Late one evening, the local residents observe strange lights coming from the laboratory. The next morning, they awake to find that their town has been literally cut off from the rest of the world...and thrust into a new one.
- Darwinia (1998) - In 1912, the entire European continent and all of the United Kingdom mysteriously vanished during the Miracle, replaced by an alien landscape known as Darwinia. Darwinia seems to be a slice of another Earth, one that diverged from our own millions of years ago and took a separate evolutionary path.
- Bios (1999) - In the 22nd century, humanity discovers life on an extrasolar planet dubbed "Isis". Isis is lush, beautiful...and deadly. The least molecule of Isian biology kills humans painfully and horribly. Zoe Fisher has been born and bred - cloned and genetically engineered - to explore Isis. But Isis has secrets undiscovered by humanity, and Zoe herself contains secrets known only to the political powers that created her. And an act of bio-medical sabotage has changed Zoe in unknown ways.
- The Chronoliths (2001) - The story revolves around the sudden appearance of destructive and indestructible monuments around the world, with inscriptions that talk about military victories of someone named "Kuin"...dated twenty years in the future.
- Blind Lake (2003) - Blind Lake is a small town in the desert, built around a large scientific installation called Eyeball Alley. There, researchers use technology even they don't fully understand to observe alien life on a distant world. Abruptly, the town is put under total military lockdown. Trapped, the residents of Blind Lake try to adapt to their new situation and figure out the reason for their sudden isolation.
- The Spin series - The first book in the series, Spin (published 2005), 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. Followed by Axis (2007), and Vortex (2011).
- Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009) - Set in a future where the oil has long since run out, America has devolved into a feudalistic theocracy where 19th-century social norms and practices (such as slavery) have been revived.
