Jack Glass (Adam Roberts)

This quirky set of three linked stories focuses on a murderer called Jack Glass. We are told up front that there are several murders committed in these stories and Jack Glass is responsible for most of them, but exactly who he really is and how the murders are committed only gradually becomes clear. The stories take place in various exotic futuristic environments, one of them planet Earth, with different point-of-view characters, and the stories have different tones and voices, but in the end they all hold together. I was somewhat disappointed in the resolution to the last mystery (I don't know how it could have been anticipated by even the cleverest reader), but overall I found the stories interesting and the puzzles entertaining.

Spin (Robert Charles Wilson)

One quiet evening in October, everything changes. All Earth's satellites fall out of the sky at once and the moon and stars flash and vanish. We quickly discover that the universe outside of Earth's atmosphere is experiencing time differently than we do; millions of years pass every day. The sun rises the next morning as usual, but it's a bland imitation of the real thing, with no sunspots and no aurora. As scientists compute the time differential, it dawns on us that within a few decades we will have outlived the sun, engulfed in its swollen surface, and no matter what this barrier is that blocks us from the universe, we will die. Who did this to us, and why, and how will humanity cope? Though these events are literally world-shaping, Wilson tells it in the most personal, compelling way, by focusing on one man, following him from the childhood night when the stars disappeared to the unthinkable new world he finds as an adult. Through his eyes we observe two people, one vital to the planet, one vital to his own soul, and this makes us care. I very much liked the book. It makes me think about big ideas and about human questions.