In An Absorbing 'Vortex,' The Future Is Alien

, Mysterious beings, for reasons of their own, encase the Earth in a temporal bubble. With every year that passes on Earth, 100 million years pass in the surrounding universe, and by novel's end, the sun has swollen in the sky. Were it not for the alien membrane, the oceans would boil and all life on the planet would be eradicated. Meanwhile, for reasons humanity can only guess at, an enormous "stargate" appears in the waters of the Indian Ocean, allowing the people of Earth to travel to a series of planets — a "Ring of Worlds" connected by their own interstellar gates.

's the same, but the world around him has literally and radically changed: Findley awakens in the middle of a desert 10,000 years in the future, after mankind has populated the Ring of Worlds and left the Earth behind. Rescued by the denizens of Vox, a sea vessel the size of a small continent, Findley discovers that his arrival on Vox has been prophesied for generations.

A parallel storyline set 10,000 years in the past (our near-future) follows a Texas psychiatrist who finds herself growing increasingly concerned about an unstable young man brought in for evaluation, whose journals are filled with wild tales of a distant future, featuring a floating ship of fanatics determined to meet the Hypotheticals with the help of a man with the unusual name of ... Turk Findley.

Wilson delights in exploring the long-term (really, really long-term) ramifications of first contact, but leavens these quieter, more contemplative passages with regular jolts of breakneck action. He's confident enough in his gifts as a writer to merely assert, and not insist upon, the incredible events he's describing, which is, of course, the key to making them seem absolutely credible. Once again, he places us in a world unlike and yet very like our own, a world that has reconciled itself to the fact that aliens exist and that we are their playthings, but is still struggling with the knowledge that these aliens remain maddeningly uncommunicative, even indifferent. In Vortex , this set of conditions irrevocably alters the warp and woof of human life — emotionally, culturally, ecologically and philosophically.

Wilson shows us these changes, but not as expositional abstractions, the way other writers might. He isn't interested in the view from 30,000 feet; throughout the novel he fixes his gaze on the level of human interactions, allowing us to feel the presence of the Hypotheticals, to witness how the dull, unignorable fact of them has changed who we are.