They moved in silence through the Hypothetical forest, though it was not entirely a silent place. No wind reached them at street level, but there must have been a wind blowing, Turk guessed, because the iridescent globes that crowned the tubular trunks occasionally bumped against each other and made a gentle sound that suggested a rubber mallet on a wooden xylophone.

Axis is the sequel to Robert Charles Wilson’s superb 2005 novel, Spin, which I reviewed earlier in the year. I’m torn about the necessity for a sequel. On the one hand, sequelitis afflicts the SF market, overloading bookshop and library shelves with the over-rated and over-familiar, or me-too attempts to strike gold with a copycat franchise. On the other hand, Spin was so extremely good that you wanted more of the same, and as soon as it could be provided.

If the title Spin was a slight misnomer (see my earlier review), then I’m afraid this title, Axis, strays even further from the core idea of the book, which is that the universe has been colonised (billions of years before we came along) by an infinitely connected, infinitely self-replicating nanomachine, one that can commit extraordinary god-like acts of engineering, creating an effect that can only be described as the nanotechnological sublime.

This sequel begins approximately 30 years after the events in the previous novel. If Spin ended on a note of optimism, as some humans were able to escape the oppressive conditions of the late late capitalist Earth through an arch constructed by the Hypotheticals (so-called because their existence is surmised by the humans who experience their effects), then Axis begins by dashing that optimism. It becomes clear that the oppressive and fearful regulatory authorities have passed through the Arch themselves, to the New World, the planet linked to Earth through the Arch. Worse than that, human nature being what it is, people have started exploiting the New World like Robber Barons, taking advantage of its frontier nature and trashing the new environment in exactly the same way as they trashed the old.

The New World, in fact, seems to be a bit of a disappointment (a bit like Australia, perhaps). People cling to coastal communities and the interior seems to be dry and inhospitable. Life is hard, a living is hard to make. This is not the new Eden we hoped for at the end of Spin. Still, every summer the skies light up with a spectacular meteor shower.

The only surviving character from Spin enters the narrative some way in, but the novel begins with Lise, a young woman in search of her 12-years-gone father, and Turk, a pilot/drifter she has met along the way. They soon encounter the (illegal) Fourth community (humans who have achieved a longer lifespan – or fourth age – using technology derived from the Hypotheticals), and become embroiled in their attempts to communicate with what they surmise is the intelligence behind the Hypotheticals and their effects. In other words, RCW continues here with his theme of dangerous religious extremists. In this case, the idea of god has been replaced by the Hypotheticals, but the fanatical attempts to know god continue, with the usual human consequences.

Meanwhile, the forces of conservatism are in pursuit of the Fourths, trying to control any alterations of the human genome, and using the kind of oppressive tactics that made sense in Spin, but make less sense here, because the ideas are just not developed enough. These authorities, who don’t allow morality to stall them, are too easy to evade.

Inevitably (and gratifyingly), encounters with the nanotechnological sublime leave the human characters helpless, and there’s a sense that (unlike with the previous novel) the human characters are just too small and insignificant to carry the weight of the ideas contained herein.

Like the New World itself, Axis is a bit of a disappointment. At around 300 pages, it’s short: and the design of the book itself is the only thing that ensures we even get to 300. There’s a lot of white space between chapters. Does this feel like the “holding pattern” novel in the middle of a trilogy? I don’t really know. We certainly learn a good deal more about the Hypotheticals than we knew before, but I don’t think we learn enough about the human characters in the story. We don’t spend enough time with any of them to care about them in the same way that we cared about Tyler Dupree and the twins in Spin. In the end, I wonder why Lise is there at all, unless she’s a central character in a hypothetical third novel.

I enjoyed reading it, but I’ve grown to expect much more from RCW. You’ll certainly not be able to resist reading this if you have read Spin, but there really isn’t a lot of point in recommending this to anyone who has not. Cautiously recommended then, with a reiteration of the strongest possible recommendation for Spin itself, which remains one of the best novels – in any genre – that I have ever read.