« Je m'appelle Turk Findley et je vais vous raconter ce que j'ai vécu longtemps après la disparition de tout ce que j'aimais ou connaissais. »C'est par ces mots que commence le premier des dix carnets lignés trouvés dans le cartable d'Orrin Mather, jeune vagabond interné dans un centre d'accueil de Houston. Ces carnets racontent l'histoire de ce Turk Findley qui, en passant un arc temporel des Hypothétiques, a fait un bond de dix mille ans dans le futur et s'est retrouvé sur Vox, un archipel artificiel sur le point de franchir l'arc pourtant fermé qui fait communiquer Equatoria avec le berceau de l'humanité — une Terre à l'agonie devenue toxique et inhabitable.Pour Sandra Cole, le médecin en charge d'Orrin, ce récit est un roman de science-fiction plein d'élucubrations sur les Hypothétiques, mais certains faits contredisent cette confortable théorie, car Orrin connaît bien un monsieur Findley, un trafiquant très dangereux…Suite directe d'Axis, Vortex clôt avec une rare audace la trilogie entamée avec Spin, récompensé par le prix Hugo et le Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire.
Robert Charles Wilson
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. As a 14-year-old boy, Guilford Law witnessed the Miracle as shimmering lights playing across the ocean sky. Now as a grown man, he is determined to travel to Darwinia and explore its mysteries. To that end he enlists as a photographer in the Finch expedition, which plans to steam up the Rhine (or what was once the Rhine) and penetrate the continent's hidden depths as far as possible. But Law has brought an unwanted companion with him, a mysterious twin who seems to have lived — and died — on an Earth unchanged by the Miracle. The twin first appears to Guilford in dreams, and he brings a message that Darwinia is not what it seems to be — and Guilford is not who he seems to be.
In the early hours before dawn, a small Michigan town vanishes from the face of the earth. That morning the men and women of Two Rivers wake up to a world strangely different from their own—a world of curfews, food rationing and secret police. Something has gone terribly wrong, something that has to do with the mysterious government facility on the outskirts of town.