Spin (Spin, 1)

One night, when he was twelve, Tyler Dupree stood in his backyard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what would become known as the Spin. It would shape their lives.

Eventually, probes reveal that the barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier - more than a hundred million years per year on Earth. At this rate, the death of the sun is only forty years away.

Now a promising young scientist, Jason works to avert this apocalypse. Diane marries a cult leader who's forged a religion out of the fears of millions. Earth sends terraforming machines, then humans, to Mars . . . and in an eyeblink, a wizened ancient Martian human returns with thousands of years' tales about the settling of Mars. Then an identical barrier appears around Mars.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.