Books like Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

In October of their childhood, Tyler Dupree and his friends Jason and Diane witness the sky cut off in a sudden, global blackout. The stars vanish in brilliance, replaced by a flat, endless black wall, and the Sun becomes a featureless heat source while the Moon disappears. Satellites that fall out of orbit are found corroded, as if aged centuries. Split among the fallout, Tyler, a budding astronomer, finds that the barrier is engineered by alien megastructures; time outside the wall runs over a hundred million years per day for those within, meaning the Sun will exhaust in roughly forty Earth years. The narrative follows the friends into adulthood: Jason turns to science in a desperate attempt to curtail the inevitable end, while Diane succumbs to a new cult that manipulates the chaos. Earth mobilizes surfaces of Mars, turning the planet green with terraforming, and dispatches probes that return with alien emissaries bearing long histories of Martian settlement. When a similar barrier appears around Mars, Jason deploys self-replicating machines into the void to broadcast findings. The world teeters on the brink of transformation, as humanity confronts alien truths, religious upheaval, and the relentless march of time.

First publish date: 2005