Ghost Spin

March 4, 2013
Moriarty’s third near-future Spin novel (after Spin Control) is both rewarding and frustrating. As the brutal but reliable framework of the UN-Syndicate war collapses into anarchy in the wake of the depletion of Bose-Einstein Condensate, the material needed for reliable faster-than-light travel, Cohen, an artificial intelligence sometimes housed in a human body, commits suicide on the industrial world of New Allegheny. His lover, Catherine Li, gets word of Cohen’s death but refuses to believe that he would kill himself. She undertakes the extraordinarily dangerous journey from Earth to New Allegheny and soon gets tangled in the affairs of corrupt officials, rogue intelligence agents, and pirates. Dense prose sometimes conceals as much as it reveals, and while some elements—the adaptations humans make to survive in the hostile environments of other worlds, a galaxy teetering on the edge of singularity—are genuinely visionary, others leave the reader wanting more. Agent: Scott Hoffman, Folio Literary Management.

March 1, 2013
Third installment of Moriarty's independently intelligible far-future series (Spin Control, 2006, etc.) featuring a power struggle between the UNSec military-industrial empire and its cold-war adversaries, the AI-enhanced clones of the Syndicate. UNSec's command of its interstellar colonies is crumbling as its quantum teleportation network collapses. Key to the survival of both UNSec and Syndicate, and perhaps the human species itself, is the Drift: a strange region of space where quantum reality seems to operate on a macro level. When the almost unimaginably complex Emergent AI called Cohen reportedly suicides on planet New Allegheny, various pieces of him--ghosts--survive in scattered networks, some insane, some conscious. Cohen's wife, ex-UNSec major Catherine Li, doesn't believe the story. Li faces several problems: She's wanted on certain planets as a war criminal, but thanks to UNSec boss Helen Nguyen's restructuring of her psyche, she has no recollection of what she's accused of doing. And the only way she can reach New Allegheny is by "scattercast," having herself beamed toward her destination as an electronic download. Unfortunately, with this method, anybody with the right equipment can grab a copy of her. Consequently, another version of Li works for UNSec Navy captain Astrid Avery, whose mission is to hunt down ex-Navy pirate William Llewellyn. Llewellyn, tortured by a guilty secret, must operate in the Drift but needs a far more powerful navigational AI than the one already in his head. The one he gets is one of Cohen's self-aware ghosts, and the ghost promptly begins to absorb him body and soul. Complexity is the watchword here, of thought, idea, narrative, character and plot; the resulting dense, chewy narrative avoids the obvious pitfalls, though it's certainly not an easy read. Highly rewarding, but you'll need to bring along plenty of active brain cells.

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April 15, 2013

Maj. Catherine Li, formerly a UN peacekeeper, works to keep humankind alive, which despite expanding throughout the galaxy still teeters on the brink of extinction. When her AI lover enters a part of space known as "the Drift," he dies, apparently by his own hand. Now Li turns her attention to gathering up the scattered pieces of his ghost in hope of discovering how he really died and whether he can be reconstructed. But other parties are also searching for the traces of the dead AI. VERDICT Set in the same distant-future world as Spin State and Spin Control, this stand-alone "spin-off" offers a compelling tale of adventure/suspense blended with cybernoir and high-tech sf. This is a good choice for series fans or lovers of cyberfiction.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2013
The good news for Moriarty's many fans is that this stand-alone novel is set in the world of her Spin State (2004) and Spin Control (2006). The bad news for readers unfamiliar with those books is that, at least at the outset, this new novel might seem baffling. It begins with a manreally an AI currently inhabiting a boy's bodytaking his own life. The man's wife, Catherine, a sort of freelance soldier, is angry: without her knowledge, the dead man's various AI networks have been sold off ( You held a yard sale? she says, baffled), and, without any functioning backups, bringing her husband back seems almost impossible. By means of a method of interplanetary travel that essentially creates multiple copies of herself, Catherine tries to hunt down her husband's scattered networks. The author plunks us down in this vividly realized environment and lets us assimilate it as we go along, which won't be a problem for those well versed in the rapidly growing subgenre of posthuman sf (see authors such as Greg Egan, Neal Asher, or Alastair Reynolds).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)