Review:Spin State, by Chris Moriarty

Book: Spin State by Chris Moriarty

Recommended to me by OddKaren, and upholds the general trend from her of high quality recs. OddKaren is always on the search for "Ladies and spaceships" books, (and who isn't?) and this one exceeds the genre.

Moriarty (I hope this is a pseud, as it would be an awesome one) writes a thickly textured future in which the definition of life is expanding in all directions: AIs, comprised of unstable networks of smaller awarenesses, are fighting for their civil rights, genetic constructs are second-class citizens, and thanks to quantum information transfer, the virtual and the real span the galaxy and lie overtop each other.

This book manages to be about all of those at once, without relegating any of them to set dressing. The physics in particular are at the heart of the book, and as an interested amateur, I was pretty quickly lost, although the pages of bibliography at the back (with less math-heavy papers helpfully starred) were sufficient to convince me that Moriarty knows what she's talking about, at least, a great deal more than I do. I hope this doesn't scare potential readers off, though.

Points of interest: sexuality in this world is a non-issue. Cohen, an AI and a major character, while doing his impression of "Shucks, I'm just folks" for a reporter, recommends she ask any of his "ex-wives and -husbands," for confirmation that he's very boring, really. Cohen, BTW, rents out brainspace in human beings in order to have a meat-presence, and doesn't particularly care the gender of the human; but Catherine Li, the equally bisexual protagonist (tending, I would say, slightly towards the homo- end of the Kinsey scale) thinks of him as unquestionably male.

Also, a future that is not white, or post-racially beige. Spanish is the lingua franca, Catherine's home-world was heavily settled by the Irish, Cohen thinks of himself as to some degree Jewish, and Catherine's gene-set, although constructed, has left her with Han features.

Catherine is an interesting protagonist. At times her self-deception annoyed me, but she is tough, capable, smart, and able to be very stupid. She is military, a genetic construct who has escaped registration and is living an illegal existence. Half cyborg, her military issue brain is the only thing that allows her to remember the past that quantum travel irreversibly erodes with every jump. Of course, she can not entirely trust the memories the military has both read- and write-access to. And Cohen is in love with her, but she can't remember all of her past with him. So maybe she has reasons to be twitchy and paranoid.

I read it one go. Recommended.

xpost of this review originally published on goodreads Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:18:02 -0700.