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Chris Moriarty, Spin State and Amazon
Aug. 6th, 2009 08:22 pmLatest book to keep me up too late was Spin State by Chris Moriarty. As the previous couple of books I have read, it features a tough, troubled protagonist that follows his convictions despite getting beat up more and more throughout the tale. It features a more-scientific-than-most take on quantum entanglement and implications on consciousness and faster-than-light travel and communication. There's even a "suggested reading" list in the back about quantum mechanics.
I liked it, and it kept me up, which means that I'm going to most likely give it a full five stars on Amazon. It was solid sci-fi noir in the sense of a hard sci-fi setting and a detective attempting to unravel a mystery, complete with romantic distractions and whatnot. It also introduced some fundamental concepts to think about, yet did it fairly unobtrusively as a natural part of the tale. Still, I can't help but to feel that there was something missing from this book; perhaps the slightly excessively sprawling plot or occasionally way-too-handy technology contributed to this impression. Much like the Kovacs novels, the protagonist is also, at times, excessively good at keeping people away and failing to open up.
This is one of the books I picked up at Amazon after noticing that one that I was buying already qualified for their 4 for 3 promotion. Consequently, I ended up with several books picked from their "people who like this also liked" list. It's almost creepy how different science fiction authors can produce works that are remarkably similar in may respects; Amazon's correlation of people's buying habits ends up then providing me with the most alike works in a given field. That's certainly something that could never happen prior to Amazon. No matter how well read someone was, nobody could provide this kind of correlation based on the contents and style of books.
I liked it, and it kept me up, which means that I'm going to most likely give it a full five stars on Amazon. It was solid sci-fi noir in the sense of a hard sci-fi setting and a detective attempting to unravel a mystery, complete with romantic distractions and whatnot. It also introduced some fundamental concepts to think about, yet did it fairly unobtrusively as a natural part of the tale. Still, I can't help but to feel that there was something missing from this book; perhaps the slightly excessively sprawling plot or occasionally way-too-handy technology contributed to this impression. Much like the Kovacs novels, the protagonist is also, at times, excessively good at keeping people away and failing to open up.
This is one of the books I picked up at Amazon after noticing that one that I was buying already qualified for their 4 for 3 promotion. Consequently, I ended up with several books picked from their "people who like this also liked" list. It's almost creepy how different science fiction authors can produce works that are remarkably similar in may respects; Amazon's correlation of people's buying habits ends up then providing me with the most alike works in a given field. That's certainly something that could never happen prior to Amazon. No matter how well read someone was, nobody could provide this kind of correlation based on the contents and style of books.
