Spin Control by Chris Moriarty
Sep. 7th, 2009 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
varjohaltiaI liked Spin State, Moriarty's previous work, a fair bit, so after the disaster of Witchling I reached for something I hoped would satisfy my desire for literary satisfaction.
It's unfortunate how often authors manage to get a book or two published, and take it as a license to get sloppy and tell their editors where to stuff it. At least judging by Moriarty's second installment, she hasn't succumbed to this trend and has only improved.
The protagonist(s) and world are carried forward from the first book, but there's enough of a gap to allow for a full novel to fit inbetween where it ends and this one starts, and this book does tell its tale largely from the viewpoint of a new character. The setting is our world, perhaps some five hundred years into the future, where a group of deep-space living cloned humans are in a state of war with normal space-faring humans, and then there are the poor sods left living on Earth. There is faster-than-light communication and travel, but it's kept prohibitively expensive to keep things interesting, and the progress of genetic technology mixes things up a lot more. The FTL issues are what the first book dealt with, this one takes place in an entirely different context and deals with new social and ethical issues.
In some ways the characterization isn't supremely deep and the interlacing of past and present chapters is a bit annoying, but those are relatively small complaints. In other aspects the characters are really rather deep and human, no matter what they are. There are issues of morality, of what it is to be human, of trying to find solace in a cold world where we are all alone, and they are all dealt with quite well. This, while maintaining a very good pacing and level of prose, and topping it all off by being excellent hard sci-fi, to the point where the ex-physicist in me is always tempted to look up the quotes, factoids and follow the "suggested factual reading" links at the back of the book.
The hard sci-fi aspect may (or may not) be a bit distracting to readers who do not have a science degree or knowledge of computer science and complex systems, but I doubt it really is necessary to follow the details; while the plot revolves around a technological MacGuffin, by the end you realize that the important things were somewhere else entirely the entire time.
There is perhaps excessive angst in this work, and perhaps partially because of its origins this book resonated with me better than many for a long time. It's not perfect literature, but it is darn good, and it gripped me tightly and gave me a very rewarding two days.
Five subjective stars out of Five. (Maybe four objective, but these are my reviews so I rate the books as I see them.)
It's unfortunate how often authors manage to get a book or two published, and take it as a license to get sloppy and tell their editors where to stuff it. At least judging by Moriarty's second installment, she hasn't succumbed to this trend and has only improved.
The protagonist(s) and world are carried forward from the first book, but there's enough of a gap to allow for a full novel to fit inbetween where it ends and this one starts, and this book does tell its tale largely from the viewpoint of a new character. The setting is our world, perhaps some five hundred years into the future, where a group of deep-space living cloned humans are in a state of war with normal space-faring humans, and then there are the poor sods left living on Earth. There is faster-than-light communication and travel, but it's kept prohibitively expensive to keep things interesting, and the progress of genetic technology mixes things up a lot more. The FTL issues are what the first book dealt with, this one takes place in an entirely different context and deals with new social and ethical issues.
In some ways the characterization isn't supremely deep and the interlacing of past and present chapters is a bit annoying, but those are relatively small complaints. In other aspects the characters are really rather deep and human, no matter what they are. There are issues of morality, of what it is to be human, of trying to find solace in a cold world where we are all alone, and they are all dealt with quite well. This, while maintaining a very good pacing and level of prose, and topping it all off by being excellent hard sci-fi, to the point where the ex-physicist in me is always tempted to look up the quotes, factoids and follow the "suggested factual reading" links at the back of the book.
The hard sci-fi aspect may (or may not) be a bit distracting to readers who do not have a science degree or knowledge of computer science and complex systems, but I doubt it really is necessary to follow the details; while the plot revolves around a technological MacGuffin, by the end you realize that the important things were somewhere else entirely the entire time.
There is perhaps excessive angst in this work, and perhaps partially because of its origins this book resonated with me better than many for a long time. It's not perfect literature, but it is darn good, and it gripped me tightly and gave me a very rewarding two days.
Five subjective stars out of Five. (Maybe four objective, but these are my reviews so I rate the books as I see them.)
