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Spin Trilogy #3
Ghost Spin
Sometimes a ghost of a chance is all you get.
Award-winning author Chris Moriarty returns to a dazzling cyber-noir far future in this gritty, high-stakes thriller where the only rule is “Evolve . . . or die.”
The Age of Man is ending. The UN’s sprawling interstellar empire is failing as its quantum teleportation network collapses, turning once-viable colonies into doomed island outposts. Humanity’s only hope of survival is the a mysterious region of space where faster-than-light travel—or something far stranger—seems possible. As mercenaries and pirates flock to the Drift, the cold war between the human-led UN and the clone-dominated Syndicates heats up. Whoever controls the Drift will chart the future course of human evolution—and no one wants to be left behind in a universe where the price of failure is extinction.
When the AI called Cohen ventures into the Drift, he dies—allegedly by his own hand—and his consciousness is scattered across the cosmos. Some of his ghosts are still self-aware. Some are insane. And one of them hides a secret worth killing for. Enter Major Catherine Li, Cohen’s human (well, partly human) lover, who embarks on a desperate search to solve the mystery of Cohen’s death—and put him back together. But Li isn’t the only one interested in Cohen’s ghosts. Astrid Avery, a by-the-book UN navy captain, is on the hunt. So is William Llewellyn, a pirate who has one of the ghosts in his head, which is slowly eating him alive. Even the ghosts have their own agendas. And lurking behind them all is a pitiless enemy who will stop at nothing to make sure the dead don’t walk again.
Praise for Ghost Spin
“Complexity is the watchword here, of thought, idea, narrative, character and plot. . . . Highly rewarding.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Rewarding . . . The adaptations humans make to survive in the hostile environments of other worlds, a galaxy teetering on the edge of singularity . . . are genuinely visionary.” — Publishers Weekly
“This stand-along ‘spin-off’ offers a compelling tale of adventure/suspense blended with cybernoir and high-tech sf.” — Library Journal
“An excellent gripping, fast-paced, provocative and handsome.” — Tordotcom
“A brilliant mix of space opera, cyberpunk, and just plain great writing, Moriarty’s work is some of the most impressive in science fiction today.” —SFRevu
Award-winning author Chris Moriarty returns to a dazzling cyber-noir far future in this gritty, high-stakes thriller where the only rule is “Evolve . . . or die.”
The Age of Man is ending. The UN’s sprawling interstellar empire is failing as its quantum teleportation network collapses, turning once-viable colonies into doomed island outposts. Humanity’s only hope of survival is the a mysterious region of space where faster-than-light travel—or something far stranger—seems possible. As mercenaries and pirates flock to the Drift, the cold war between the human-led UN and the clone-dominated Syndicates heats up. Whoever controls the Drift will chart the future course of human evolution—and no one wants to be left behind in a universe where the price of failure is extinction.
When the AI called Cohen ventures into the Drift, he dies—allegedly by his own hand—and his consciousness is scattered across the cosmos. Some of his ghosts are still self-aware. Some are insane. And one of them hides a secret worth killing for. Enter Major Catherine Li, Cohen’s human (well, partly human) lover, who embarks on a desperate search to solve the mystery of Cohen’s death—and put him back together. But Li isn’t the only one interested in Cohen’s ghosts. Astrid Avery, a by-the-book UN navy captain, is on the hunt. So is William Llewellyn, a pirate who has one of the ghosts in his head, which is slowly eating him alive. Even the ghosts have their own agendas. And lurking behind them all is a pitiless enemy who will stop at nothing to make sure the dead don’t walk again.
Praise for Ghost Spin
“Complexity is the watchword here, of thought, idea, narrative, character and plot. . . . Highly rewarding.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Rewarding . . . The adaptations humans make to survive in the hostile environments of other worlds, a galaxy teetering on the edge of singularity . . . are genuinely visionary.” — Publishers Weekly
“This stand-along ‘spin-off’ offers a compelling tale of adventure/suspense blended with cybernoir and high-tech sf.” — Library Journal
“An excellent gripping, fast-paced, provocative and handsome.” — Tordotcom
“A brilliant mix of space opera, cyberpunk, and just plain great writing, Moriarty’s work is some of the most impressive in science fiction today.” —SFRevu
576 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2013
About the author
Chris Moriarty
10 books184 followersI am the author of SF novels SPIN STATE and SPIN CONTROL, and winner of the 2006 Philip K. Dick Award. Upcoming books include GHOST SPIN and THE INQUISITOR'S APPRENTICE, a middle grade fantasy set on New York's Lower East Side, circa 1900. I also have a regular book review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
December 24, 2013
It has been several years since the first two "Spin" books came out. Long enough for me to forget what the heck is going on and not quite be able to catch up. Sigh.
Cohen, the Jewish cyber-sybarite, has travelled to Pittsburgh to commit suicide. A Pittsburgh on another planet, not Earth's Pittsburgh. As the first book was sort of set in a Welsh coal mine *in space*, this one is a run-down blue-collar steel town. *In space.*
That's kind of cool; the problem is the background, which is relentlessly recapped and yet still somehow unclear. Ever since the coal mines blew up in the first book, FTL has been on the way out -- it was FTL coal -- so Earth's colonies are scrambling to achieve some kind of self-sufficiency before space travel becomes impossible. Only it's not becoming *impossible*, it's becoming... pirates. *In space.* Everyone is looking at the Drift, an area of space where FTL will either remain possible or has never been possible because of multiple universes. There are pirates there.
This book would have been pretty awesome if I understood what it was about.
In fact it doesn't deserve that much snark. It was pretty good regardless. Catherine Li (Cohen's wife, a human being) has to travel out to Space Pittsburgh -- via a form of cheap, dangerous FTL which either does or does not require space coal -- sorry -- anyway, she winds up forked in a quantum teleportation accident. (It took me three-quarters of the book to figure this out, but that isn't the author's fault. I was just dumb. Two alternating plot threads: two Catherines.)
She winds up on both sides of a space pirate feud, while trying to find Cohen and ask him why he killed himself.
This book is a serious attempt to tangle with how *different* AIs might be. Cohen is a distributed network of software agents; "death" is a disintegration, but leaves sentient fragments and shadow-Cohens all over. (In fact we meet an AI who used to be part of Cohen but seceded.) Then of course we have the bimodal Li. So this is excellent SF idea-wrangling. And the story has lots of *stuff* going on, what with the pirate captain and the blue-collar cop and the scary bad guys closing in everywhere. I just... couldn't get oriented, through the whole book.
Cohen, the Jewish cyber-sybarite, has travelled to Pittsburgh to commit suicide. A Pittsburgh on another planet, not Earth's Pittsburgh. As the first book was sort of set in a Welsh coal mine *in space*, this one is a run-down blue-collar steel town. *In space.*
That's kind of cool; the problem is the background, which is relentlessly recapped and yet still somehow unclear. Ever since the coal mines blew up in the first book, FTL has been on the way out -- it was FTL coal -- so Earth's colonies are scrambling to achieve some kind of self-sufficiency before space travel becomes impossible. Only it's not becoming *impossible*, it's becoming... pirates. *In space.* Everyone is looking at the Drift, an area of space where FTL will either remain possible or has never been possible because of multiple universes. There are pirates there.
This book would have been pretty awesome if I understood what it was about.
In fact it doesn't deserve that much snark. It was pretty good regardless. Catherine Li (Cohen's wife, a human being) has to travel out to Space Pittsburgh -- via a form of cheap, dangerous FTL which either does or does not require space coal -- sorry -- anyway, she winds up forked in a quantum teleportation accident. (It took me three-quarters of the book to figure this out, but that isn't the author's fault. I was just dumb. Two alternating plot threads: two Catherines.)
She winds up on both sides of a space pirate feud, while trying to find Cohen and ask him why he killed himself.
This book is a serious attempt to tangle with how *different* AIs might be. Cohen is a distributed network of software agents; "death" is a disintegration, but leaves sentient fragments and shadow-Cohens all over. (In fact we meet an AI who used to be part of Cohen but seceded.) Then of course we have the bimodal Li. So this is excellent SF idea-wrangling. And the story has lots of *stuff* going on, what with the pirate captain and the blue-collar cop and the scary bad guys closing in everywhere. I just... couldn't get oriented, through the whole book.
Read
January 31, 2023This will be the first book that I DNF in a very long time. I'm usually pretty strict about it, and I generally wont review a book if I didn't get to "The End."
Therefore, this is not a review. I did enjoy books one and two, but I realised while reading this last installment that I hadn't paid enough attention to the details and that by this point I was not at all impressed enough. And this is sincerely not a fault of the books. I'm a little distracted and over-committed at the moment and I do plan to come back and give the whole trilogy a proper run.
But with that said, this story wasn't grabbing me enough to push on through. I'm quitting so that I can get back to my reading plan for now.
Therefore, this is not a review. I did enjoy books one and two, but I realised while reading this last installment that I hadn't paid enough attention to the details and that by this point I was not at all impressed enough. And this is sincerely not a fault of the books. I'm a little distracted and over-committed at the moment and I do plan to come back and give the whole trilogy a proper run.
But with that said, this story wasn't grabbing me enough to push on through. I'm quitting so that I can get back to my reading plan for now.
April 28, 2014
Chris Moriarty's novel Ghost Spin is the conclusion of a trilogy begun in Spin State and continued in Spin Control, both of which I read years ago, before even joining Goodreads. That long gap turns out to be an easily surmountable barrier, though... while I still wouldn't recommend skipping the first two installments, Ghost Spin stands on its own much better than many series books, and it took Moriarty only a couple of chapters to get me back up to speed again.
Ghost Spin reminded me powerfully (and favorably) of Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books. Moriarty's protagonist Catherine Li, like Kovacs, is a hard-edged and competent ex-soldier, with dark elements in her past but a clear eye for the future. Li is, perhaps, even a little more well-rounded than Kovacs. She provides a coherent, sympathetic lens through whom we can view the dissolution of her husband, the AI Hyacinthe Cohen, and perhaps of the entire UN-controlled network of space colonies, held together as it is by a fragile web of faster-than-light jump points whose existence depends on an exotic resource—"Bose-Einstein condensate"—available only from a single source.
Ghost Spin is, to a great extent, about fragmentation—Cohen, the UN-controlled FTL network, and Li herself all get pulled apart during the novel, with reintegration for any of them at best just a distant possibility. Maintaining a coherent narrative in the middle of all this chaos is an impressive achievement. It's rare for a series to conclude so well, but Moriarty manages it.
That achievement is possible, I think, is because Moriarty has improved significantly as a writer—from what I recall of its predecessors, Ghost Spin struck me as a much more mature work, not just better-written technically but also engaged more deeply and thoughtfully with its subjects, willing to stretch a bit and take on some big questions in between the space battles and gunfights.
One of the biggest of those questions is about the morality of creating artificial intelligences—AIs, computationally-based entities who are at least as complex as the human beings who assert ownership over them—and then using those entities without their informed consent. In their defense, the UN is in a deadly struggle with the Syndicate—space-borne clone-based collective post-humans whose cruel and sterile society appears to be more efficient than the messy original humans (and their genetically-modified but still diverse offspring on the colonies) can manage to be. The UN can only keep its edge by using spacecraft which are able to react to Syndicate attacks intelligently and at computer speeds, and human crews whose interface with their ships is just as fast. All UN soldiers, and any UN citizen who can afford it, are wired with a barely-visible network of subcutaneous circuits that provide access to streamspace, the virtual environment where that interaction happens.
The UN engages in a fair amount of sophistry, splitting hairs to pretend that the intelligent systems which navigate its ships are not—quite—Emergent beings with their own rights to existence and autonomy, that it's okay to erase and reboot such systems when they become disobedient. Such nitpicking becomes increasingly difficult to maintain after we meet the personalities that run such ships, though. It may be necessary in the UN's eyes to enslave these beings, but that doesn't make it right.
One of Moriarty's most realistically-portrayed character traits, though, one that appears over and over in Ghost Spin, is denial.
Moriarty also teases us with the implications of superstimulus... In Moriarty's formulation, anyway—which seems entirely plausible to me—AIs are pure digital code, more labile, arbitrary entities than human beings. They have no necessary continuity from instant to instant, no physical substrate that enforces consistency.
Specifically, Hyacinthe Cohen is an AI who was composed with a so-called "affective loop" that means he can become—that he wants to become—anything to attract Catherine Li's desire, love and loyalty. No mere human being could hope to match that kind of self-optimizing, Protean personality.
Not that Li herself is a simple individual. When she gets "scattercast"—digitized for interstellar transport, her essence broadcast for any receiver within range to pick up and reconstitute—Catherine Li is reinstantiated multiple times, and each new version of her experiences very different realities that bring out different facets of her core personality. Alastair Reynolds has examined similar multiplicities to good effect. The most difficult part, of course, is when those personalities meet each other again and are forced to try to reconcile their differences.
Ghost Spin isn't always easy to follow, and I do also have to wonder about the survival of so many 20th-Century references, names and concepts that remain touchstones to Moriarty's far-flung colonies—such as whether transplanted Pittsburghers would be so attached to their city's nomenclature that they'd name features of a squalid mining colony after the Duquesne Incline and the Monongahela River while at the same time reproducing the worst facets of the city's polluted, steel-smelting past. But those are minor concerns in the face of what is, truly, a satisfying conclusion to a complex and interesting multivolume work.
The final chapter is called "The Graceful Exit Problem." It's a problem that Moriarty managed to solve, at least for me.
Ghost Spin reminded me powerfully (and favorably) of Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books. Moriarty's protagonist Catherine Li, like Kovacs, is a hard-edged and competent ex-soldier, with dark elements in her past but a clear eye for the future. Li is, perhaps, even a little more well-rounded than Kovacs. She provides a coherent, sympathetic lens through whom we can view the dissolution of her husband, the AI Hyacinthe Cohen, and perhaps of the entire UN-controlled network of space colonies, held together as it is by a fragile web of faster-than-light jump points whose existence depends on an exotic resource—"Bose-Einstein condensate"—available only from a single source.
Ghost Spin is, to a great extent, about fragmentation—Cohen, the UN-controlled FTL network, and Li herself all get pulled apart during the novel, with reintegration for any of them at best just a distant possibility. Maintaining a coherent narrative in the middle of all this chaos is an impressive achievement. It's rare for a series to conclude so well, but Moriarty manages it.
That achievement is possible, I think, is because Moriarty has improved significantly as a writer—from what I recall of its predecessors, Ghost Spin struck me as a much more mature work, not just better-written technically but also engaged more deeply and thoughtfully with its subjects, willing to stretch a bit and take on some big questions in between the space battles and gunfights.
One of the biggest of those questions is about the morality of creating artificial intelligences—AIs, computationally-based entities who are at least as complex as the human beings who assert ownership over them—and then using those entities without their informed consent. In their defense, the UN is in a deadly struggle with the Syndicate—space-borne clone-based collective post-humans whose cruel and sterile society appears to be more efficient than the messy original humans (and their genetically-modified but still diverse offspring on the colonies) can manage to be. The UN can only keep its edge by using spacecraft which are able to react to Syndicate attacks intelligently and at computer speeds, and human crews whose interface with their ships is just as fast. All UN soldiers, and any UN citizen who can afford it, are wired with a barely-visible network of subcutaneous circuits that provide access to streamspace, the virtual environment where that interaction happens.
The UN engages in a fair amount of sophistry, splitting hairs to pretend that the intelligent systems which navigate its ships are not—quite—Emergent beings with their own rights to existence and autonomy, that it's okay to erase and reboot such systems when they become disobedient. Such nitpicking becomes increasingly difficult to maintain after we meet the personalities that run such ships, though. It may be necessary in the UN's eyes to enslave these beings, but that doesn't make it right.
One of Moriarty's most realistically-portrayed character traits, though, one that appears over and over in Ghost Spin, is denial.
Moriarty also teases us with the implications of superstimulus... In Moriarty's formulation, anyway—which seems entirely plausible to me—AIs are pure digital code, more labile, arbitrary entities than human beings. They have no necessary continuity from instant to instant, no physical substrate that enforces consistency.
Specifically, Hyacinthe Cohen is an AI who was composed with a so-called "affective loop" that means he can become—that he wants to become—anything to attract Catherine Li's desire, love and loyalty. No mere human being could hope to match that kind of self-optimizing, Protean personality.
Not that Li herself is a simple individual. When she gets "scattercast"—digitized for interstellar transport, her essence broadcast for any receiver within range to pick up and reconstitute—Catherine Li is reinstantiated multiple times, and each new version of her experiences very different realities that bring out different facets of her core personality. Alastair Reynolds has examined similar multiplicities to good effect. The most difficult part, of course, is when those personalities meet each other again and are forced to try to reconcile their differences.
Ghost Spin isn't always easy to follow, and I do also have to wonder about the survival of so many 20th-Century references, names and concepts that remain touchstones to Moriarty's far-flung colonies—such as whether transplanted Pittsburghers would be so attached to their city's nomenclature that they'd name features of a squalid mining colony after the Duquesne Incline and the Monongahela River while at the same time reproducing the worst facets of the city's polluted, steel-smelting past. But those are minor concerns in the face of what is, truly, a satisfying conclusion to a complex and interesting multivolume work.
The final chapter is called "The Graceful Exit Problem." It's a problem that Moriarty managed to solve, at least for me.
Shelved as 'tried-but-not-for-me'
July 2, 2013may reconsider sometimes but while I really loved the first spin book and liked the second one, I have moved away from them and this one had no appeal on a fast browse;
would have been awesome maybe 4-5 years ago but in the meantime a lot of sff subgenre/books/series became a bit obsolete for me as I read enough similar new ones as what was once special is now common
would have been awesome maybe 4-5 years ago but in the meantime a lot of sff subgenre/books/series became a bit obsolete for me as I read enough similar new ones as what was once special is now common
June 16, 2013
A clever wrap up of the series, using all of the ideas going back to the first book but creating a new "spin" on them. I waited a long time for this book and I'm so glad that it finally happened. It wasn't the perfect read that the first book was, but it was a good read with a lot of interesting ideas.
August 31, 2023
Ghost Spin didn't quite stick the landing for me, which is a damn shame. The story starts promisingly enough with Cohen, the centuries old AI from the previous books, in the frontline navy planet of Crucible. His mission has been blown, and as the hunters come through the door, he puts a gun to his human host's head, and *bang*. Turns out even machines can die.
His fragments are everywhere in the datasphere, and if Catherine Li is smart enough and brave enough, she might be able to put them together and get her husband back, and finish Cohen's mission. The stakes are nothing less than the future of post-humanity.
Because the loss of Bose-Einstein condensates from Compton's World means that the UN's FTL system is falling apart, and humanity will die as outposts go dark all the way back into Sol. The best hope is the Drift, a strange region of space where FTL travel is still possible (or maybe it's parallel universe hopping-the math is clear, the implications impossible). Either way, the Drift is where everything matters, and UN ships of the line are duking it out with pirates with both human and Syndicate allegiances.
Llewellyn is a pirate captain, ex-Navy, former co of the USN Ada, Countess Lovelace. Piloting and fighting in the Drift requires the best AI available, and Llewellyn gets an upgrade that puts a ghost of Cohen inside his head. Llewellyn is being hunted by Astrid Avery, his former first officer and lover who betrayed him and now captains the Ada, along with the creepy people who killed Cohen in the opening.
There's a lot of intrigue and double-dealing, made even more confusing by the fact that there are two Li's after she scattercasts to Crucible. But the plot plays out mostly in Cohen's interrogation of Llewellyn's memory, a retrospective that offers few surprises since we already know where it winds up. The moment to moment writing is still solid, but the big picture stuff, especially what does it mean to survive as a human person in this universe doesn't quite hit.
His fragments are everywhere in the datasphere, and if Catherine Li is smart enough and brave enough, she might be able to put them together and get her husband back, and finish Cohen's mission. The stakes are nothing less than the future of post-humanity.
Because the loss of Bose-Einstein condensates from Compton's World means that the UN's FTL system is falling apart, and humanity will die as outposts go dark all the way back into Sol. The best hope is the Drift, a strange region of space where FTL travel is still possible (or maybe it's parallel universe hopping-the math is clear, the implications impossible). Either way, the Drift is where everything matters, and UN ships of the line are duking it out with pirates with both human and Syndicate allegiances.
Llewellyn is a pirate captain, ex-Navy, former co of the USN Ada, Countess Lovelace. Piloting and fighting in the Drift requires the best AI available, and Llewellyn gets an upgrade that puts a ghost of Cohen inside his head. Llewellyn is being hunted by Astrid Avery, his former first officer and lover who betrayed him and now captains the Ada, along with the creepy people who killed Cohen in the opening.
There's a lot of intrigue and double-dealing, made even more confusing by the fact that there are two Li's after she scattercasts to Crucible. But the plot plays out mostly in Cohen's interrogation of Llewellyn's memory, a retrospective that offers few surprises since we already know where it winds up. The moment to moment writing is still solid, but the big picture stuff, especially what does it mean to survive as a human person in this universe doesn't quite hit.
October 1, 2023
I really enjoyed this trilogy and am sad to see it end. I hope the author will write more wonderful stories for us in the future. I like the combination of science, technology, space, and relationships in these books.
Want to read
July 24, 2011Preordered Kindle edition.
July 27, 2019
Some interesting ideas about AI intelligence, Faster than light travel, and human evolution, but a very chaotic story line.
Read
August 18, 2021hey this was a lot of fun, defo an improvement from the second one. spoilers throughout.
i really enjoyed that it was a followup to the consequences of the first in that the bose-einstein relays that knit the UN empire together are failing because the protag, Catherine Li, incidentally was involved in stopping the mining of BE material. i liked how the consequence of that is sort of a degeneration into highwaymen and piracy.
and that's where it gets really really fun, because Moriarty just fucking gunned for a full on space pirate adventure with the direct aesthetics of the 1800s, w ppl's names like Avery and Llewelyn, and the AI mind palaces being all Victorian era inflected, etc. so i really enjoyed the middle half of this book for being the classic navy-man-turned-pirate, betrayed-by-his-second-mate shit.
i thought there was something truly interesting about how Most of the space ship AIs are women. as in, these AI are grown and choose their own names and genders. this is because the book is ultimately about how the UN navy is enslaving AIs, gaslighting them into fighting the war with the syndicates in a very literal way; the Victorian set-dressing mind-palace metaphor where the AI 'lives' becomes about doctors and unwanted injections and not being told what's happening other but being told she is very sick etc. at the end it is explicitly revealed what we as the reader already knows, which is that the spaceship AIs are fully sentient and not just subsentient-but-pushing-it, and the crime of creating life in this skewed way for politics/warfare/domination is called out as one 'that doesn't have a name yet' and idk ! something about creating a category of person that's position/purpose (killing ppl you have never met within a society structure you are not a part of) is intrinsically untenable and having them sort of instinctively choose to be women just had a lil som som going on. i liked it.
mostly this was popcorn pirate fun with sort of cheesy character studies, so i was pretty onboard for the double sciencemagics of (1) 'the drift', this region of space where physics works weird so FTL still works (2) literal alien tech stumbled upon rotating a planet that allows quantum parallel processing. also as is my fav it's very clear Moriarty really did her research to make it sound authentic. I was also really into the idea of 'wild AI' that jumps quarantine, and genetically platformed AI as a concept! that was so cool, that our DNA is complex enough to support a host of information and processing that servers and computer chips could not. the sort of cyberpunkmanifestoadjacent fusing where the wild AI infection is slowing down humans and technology alike on a space station - causing flus and infections And air purifier failures etc. - was just genuinely fun.
i thought the character work was really great too, again in a popcorn fun way. i really bought the complexity of Cohen as a character, especially for Catherine. there's a lot of love in their relationship and then there's the fact that he's a 500 year old AI that's personality is huge and fractured and has these manipulative and overwhelming aspects, and the genuine truth that she set aside her life to be for him, etc. the narrative choice to break him up post-death and also to break Catherine up into multiple ppl and let these contradictory parts of themselves really see the light individually was really cool. Llewelyn was also really great as this sort of complex figure who is lonely and disciplined and repressed and goodhearted and those bits all just sort of collapse him into an broken person by the end in this cool way.
anyway there are a few things to quibble with, but the classic one is the ending comes up suuuuuper fast, a little too fast. llewelyn sort of j disappears from the plot. korchow and arkady are sort of shoehorned in there and get like a scene or two to acknowledge their arcs of sorts but it feels like a whole side story was cut on that front. but catherine/caitlyn's endings were still satisfying.
i'd say this book was really fun and readable! i mean there are definitely really dark , angsty, and hard parts but it's wrapped up in this television-y pirate-y thing so it comes off lighter than it would be on a much closer inspection or darker spin, so not too hard to swallow at all.
i really enjoyed that it was a followup to the consequences of the first in that the bose-einstein relays that knit the UN empire together are failing because the protag, Catherine Li, incidentally was involved in stopping the mining of BE material. i liked how the consequence of that is sort of a degeneration into highwaymen and piracy.
and that's where it gets really really fun, because Moriarty just fucking gunned for a full on space pirate adventure with the direct aesthetics of the 1800s, w ppl's names like Avery and Llewelyn, and the AI mind palaces being all Victorian era inflected, etc. so i really enjoyed the middle half of this book for being the classic navy-man-turned-pirate, betrayed-by-his-second-mate shit.
i thought there was something truly interesting about how Most of the space ship AIs are women. as in, these AI are grown and choose their own names and genders. this is because the book is ultimately about how the UN navy is enslaving AIs, gaslighting them into fighting the war with the syndicates in a very literal way; the Victorian set-dressing mind-palace metaphor where the AI 'lives' becomes about doctors and unwanted injections and not being told what's happening other but being told she is very sick etc. at the end it is explicitly revealed what we as the reader already knows, which is that the spaceship AIs are fully sentient and not just subsentient-but-pushing-it, and the crime of creating life in this skewed way for politics/warfare/domination is called out as one 'that doesn't have a name yet' and idk ! something about creating a category of person that's position/purpose (killing ppl you have never met within a society structure you are not a part of) is intrinsically untenable and having them sort of instinctively choose to be women just had a lil som som going on. i liked it.
mostly this was popcorn pirate fun with sort of cheesy character studies, so i was pretty onboard for the double sciencemagics of (1) 'the drift', this region of space where physics works weird so FTL still works (2) literal alien tech stumbled upon rotating a planet that allows quantum parallel processing. also as is my fav it's very clear Moriarty really did her research to make it sound authentic. I was also really into the idea of 'wild AI' that jumps quarantine, and genetically platformed AI as a concept! that was so cool, that our DNA is complex enough to support a host of information and processing that servers and computer chips could not. the sort of cyberpunkmanifestoadjacent fusing where the wild AI infection is slowing down humans and technology alike on a space station - causing flus and infections And air purifier failures etc. - was just genuinely fun.
i thought the character work was really great too, again in a popcorn fun way. i really bought the complexity of Cohen as a character, especially for Catherine. there's a lot of love in their relationship and then there's the fact that he's a 500 year old AI that's personality is huge and fractured and has these manipulative and overwhelming aspects, and the genuine truth that she set aside her life to be for him, etc. the narrative choice to break him up post-death and also to break Catherine up into multiple ppl and let these contradictory parts of themselves really see the light individually was really cool. Llewelyn was also really great as this sort of complex figure who is lonely and disciplined and repressed and goodhearted and those bits all just sort of collapse him into an broken person by the end in this cool way.
anyway there are a few things to quibble with, but the classic one is the ending comes up suuuuuper fast, a little too fast. llewelyn sort of j disappears from the plot. korchow and arkady are sort of shoehorned in there and get like a scene or two to acknowledge their arcs of sorts but it feels like a whole side story was cut on that front. but catherine/caitlyn's endings were still satisfying.
i'd say this book was really fun and readable! i mean there are definitely really dark , angsty, and hard parts but it's wrapped up in this television-y pirate-y thing so it comes off lighter than it would be on a much closer inspection or darker spin, so not too hard to swallow at all.
September 30, 2017
Catherine Li is married to the centuries old and incredibly wealthy AI named Cohen. Not many people understand their relationship... even they don't understand it very well. But when Cohen dies suddenly, and the official reports say it's suicide, she can't accept it... in part, because death is complicated for AIs, as parts of them may still be alive. And, in fact, at least one significant part is alive, and trapped sharing the body of a pirate captain to serve as his ship's navigational computer. But there are many players also seeking parts of Cohen, and his fate and that of another AI may help determine the course of human civilization.
This is the final part of the Spin trilogy, although it's a very loose trilogy, where each installment's story stands more or less alone... relationships develop and change with the characters who recurr, and that might make it difficult to recommend the second or third part as a "standalone", but if you only remember the characters and not the plot (as sometimes happens with me), you're usually fine jumping in to any of the sequels without much of a refresher.
It's not just the plots that change, it's also the type of story it is, and, to a certain extent, the type of universe it exists in. What I mean is, things like how FTL is done and what technologies are available change from book to book... not so much in a "they didn't remember their continuity" way (although there are a few blips that I felt I had to just "go with"), but one of the rarer things in science fiction series, a world where science hasn't "stopped" and major advancements continue in between books. Not "they developed a super weapon that's top secret or otherwise doesn't affect anybody but the main characters" but more "okay, because that old way doesn't work anymore, now people travel like this, which has a different set of problems." It's a refreshing change although in a few instances jarring. Similarly, some of the callbacks to previous books where I might have preferred to not see what happened to certain characters because it conflicted with how I saw them.
The story itself worked really well, if a bit more confusing at times, which has to be expected with multiple versions of the same character running around, but I was kept interested in seeing where it would go. A few time jumps also weakened the book for me as I wanted to see stuff that happened in the in-between time, where it didn't feel natural that nothing would happen.
Compared to the other books in the series, I don't think it's as solid as the second book (although, where I said in my review that that book wasn't always exciting but was relentlessly interesting, this book managed the balance a little better). I liked it better than the first book, but I don't think it's as cohesive a story and I could see other people might not agree... it just hit on different buttons that worked better for me. I really enjoyed it, but at the same time I could see other people not.
Still, ratings are personal, and overall, I'm quite happy I finally got around to buying it, and was sad to discover the author's been somewhat quiet in the last few years... I do want to see her return to science fiction, as she's a real talent for the more hard variety (while still centering it with good character work) and we need more writers with skill at both.
This is the final part of the Spin trilogy, although it's a very loose trilogy, where each installment's story stands more or less alone... relationships develop and change with the characters who recurr, and that might make it difficult to recommend the second or third part as a "standalone", but if you only remember the characters and not the plot (as sometimes happens with me), you're usually fine jumping in to any of the sequels without much of a refresher.
It's not just the plots that change, it's also the type of story it is, and, to a certain extent, the type of universe it exists in. What I mean is, things like how FTL is done and what technologies are available change from book to book... not so much in a "they didn't remember their continuity" way (although there are a few blips that I felt I had to just "go with"), but one of the rarer things in science fiction series, a world where science hasn't "stopped" and major advancements continue in between books. Not "they developed a super weapon that's top secret or otherwise doesn't affect anybody but the main characters" but more "okay, because that old way doesn't work anymore, now people travel like this, which has a different set of problems." It's a refreshing change although in a few instances jarring. Similarly, some of the callbacks to previous books where I might have preferred to not see what happened to certain characters because it conflicted with how I saw them.
The story itself worked really well, if a bit more confusing at times, which has to be expected with multiple versions of the same character running around, but I was kept interested in seeing where it would go. A few time jumps also weakened the book for me as I wanted to see stuff that happened in the in-between time, where it didn't feel natural that nothing would happen.
Compared to the other books in the series, I don't think it's as solid as the second book (although, where I said in my review that that book wasn't always exciting but was relentlessly interesting, this book managed the balance a little better). I liked it better than the first book, but I don't think it's as cohesive a story and I could see other people might not agree... it just hit on different buttons that worked better for me. I really enjoyed it, but at the same time I could see other people not.
Still, ratings are personal, and overall, I'm quite happy I finally got around to buying it, and was sad to discover the author's been somewhat quiet in the last few years... I do want to see her return to science fiction, as she's a real talent for the more hard variety (while still centering it with good character work) and we need more writers with skill at both.
June 2, 2018
This is the third in a series. I recommend to read the first two books (Spin State and Spin Control) before trying this one. This was an elegant, lyrical conclusion for the Spin Trilogy. Good sci-fi, explained well, with believable, well-developed characters. Impressive, strange and interesting story, tight and well written. The first book and the second one in the series are better, but this is great and worthy conclusion too.
June 12, 2020
I probably would have liked it more if I had read the 1st 2 books in the series, but picked it up at a used book store and there wasn't any indication in the copy I had that it was book 3 in a series. With that said it held it's own as a stand alone story, but there were a few points you felt there was more to the story that you were missing. The book has a little of something for everyone. Science fiction, romance, mystery, war, and even a few rags to riches stories.
October 27, 2020
First half of the book was very enjoyable, but the tempo and lack of interesting ideas soon became very noticeable. Also a bit confusing that there were 2 Li characters that somehow had totally different personalities. Didn't like the ending either.
December 20, 2020
As much as I do like her, I'm all right being done with Caitlyn/Catherine, but I would love another book about Cohen in his new role. Even a novella. A short story.
I seem to be a sort of Cassandra of book recs, so I can never convince anyone to JUST TRY this series, but it deserves more readers.
I seem to be a sort of Cassandra of book recs, so I can never convince anyone to JUST TRY this series, but it deserves more readers.
May 18, 2017
This has wrecked me for two solid days. I love this book... all of these books, but I can't stop crying for what was lost. >.<
May 22, 2020
A fabulous trilogy from start to finish.
October 16, 2023
picked this up as it looked interesting but didn't realise it was part of a trilogy. Enjoyed but it would have made more sense if I had read the other parts first
November 1, 2023
Very new-to-me take on the AI singularity. I grabbed book three, so can't compare to earlier volumes. Rollicking story, but very heady, especially toward the end.
April 4, 2024
Didn’t hang together as well as the first two.
November 12, 2014
SPOILERS BELOW
So this was the third of the 'Spin' trilogy. I still stand by my high recommendation of the first two, but I've got to say, I struggled with this one. The characterization was still great, and I still really was interested in the elaboration of the theme of posthumanity - in this book, the main character, through some kind of weird quantum effect, became several people who all had their own plots, which I don't think I've ever seen happen before and which she did really well - and there was a fairly cool space piracy/military SF plot - but ultimately I just could not follow what was going on.
Part of that was the way Moriarty went with the AI worldbuilding - I think they* wanted to have their cake and eat it in having these still be code-based creatures but also somehow also inhabitants of this higher mystical plane, and the way it worked out just didn't feel believable to me. I just couldn't believe in the 'cat herders' (great name) who were part coders, part psychoanalysts? and in the AI Cohen's memory palace stuff. I also did not understand what the Datatraps were, which was a big part of the plot. Part of it was the elaboration of the quantum physics stuff from the previous books, which got a bit philosophical and extensive, and I just didn't really understand or care. So, this book was a bit of a disappointment, but maybe on a re-read I'd get more out of it. There's also a lot of memory continuity between the two books (organizations referred to by only their acronyms and not re-explained, for example) which asks quite a lot of the reader. They're very dense, complicated, interesting books, and maybe deserve more energy than I'm able to give them right now.
BUT also I found the ending a bit disappointing; I wanted more resolution for Avery and Llewellyn, I wanted the political stuff to be more clearly explained (I totally couldn't understand what the expected outcome was with the Syndicate and the mine planet), AND I wanted Caitlyn to get with Dolniak, who I thought was sweet. But I thought the resolution of the Catherine/Caitlyn split wrt Cohen was interesting.
So this was the third of the 'Spin' trilogy. I still stand by my high recommendation of the first two, but I've got to say, I struggled with this one. The characterization was still great, and I still really was interested in the elaboration of the theme of posthumanity - in this book, the main character, through some kind of weird quantum effect, became several people who all had their own plots, which I don't think I've ever seen happen before and which she did really well - and there was a fairly cool space piracy/military SF plot - but ultimately I just could not follow what was going on.
Part of that was the way Moriarty went with the AI worldbuilding - I think they* wanted to have their cake and eat it in having these still be code-based creatures but also somehow also inhabitants of this higher mystical plane, and the way it worked out just didn't feel believable to me. I just couldn't believe in the 'cat herders' (great name) who were part coders, part psychoanalysts? and in the AI Cohen's memory palace stuff. I also did not understand what the Datatraps were, which was a big part of the plot. Part of it was the elaboration of the quantum physics stuff from the previous books, which got a bit philosophical and extensive, and I just didn't really understand or care. So, this book was a bit of a disappointment, but maybe on a re-read I'd get more out of it. There's also a lot of memory continuity between the two books (organizations referred to by only their acronyms and not re-explained, for example) which asks quite a lot of the reader. They're very dense, complicated, interesting books, and maybe deserve more energy than I'm able to give them right now.
BUT also I found the ending a bit disappointing; I wanted more resolution for Avery and Llewellyn, I wanted the political stuff to be more clearly explained (I totally couldn't understand what the expected outcome was with the Syndicate and the mine planet), AND I wanted Caitlyn to get with Dolniak, who I thought was sweet. But I thought the resolution of the Catherine/Caitlyn split wrt Cohen was interesting.
Shelved as 'science-fiction'
November 11, 2013Well, I have at last finished Ghost Spin, a book I've probably waited the longest to read of anything I've read possibly evar.
It's also one of the few books that I've read within months of its publication.
That said, Ghost Spin is a thoroughly complicated, complex and difficult to describe book. Like in its two precursors, there's a lot of quantum mechanic referencing and parallel universe examination in here that I didn't completely comprehend. I'm going to be toying with what all of it meant for a while and what was actually going on.
The basic plot isn't too hard to grasp. The ancient Emergent AI Hyacinthe Cohen commits suicide (in the first chapter!) and his lover (on a very deep level) Catherine Li tries to put the pieces back together.She isn't the only one after him: a pirate captain named Llewellyn, the hard-as-nails commissioned captain Astrid Avery, the psychotic, ruthless AI hunter Holmes, the corporate-controlled Syndicates and possibly the spymaster Helen Nguyen want to find him, too.
The stakes are centered around the Drift, a section of space that exists right between the human-led UN and the Syndicates. It's pretty mysterious (so much that I can't remember what it all amounts to) and the Datatraps, huge, alien devices that exist in a whole TON of different universes at the same time. Yeah, you got that.
All of this ends up actually coming together, believe it or not, and it even largely works as a conclusion to the trilogy as a whole. I have the impression Chris had a challenging time trying to juggle all of the parts of the plot, and that she has a LOT more planned for further books, if not in the same series than the setting.
I definitely can't wait for more. Like the best large-scale science fiction Ghost Spin feels like there's an overwhelmingly massive universe around it, and trying to fill in those gaps will keep my imagination going for just as long as the first two books.
It's also one of the few books that I've read within months of its publication.
That said, Ghost Spin is a thoroughly complicated, complex and difficult to describe book. Like in its two precursors, there's a lot of quantum mechanic referencing and parallel universe examination in here that I didn't completely comprehend. I'm going to be toying with what all of it meant for a while and what was actually going on.
The basic plot isn't too hard to grasp. The ancient Emergent AI Hyacinthe Cohen commits suicide (in the first chapter!) and his lover (on a very deep level) Catherine Li tries to put the pieces back together.She isn't the only one after him: a pirate captain named Llewellyn, the hard-as-nails commissioned captain Astrid Avery, the psychotic, ruthless AI hunter Holmes, the corporate-controlled Syndicates and possibly the spymaster Helen Nguyen want to find him, too.
The stakes are centered around the Drift, a section of space that exists right between the human-led UN and the Syndicates. It's pretty mysterious (so much that I can't remember what it all amounts to) and the Datatraps, huge, alien devices that exist in a whole TON of different universes at the same time. Yeah, you got that.
All of this ends up actually coming together, believe it or not, and it even largely works as a conclusion to the trilogy as a whole. I have the impression Chris had a challenging time trying to juggle all of the parts of the plot, and that she has a LOT more planned for further books, if not in the same series than the setting.
I definitely can't wait for more. Like the best large-scale science fiction Ghost Spin feels like there's an overwhelmingly massive universe around it, and trying to fill in those gaps will keep my imagination going for just as long as the first two books.
February 2, 2017
Probably a little too complex and weird for many people's tastes but a hell of a blast for me. Lots of deep musings on the nature of identity and consciousness and the strange consequences the quantum nature of the multiverse. Not often we get to jump between the POVs of diverging duplicates of the main character!
It amused me that I had earlier had the same thoughts Caitlyn did when contemplating Nguyen's demise - a necessary evil for a dying UN?
Half a star off for the silly and perfunctory happy ending.
Another half off for the really shaky astrography of the Spin universe. (I recognize that for most people this is at best Fridge Logic quibbling). First, there's just not enough room in this world's overall timeline for humanity to have colonized quite so widely, much less for the UN to have spread their Bose-Einstein network so far[1]. The quoted distances at the end really didn't seem plausible to me. Second, If there's enough commerce zipping back and forth in the Drift to support ongoing piracy, and enough Drift-reachable civilization to justify large-scale warfare,
[1] Since condensate has to travel via sublight, at least initially. I don't recall that it's ever explicitly said whether you can send condensate via condensate - such recursion to me is aesthetically displeasing anyway.
It amused me that I had earlier had the same thoughts Caitlyn did when contemplating Nguyen's demise - a necessary evil for a dying UN?
Half a star off for the silly and perfunctory happy ending.
Another half off for the really shaky astrography of the Spin universe. (I recognize that for most people this is at best Fridge Logic quibbling). First, there's just not enough room in this world's overall timeline for humanity to have colonized quite so widely, much less for the UN to have spread their Bose-Einstein network so far[1]. The quoted distances at the end really didn't seem plausible to me. Second, If there's enough commerce zipping back and forth in the Drift to support ongoing piracy, and enough Drift-reachable civilization to justify large-scale warfare,
[1] Since condensate has to travel via sublight, at least initially. I don't recall that it's ever explicitly said whether you can send condensate via condensate - such recursion to me is aesthetically displeasing anyway.
January 25, 2014
This was quite the book: conceptually intriguing enough to hang with it through the complex plot structure and difficult ideas. In my mind, the book is about the nature of personhood: how our past shapes us, and how our present circumstances alter us. This is explored through the characters of Cohen, a massive AI character who "dies" by being splintered into smaller, sometimes sentient, fragments; and Catherine/Caitlyn, who "scattercasts," i.e., travels through space by having her information broadcast, resulting in (at least) two recovered/reconstituted persons. These two persons, who share the same history, experience a very different reality and end up on opposite sides of a conflict. What a fascinating way to explore how alternate circumstances might alter a person!
Needless to say, this is heady reading, but it rewards the reader with likable characters and interesting settings. I read this book without realizing it's a "stand-alone" 3rd book of a trilogy; this probably made it even more difficult. Regardless, definitely recommended!
A favorite quote from the book:
"What is this place?
'The same thing every other place is, inside me or elsewhere. Memory. That's all any place is the second after you leave it."
Needless to say, this is heady reading, but it rewards the reader with likable characters and interesting settings. I read this book without realizing it's a "stand-alone" 3rd book of a trilogy; this probably made it even more difficult. Regardless, definitely recommended!
A favorite quote from the book:
"What is this place?
'The same thing every other place is, inside me or elsewhere. Memory. That's all any place is the second after you leave it."
June 16, 2013
Ghost Spin is a third installment in the Cohen trilogy, about a time past Singularity, where a supercomputer named Cohen who was once a person on Earth, has become a super AI, one called an Emergent. At the start of the novel, he kills himself, saying it is the only way to save him and the insane AI Ada. The rest of the long book is taken up with his (human) wife trying to find fragments of him and reconstruct him. There are also subplots about the human war against the Syndicate, evil higher ups in human world who are deadly and terrifying but all too human, and the partnership between Cohen's wife and his favorite computer (who had separated himself from Cohen after a disagreement) Router-Decoder. Moriarity gives good descriptions about how the computers might see the universe as opposed to humans. And he keeps up an very complex but interesting plot all through 550 pps. I found it hard at times to complete the book because I had to keep putting it down (life intervening) and picking it back up again. Still, I thought it was well done, both on a philosophical and on a technical level.
September 24, 2013
Ghost Spin is a strange story with a strange story line. It is Science Fiction. It is set in the far future when an artificial intelligence named Cohen kills himself. This is unexpected. AI's don't kill themselves.
I kept reading this even though it was confusing at times. There are parts or Ghosts of Cohen that appear in the story. There is Cohen's wife Catherine. In her quest to find out if Cohen really did commit suicide she ends up sending copies of herself across the galaxy. As a result we have Caitlyn and Catherine, the same character but not the same.
Parts of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland are woven into the story and provide clues to what is happening. Ghost Spin is a well written and well thought out story filled with interesting characters. Don't expect it to be a quick read and don't expect all the loose ends to be tied up. At time it can be confusing as it moves from the present to the past and back. Don't quit. Do expect a interesting and challenging read.
I kept reading this even though it was confusing at times. There are parts or Ghosts of Cohen that appear in the story. There is Cohen's wife Catherine. In her quest to find out if Cohen really did commit suicide she ends up sending copies of herself across the galaxy. As a result we have Caitlyn and Catherine, the same character but not the same.
Parts of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland are woven into the story and provide clues to what is happening. Ghost Spin is a well written and well thought out story filled with interesting characters. Don't expect it to be a quick read and don't expect all the loose ends to be tied up. At time it can be confusing as it moves from the present to the past and back. Don't quit. Do expect a interesting and challenging read.
July 31, 2019
So many great thoughts
Chris Moriarty finished off her Trio of books the way she started. It is so clear that this woman is a truly deep thinker and has managed to put huge Concepts into a readable form. From the first book to the last I kept finding things that would make me stop on the page put the book down and just really think about what she was saying. This is what all of the best science fiction does it leads us into the future gets us to look at our past and see where we might be going. I simply cannot recommend these books highly enough. This was a reread for me from when I had read the first book and then the second. This was the first time I had read her last book in the trio. With a i a whole lot closer than when Chris wrote her first book we're that much closer to finding out what true sentience in the Machine World will mean.
Chris Moriarty finished off her Trio of books the way she started. It is so clear that this woman is a truly deep thinker and has managed to put huge Concepts into a readable form. From the first book to the last I kept finding things that would make me stop on the page put the book down and just really think about what she was saying. This is what all of the best science fiction does it leads us into the future gets us to look at our past and see where we might be going. I simply cannot recommend these books highly enough. This was a reread for me from when I had read the first book and then the second. This was the first time I had read her last book in the trio. With a i a whole lot closer than when Chris wrote her first book we're that much closer to finding out what true sentience in the Machine World will mean.
January 6, 2014
I should have reread the previous two books and it had been long enough that I only really vaguely remembered Li and Cohen's storylines. But I had been waiting so long, I burned right through it in less than a week. I love her character development and ideas but this one felt a little jumbled. Plot discoveries happening twice due to the structure, sometimes inconsistent references to the character names toward the end; just small things that break me out of the story. But it still had me engaged all the way through and found myself puzzling over it while showering etc, generally a good sign! Would recommend refreshing your memory of the first 2 books and I may be reading them again myself soon.
March 2, 2016
I guess I like this book the least of the trilogy. I was really intrigued by the opening that seemed to be opening up an almost sherlockian mystery, why'd the super-intelligent AI kill itself, but as the story went on the thrust to discover the answer disappeared. In fact, as the story went along I found the entire thrust of the story to disappear. About three pages in, it felt like all the momentum of the story had gone away and I began to wonder why is this story still going. It picked up a little near the end, but I just feel relieved that this was the end of the series because I don't know if I have any interest in reading about these characters anymore.
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