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Spin State (The Spin Trilogy Book 1) Kindle Edition
SPIN STATE
UN Peacekeeper Major Catherine Li has made thirty-seven faster-than-light jumps in her lifetime—and has probably forgotten more than most people remember. But that’s what backup hard drives are for. And Li should know; she’s been hacking her memory for fifteen years in order to pass as human. But no memory upgrade can prepare Li for what she finds on Compson’s World: a mining colony she once called home and to which she is sent after a botched raid puts her on the bad side of the powers that be. A dead physicist who just happens to be her cloned twin. A missing dataset that could change the interstellar balance of power and turn a cold war hot. And a mining “accident” that is starting to look more and more like murder...
Suddenly Li is chasing a killer in an alien world miles underground where everyone has a secret. And one wrong turn in streamspace, one misstep in the dark alleys of blackmarket tech and interstellar espionage, one risky hookup with an AI could literally blow her mind.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSpectra
- Publication dateSeptember 30, 2003
- File size953 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Major Catherine Li is a veteran United Nations Peacekeeper in a future of world-nations. Humanity has spread across interstellar space by "jumping": teleportation enabled by quantum physics and a bizarre crystal found only on Compson's World. The jumps destroy memory, so jumpers back up their memories on computer. Despite this precaution, frequent jumpers still lose some memories, a fact that poses a far greater problem for Catherine Li than it does for other Peacekeepers. For Li has a dangerous, potentially deadly secret: she's an illegal clone.
When a UN mission goes awry, Li finds herself shipped on solo duty to Compson's World--her home world, to which she'd vowed never to return. Her mission initially seems simple: to determine if the death of brilliant physicist Hannah Sharifi was a crystal-mining accident or cold-blooded murder. Like Li, Sharifi is a clone--in fact, she's Li's genetic twin. Li swiftly finds herself enmeshed in the intertangled politics of the UN, the multiplanetary corporations, the miners, and the human-created Artificial Intelligences, who have enigmatic agendas of their own. --Cynthia Ward
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
—Nicola Griffith
"A spiky, detailed, convincing, compelling page-turner, and the science is good too. Chris Moriarty is a dangerous talent."
—Stephen Baxter
"Action, mystery and drama, set against some of the most plausible speculative physics I’ve seen."
—David Brin
"Highly atmospheric ... a hefty far-future exploration of AI, human cloning, class conflict and plain old-fashioned murder."
--Publishers Weekly
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
SPIN STATE
UN Peacekeeper Major Catherine Li has made thirty-seven faster-than-light jumps in her lifetime?and has probably forgotten more than most people remember. But that?s what backup hard drives are for. And Li should know; she?s been hacking her memory for fifteen years in order to pass as human. But no memory upgrade can prepare Li for what she finds on Compson?s World: a mining colony she once called home and to which she is sent after a botched raid puts her on the bad side of the powers that be. A dead physicist who just happens to be her cloned twin. A missing dataset that could change the interstellar balance of power and turn a cold war hot. And a mining ?accident? that is starting to look more and more like murder...
Suddenly Li is chasing a killer in an alien world miles underground where everyone has a secret. And one wrong turn in streamspace, one misstep in the dark alleys of blackmarket tech and interstellar espionage, one risky hookup with an AI could literally blow her mind.
From the Back Cover
—Nicola Griffith
"A spiky, detailed, convincing, compelling page-turner, and the science is good too. Chris Moriarty is a dangerous talent."
—Stephen Baxter
"Action, mystery and drama, set against some of the most plausible speculative physics I’ve seen."
—David Brin
"Highly atmospheric ... a hefty far-future exploration of AI, human cloning, class conflict and plain old-fashioned murder."
--Publishers Weekly
About the Author
From the Paperback edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not play at dice.
--Albert Einstein
God may not play at dice, but She certainly knows how to count cards.
--Hannah Sharifi
They cold-shipped her out, flash-frozen, body still bruised from last-minute upgrades.
Later she remembered only pieces of the raid. The touch of a hand. The crack of rifle fire. A face flashing bright as a fish's rise in dark water. And what she did remember she couldn't talk about, or the psychtechs would know she'd been hacking her own memory.
But that was later. After the court-martial. After jump fade and the rehab tanks had stolen it from her. Before that the memory was still crisp and clear and unedited. Still hers.
After all, she'd been there.
Li knew Metz was going to be big as soon as she met the liaison officer TechComm sent out to brief her squad. Twenty minutes after Captain C. Xavier Soza, UNSC, hit planet surface he'd gone into anaphylactic shock, and she was signing him into the on-base ER and querying her oracle for his next-of-kin list.
Allergies went with the uniform, of course. Terraforming was just a benign form of biological warfare; anyone who had to eat, breathe, or move in the Trusteeships got caught in the crossfire sometime. Still, no normal posthuman was that fragile. This time TechComm had sent out a genuine unadapted Ring-bred human. And clever young humans didn't get cold-shipped to the Periphery, didn't risk decoherence and respiratory failure unless they'd been sent out to do something that counted. Something the brass wouldn't trust to the AIs and colonials.
Soza spent thirty hours in the tanks before he recovered enough to give them their briefing. He seemed alert when he finally showed up, but he was still short of breath, and he had the worst case of hives Li had ever seen.
"Major," he said. "Sorry you had to deal with that little crisis. Not how I imagined my first meeting with the hero of Gilead."
Li flinched. Was she never going to enter a room without her reputation walking two steps in front of her?
"Forget it," she said. "Happens to the best of us."
"Not to you."
She searched Soza's handsome, unmistakably human face for an insult. She found none; in fact his eyes dropped so quickly under her stare that she suspected he'd let the words slip out without thinking how they sounded. She glanced at her squad, settling into chairs proportioned for humans, behind desks designed for humans, and she felt the usual twist of relief, shame, envy. It was pure accident, after all, that her ancestors had boarded a corporate ship and paid for their passage with blood and tissue instead of credit. Pure accident that had subjected her geneset to anything more than the chance mutations of radiation exposure and terraforming fallout. Pure accident that made her an outsider even among posthumans.
"No," she told Soza finally. "Not to me."
Slip of the tongue or no, Soza was all smooth, cultured confidence when he stood up to give the briefing. His uniform hung the way only real wool could, and he spoke in smooth diplomatic Spanish that even the two newest enlisted men could follow without accessing hard memory. The very picture of a proper UN Peacekeeper.
"The target is located below a beet-processing plant," he told them, "hiding in its heat signature." He subvocalized, and a streamspace schematic of the target folded into realspace like a spiny asymmetrical flower. "There are five underground labs, each one of them a small-run virufacture facility. The system is deadwalled. No spinstream ports, no VR grid, not even dial-in access. The only way to break it is to shunt the cracker in on a human operative."
Soza nodded toward Kolodny, who straightened out of her habitual slouch and grinned wolfishly. There was a new scar along the rake of Kolodny's cheekbone. Fresh, but not so fresh that Li shouldn't remember it. She searched her active files, came up empty. Ran a parity check. Nothing. Christ, she thought, feeling queasy, how much is missing this time?
She was going to have to get someone to put a patch on her start-up files. Someone who could keep a secret. Before she forgot more than she could afford to forget.
"The rest of you will get the cracking team past the deadwall," Soza was saying, "and collect biosamples while the AI goes fishing. We're after whatever you can get on this raid. Source code, hardware, wetware. Especially wetware. Once the AI has the target code on cube, he wipes his tracks, and you withdraw. Hopefully without being detected."
"Which AI are we using?" Li asked.
But before Soza could answer, Cohen walked in.
Cohen wasn't his real name, of course. Still, he'd been calling himself that for so long that few people even remembered his Toffoli number. Today's interface wasn't one Li had seen before, but she knew it was Cohen on shunt before he closed the door behind him. He wore a silk suit the color of fall leaves--real silk, not tank-grown stuff--and he moved with the smooth, spare grace of a multiplanetary network shunting through cutting-edge wetware. And there was the ironic smile, the hint of laughter behind the shunt's long-lashed eyes, the faint but ever-present suggestion that whatever he was talking to you about couldn't possibly be as important as the countless other pies he had his fingers in.
As usual, he'd appeared at exactly the right moment, but with no apparent idea what he was doing there. "Hallo?" he said, blinking vaguely. "Oh. Right. The briefing. Did I miss anything?"
"Not yet," Soza answered. "Glad you could make it." He spoke French to Cohen, and Li glanced between the two men, wondering how they knew each other--and how well they knew each other--in the privileged world Ring-siders called normal life.
Cohen caught her looking at him, smiled, took a half step toward the empty place next to her. She turned away. He took a seat in the back. He leaned over and whispered something in Kolodny's ear as he sat down, and she smothered a laugh.
"We interfering with your social life, Cohen?" Li asked. "Like us to take the briefing elsewhere?"
"Sorry," Kolodny muttered.
Cohen just raised an eyebrow. As he did, a thin, dark-haired schoolboy trotted into Li's frontbrain, dribbling a soccer ball. He pantomimed an elaborate apology, then bounced the ball off the toe of one cleated foot, tucked it under his arm, and loped off toward a point behind her right ear. The cleats tickled; she had to resist the urge to reach up and rub her forehead.
she told Cohen.
Metz's Bose-Einstein relay was sulking today. A rapid-fire barrage of status messages flashed across Li's peripheral vision telling her that the relay station was establishing entanglement, acquiring a spinfoam channel, spincasting, matching spinbits to e-bits, running a Sharifi transform, correcting nontrivial spin deviations and dispatching the replicated datastream to whatever distant segments of Cohen's network were monitoring this briefing.
Before the first Bose-Einstein strike on Compson's World--before the first primitive entanglement banks and relay stations, before Hannah Sharifi and Coherence Theory--a message from Metz to Earth would have taken almost three days in transit along a narrow and noisy noninteractive channel. Now Bose-Einstein arrays sent entangled data shooting through the spinfoam's short-lived quantum mechanical wormholes quickly enough to link the whole of UN space into the vivid, evolving, emergent universe of the spinstream.
Except today, apparently.
Li asked.
Cohen answered before she'd finished the thought.
Soza had turned back to the VR display and was explaining the logistics of the raid. If things went as planned, Cohen would shunt through Kolodny and retrieve the target code. The rest of Li's squad had only two jobs: get the AI in and out and collect biosamples while he cracked on-line security. It sounded little different than the two dozen other tech raids Li had commanded, and she thought impatiently that Soza could have briefed them more efficiently by dumping the data into the squad's shared hard memory. She sat through about five more minutes before interrupting him with the obvious but still-unanswered question.
"So what are we looking for?"
"Ma'am," Soza said. He hesitated, and Li saw a flicker of self-doubt behind his eyes. She thought back to her first command, remembered the panic of wondering if she could give orders to seasoned combat veterans and make them stick. She'd been different, though. She'd led Peacekeepers in combat against Syndicate ground troops long before her first official command. Hell, she'd held a wartime field commission for three years before her CO would recommend a quarter-bred genetic for officers' candidate school. "Our reports--" Soza cleared his throat and continued. "Our reports indicate that the facility is producing products on the Controlled Technology List."
Someone--Dalloway, Li thought--snickered.
"That's not too helpful," Li said. "Last time I saw the CTL it ran to a few thousand pages. We go in with that, we're going to be confiscating wristwatches and toenail clippers."
"We also have strong evidence the parent corporation is Syndicate-fr...
Product details
- ASIN : B000RH0E7K
- Publisher : Spectra (September 30, 2003)
- Publication date : September 30, 2003
- Language : English
- File size : 953 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 642 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,076,056 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,243 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #2,437 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #5,197 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Chris Moriarty](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41RB2Utk4QL._SY600_.jpg)
Author of SPIN STATE, SPIN CONTROL, GHOST SPIN, and THE INQUISITOR'S APPRENTICE. Winner of the 2006 Philip K. Dick Award. Book reviewer for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Owner of the most patient dog in the multiverse.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book to be readable and enjoyable, with excellent characters. They also appreciate the great plot and worldbuilding, blending futuristic concepts and technology into a world readers can understand. However, some find the middle sags and the pace slow going.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book enjoyable, deep, and difficult to read. They also appreciate the interesting twists and turns, and beautiful language. Readers also mention that the author is talented but a bit too sanctimonious at times.
"...with far-future science, an elaborate (future) history, and an exciting action story...." Read more
"...But it's fascinating enough in its way, and you'll probably want to see how the story ends--although when you do, maybe you'll be more exhausted..." Read more
"...The ending picks up again thank god and the last 80-100 pages are pretty good..." Read more
"...And then it gets complicated.Great fun, and there's a sequel coming out late 2005 called "Spin Control"" Read more
Customers find the characters in the book excellent, fully formed, and fully realized.
"...I particularly enjoyed the depth of the main character and the emotional demons she wrestled with; this is the kind of human drama that is a..." Read more
"...this one really delivers, while also having a real plot, character development and action in perfect combination." Read more
"The story starts out well with a good strong female lead character and with post-human touches such as illegal genetic engineering, shadowy AIs up..." Read more
"...None of the characters are very likeable (save for the AI, who's given the best lines), and it doesn't make a great deal of sense if you think about..." Read more
Customers find the plot of the book great, superb, and terrific. They also describe it as a sci-fi book, great first novel in the series, and a post-human cyber thriller.
"...sci-fi about strange minds, this one really delivers, while also having a real plot, character development and action in perfect combination." Read more
"The story starts out well with a good strong female lead character and with post-human touches such as illegal genetic engineering, shadowy AIs up..." Read more
"...But the best thing is that all the great storytelling is backed up by substance: the characters are as real as people you know, and the..." Read more
"...especially the emergent AI Cohen, are well drawn and the plot is intriguing, I found author Chris Moriarty lacking in her explanations of the..." Read more
Customers find the book's worldbuilding believable and deep. They also say the author blends futuristic concepts and technology into a world readers can understand. Readers also mention that science is interesting but dull if it's not made relevant to the world we live in.
"...He has combined good character development with far-future science, an elaborate (future) history, and an exciting action story...." Read more
"...The characters, the ideas are all so good...." Read more
"...(she can do good love scenes, good fight scenes, good AI mind-melds, and post-human cybernetic enhancements are good too)...." Read more
"...What interests me most is both science and ideas. Science is interesting but dull if it is not made relevant to the world we live in or may do so..." Read more
Customers find the plot pace of the book slow going.
"...Unfortunately the middle sags quite a bit, slow going, I almost gave up with little happening and lots of minor and confusing characters being..." Read more
"...to keep to pace, the book backs away from its potential, dragging on far too long before concluding in a rather predictable and unsatisfying..." Read more
"...I personally didn't find the plot all that convoluted, just slow to develop...." Read more
"This is a great first novel, has a few slow spots, but I'm sure her next will be even better." Read more
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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Moriarty creates a believable and deep world the way masters like Herbert and Tolkien have. He has combined good character development with far-future science, an elaborate (future) history, and an exciting action story. I particularly enjoyed the depth of the main character and the emotional demons she wrestled with; this is the kind of human drama that is a standard of regular fiction but almost always absent from science-fiction.
Reading the other reviews here, there seem to be a lot of complaints that the science doesn't work or that the story leaves some gaps. There is some truth to these comments. All I can say is that story kept me going and I never once said to myself: "Well that's just dumb", "Oh that would never work" or "cliché!" There were some parts that I found hard to follow but after all, this is science-FICTION - a good writer leaves much to the imagination. On the other hand, the end of the novel contains a reading list of quantum physics material that makes me feel there is more science here than most books.
The only bad thing I can say about this book is that there isn't a sequel!
But that hardly matters. At its cold heart, this is just another noirish hardboiled detective story, one set a few centuries into the future, to which the author's added some genetic engineering, quantum physics (instant travel!), some computer science (yes there are AI's), and an apparently excellent knowledge of coal mining. And then she throws in a Maguffin: all of known space--here consisting of UN and "syndicate" territory--needs the "Bose Einstein Condensate" crystals that can be found, of course, of course, only on one planet.
And on that planet a nuclear physicist has been murdered, and of all things, her clone, Catherine Li, is sent to this planet (zounds! her native planet) in order to solve the crime.
Of course, as is customary in Noir World, everybody knows more about the case than Li does. And of course, she perseveres against overwhelming odds in her quest for the truth as the body count piles up behind her.
None of the characters are very likeable (save for the AI, who's given the best lines), and it doesn't make a great deal of sense if you think about it for very long. But it's fascinating enough in its way, and you'll probably want to see how the story ends--although when you do, maybe you'll be more exhausted than elated, and ready for a drink or two.
The characters, the ideas are all so good. If you like sci-fi about strange minds, this one really delivers, while also having a real plot, character development and action in perfect combination.
One of my major problems with the story is that the quantum teleportation/FTL communication systems used by the civilization is never really explained, terms like Bose-Einstein condensate, spin stream and slow time are thrown about but never detailed. We are expected to swallow the idea that Bose-Einstein condenstates exist naturally in some crystalline form buried in a coal mine on a distant planet, where they are mined by normal (and some biologically enhanced) humans hundreds of years from now, in a fashion very similar to a 19th or 20th century coal mine. Full of pissed off Irish miners and very 19th/20th century management vs the workers politics. Black lung disease and Davey lamps yet! Yeah sure, and I'll bet there's a colony world nearby with knights on horseback armed with laser rifles and laptops...
No justification is provided for the existance of B-E condensates in a coal mine at high temperatures, it's just assumed for the sake of having a vital, finite resource for the U.N. humans and the mysterious "Syndicate" to fight over. How B-E condensates are related to the (hinted at but never really described) quantum teleportation technology the civilization uses is never explained either. "The science is good too" according to Stephen Baxter's blurb on the back-cover - no it isn't, it's almost non-existent.
At one point a relative of the murdered physicist takes off in some sort of (apparently) slower-than-normal starship that cannot be intercepted until it arrives at its destination because it's in "slow time", but what exactly this means is never explained. It's going to arrive at its destination in a couple of weeks planet-time so it's not slow-time as in relativistic time dialation, so what the heck is it? We never find out.
The AI and cyborg stuff is much better done and the AI Cohen comes across as the most likable character by far. Heroine Major Catherine Li is brave, strong, blood-thirsty at times but emotionally a mess, and hard to feel much sympathy for by the end I'm afraid.
Overall this book is like the Curate's egg--good in parts. But the author really should study taut, S.F. page-turners like Richard Morgan's ALTERED CARBON, a really stunning first novel. Still, I think there's hope for future work, she's got a good style and if she can get the kinks worked out the next novel might be much better. The potential is certainly there.
P.S. All that research in quantum physics and quantum information theory, etc. listed at the end of the book and virtually none of it ends up in the story, aside from some throwaway terminology! Just tragic.
Top reviews from other countries
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![](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
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![](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/16cf21ab-42de-4c6f-97c7-3694cef4e273._CR0,0,467,467_SX48_.jpg)
The author intertwined quantum physics and a taut story with sharp characters without big scientific monologues (like Stephen Baxter). This leads to a faszinating action filled story with deep livid characters in an even deep pit and a lot of open questions, wich are only particulary answered at the end.
For a debut, this is a real page turner and gets my full recommendation.