springsnotfail's Reviews > Ghost Spin

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.