boocia's Reviews > Spin Control

wow this book was meeesssssyyyy

it got increasingly problematic and distracting that the setting is that it's like 2400 and palestine and israel are at war (again, after 200 years of peace), and depicting palestine as sort of in an equivalent and symmetric actor to israel in this war. chris moriarty is jewish, and i have no idea what her politics are really, but what i got from this book was that sort of insipid apathy or two-side-ism that itself sort of takes sides, right? at one point a character remarks something like "nobody knows why these wars start up again". so clearly a book that wouldn't touch on the settler colonialism aspect with a ten foot pole, doesn't think of it that way. and the book is primarily about both israeli and palestinian spies and soldiers and spymasters who are kind of the same flavor of bad and good and conniving, just on opposite sides, no super clear political motivations about the war they are embroiled in, no opinions on ppl from 'the other side', this political situation is just happening to them. i think it was especially grating with Gavi, who is half-Palestinian and half-Israeli (which feels like one of those eye-rolling as-fate-would-have-it liberal parable set ups), but whose nationality is Israeli, and who married a Palestinian woman ... and had a son with Palestinian citizenship ... and it's like ... why ... are you in the highest echelon's of the Mossad then ... bro ?? like political motivations-wise why is this happening? ultimately the most groan-worthy part was that the whole thing is resolved when Cohen 'wakes up' the emergent AI networks that have been powering both sides' flesh-and-bone-armies by?? downloading onto it a huge repository of testimonials from The Holocaust?? so the rogue AIs put a temporary stop to the war? which just feels like a wildly cheap thing to do with the Holocaust, some really mid-2000ts pulp. whew. lots to unpack there and i'm not gonna.

so obviously long dark shadow there. i think the other issue was this book felt like that thing where the author built really elaborate backstories and emotional patinas for all these characters in her notes, but only put in the emotional payoffs in the book itself, so they all seem shallow. for example, by the time the book starts it has already been 2 years since a disastrous spy mission ruined the israeli spy Gavi's career and broke his relationship with his squadmates and the AI Cohen. but we don't see it, not even as a flashback, and we don't get more than a few sentences about it from Cohen's perspective. It's clear that the squadmates and Cohen physically seeing Gavi again is supposed to be this huge emotional impact scene, but it doesn't hit right because the history isn't heavy enough for the reader. a lot of moments happen like this.

in general like in the previous book, the plots within plots were a bit too whirling and yanking the reader from scene to scene , or maybe i'm just stupid, so hard to follow there.

but what did fuck was the non-set-on-Earth stuff. the Syndicate research ship exploring an obviously terraformed, abandoned planet and all the inter-team tensions was just fun. this series i think is fun in the popcorn sense 85% of the time, and that really delivered here with all the inter-party tensions. was a little disappointed about depictions of Syndicate life, in that i feel like she took 'society made of just clones' and went flat-socialism-critique on it a little, borrowing cultural ideas like lots of committees and structured conversation time that reminded me of "struggle sessions" more than anything and fear of being deviant lest you get sent to a 're-norming center'. but i did like the bits of worldbuilding there, like that the older Syndicates have more 'human' values and the newer ones are like, "why don't we have a clone-based caste system? what's wrong with that?".

other worldbuilding was also cool; i liked the political tension between Earth and 'the Ring', literally a ring of technologically advanced humanity orbiting earth and enforcing a tech embargo on Earth for its own political benefit. i liked the consequences of infertility in the Earth human population and how that is itself a threat to the Syndicates, who need fresh genetic variation but don't want to implement it themselves, of course. i liked the detail about how much water Earth gets to keep vs the Ring gets to harvest is calculated on its population, and water is therefore heavily measured out.

so idk, this is problematic popcorn fiction with like fun scifi tropiness in it. i'll read the third one, it's like cozy and easy to read.