boocia's Reviews > Ghost Spin

hey 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.