astaliegurec's Reviews > Spin Control

With some reservations, I enjoyed the first book (“Spin State”) in Chris Moriarty’s “Spin” series. But I’m not happy at all with her 2006 sequel, "Spin, Book 2: Spin Control.” I’ve got three major problems:

- The first can be boiled down to the same major issue I had with the first book: she sets up a society and its technologies, then utterly ignores them to use some ridiculous setting as the backdrop for the whole thing. In this book, we’ve got two such settings. On the UN side, Earth has theoretically been abandoned for generations because of environmental damage except for a few people hunkering down and fighting in gas masks in frozen cellars (according to the first book). Well, the locale for this part of the book is on Earth in Israel (where the Israeli/Palestinian thing is still going on). At one point, the characters are sitting in what amounts to a sidewalk internet cafe drinking coffee and talking. And, the internet bit is important since Cohen the AI is there somehow stealing enough bandwidth to function (and from the first book, that’s about as much bandwidth as a major corporation needs). Remember, Earth has been abandoned as being uninhabitable. On the Syndicate side, the setting is a terraforming project on some planet. From the previous book, we know the Syndicate’s culture is based on a complete population of designed clones who are culled during development if they don’t meet technical and social standards. They know and have their “Place.” Yet, this whole portion of the book is turned into some kind of soap opera because one of the clones is both technically and socially incompetent. The whole point of the Syndicate is to remove the grit from the gears of society. Yet, we’ve got a clone who’s an entire truckload of gravel sitting here gumming up the works. It’s ridiculous.

- Next is the environmental issue. In the first book, it was just mentioned as a given and Moriarty moved on. In this one, she harps on it continually with lectures to us specifically and mostly blaming America for destroying the Earth with our Eeeeeevil consumer culture. Of course, like all such people, she doesn’t have a solution that would allow 8 billion people to live here without affecting things. She’s “solved” the problem in this book by miraculously moving almost all 8 billion people off the Earth into a series of habitats in orbit (the Ring). She describes nothing that would provide enough energy or materials (i.e., ships) to lift those people into orbit, enough resources to build the habitats (and those should number in the 10s, if not 100s of millions of habitats), or enough of anything to provide those 8 billion (now 18 billion) people with food, water, oxygen, energy, materials, industry, entertainment, etc. to actually live there. And, that’s not even mentioning what’s required for protection from solar radiation and cosmic rays.

- And finally, this story doesn’t even feel like science fiction. On the one hand, it feels like some kind of cold war spy thriller. On the other, some kind of soap opera.

So, no. I’m not happy. And, at the 25% point, I’m giving up and rating the book at a Not Very Good 2 stars out of 5.