John's Reviews > Spin Control

This is pretty standard science fiction fare about the struggles among clones, humans, and artificial intelligence units. An ant-expert clone named Arkady comes to earth with a secret that he wants to trade for one of his mates. Lots of bad humans try to figure out what he's up to (he meets a few good ones along the way). A series of flashbacks describe Arkady's mission to explore a planet that inexplicably appears to have been terraformed even though no record exists of the procedure. Some sort of genetic "weapon" has been used and now the powers of earth want it for their own purposes.

Although Spin Control has its riveting moments and the science is at times interesting, the characters are lacking and the story is never close to gripping or suspenseful, even though I think it was intended to be. As I was reading it, I kept thinking that science fiction needs a jolt (I don't like the term paradigm shift, but I'll throw it out there anyway) that probably hasn't been seen since Neuromancer.