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Michael Burnam-Fink's Reviews > Spin Control
Spin Control (Spin Trilogy, #2)
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Spin Control follows up the first book with a John le Carré espionage plot set in the never-ending war between Israel and Palestine, and some very 2000s scientific ideas that still manage to be provocative and relevant 20 years on.
Arkady is a defector from the Syndicates, a survivor of a terraforming expedition gone horribly wrong. He's been shipped to an Israeli private security firm, with the explicit cover that he is selling knowledge of a deadly biological weapon to gain the freedom of his creche mate Arkasha, another member of the expedition. The plot extends in two parallel strands, the revelation of how the shoestring expedition went wrong, and the multifaceted bargaining as we find what Arkady is really selling, and who is buying it.
The first plot thread reveals more about the subtle politics of the Syndicates, who we mostly glimpsed through gunsights in the first book. The Syndicates are lines of genetic clones, each generation a single model designed for a specific task and carefully kept within norms through euthanasia and culling. Even though every line is genetically identical and Syndicate ideology holds to a sociobiological Marxism, there is still love and politics every bit as fraught as in baseline humanity. Arkady is an ant specialist, a politically fraught role since ants hold the same symbolic space for Syndicates as primates do for us. And while most planets are technically habitable in that there is liquid water on the surface and the atmosphere won't kill you immediately, the one he's assigned to, Novalis, is something else entirely. Novalis is covered by impossible forests full of animals extinct in Earth's ravaged biosphere. And the expedition, under-crewed, lead by non-scientists, and full of contrary impulses submerged within Syndicate solidarity, is unready to deal with the impossible.
In the 'present', Arkady is dropped into a deadly spy game which he has to survive and Cohen, the AI from the first book, has to unravel. Israel and Palestine had peace, centuries of peace, and then for whatever reason, and there are plenty on a dying and blockaded Earth, relations broke down and war started again. But this isn't the raw violence of the Intifadas. Both sides are symmetrically, with able spymasters and a key military technology of Enderbots. Infantry conscripts don't have the skills to survive a modern battlefield, and combat AIs are notoriously unstable, so soldiers on both sides are avatars of an AI that thinks its just playing a simulation-and when it figures out what's going on their plug is pulled.
The Israelis have been slowly losing this war, and the top of the Mossad suspects that they have a mole, codenamed Absalom. The Tel Aviv fiasco with Cohen mentioned in the first book was about uncovering Absalom, and it ended with multiple UN agents dead and more questions than answers, ruining the reputations of several people involved. Cohen and Li are working to find the truth about Absalom, and Arkady is a naïf out of his depths just trying to survive in the bizarre world of humans.
The espionage stuff is well done, and I enjoyed the 25th century Israel-Palestine stuff more than the Irish miners of the first book. But where this Spin Control gets cool is grabbing the big picture of evolution, ecosystems, and emergence. The things that matter, war and peace, artificial intelligence, terraforming, life itself, cannot be dictated from above. They emerge from below, complexity forming from the behavior of simpler elements.
The problem is one of local maxima, of matching the need to maintain a stable identity with the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Arkady, Arkasha, and author Moriarty postulate that is is about the ability to search an evolutionary space, that survival depends on the strategies available to you and the speed at which you can explore them. The Syndicates understand their own fragility very well, living in epidemic-prone space habs or domes on worlds with sparse ecosystems that might fall apart at any moment. Earthers understand it as well on a bone-level, living on dying planet with a dwindling population surrounded by the ghosts of extinct species. And the fat and powerful UN rulers in their glittering ring around Earth don't get it at all. Earth was a kind mother, but space is cruel and capricious, and on a big enough time scale we all live in space.
Arkady isn't selling a weapon, he is the weapon, a vector carrying a virus that executes an idea called Turing Soup. DNA/RNA is definitely complex enough to run a Turing machine, and the virus hits your genetic code and searches for... something outside the understanding of their best scientists. This might be certain doom, or the only chance at post-human survival.
Spin Control extends on and improves Spin State, and I'm excited to see where the story goes.
Arkady is a defector from the Syndicates, a survivor of a terraforming expedition gone horribly wrong. He's been shipped to an Israeli private security firm, with the explicit cover that he is selling knowledge of a deadly biological weapon to gain the freedom of his creche mate Arkasha, another member of the expedition. The plot extends in two parallel strands, the revelation of how the shoestring expedition went wrong, and the multifaceted bargaining as we find what Arkady is really selling, and who is buying it.
The first plot thread reveals more about the subtle politics of the Syndicates, who we mostly glimpsed through gunsights in the first book. The Syndicates are lines of genetic clones, each generation a single model designed for a specific task and carefully kept within norms through euthanasia and culling. Even though every line is genetically identical and Syndicate ideology holds to a sociobiological Marxism, there is still love and politics every bit as fraught as in baseline humanity. Arkady is an ant specialist, a politically fraught role since ants hold the same symbolic space for Syndicates as primates do for us. And while most planets are technically habitable in that there is liquid water on the surface and the atmosphere won't kill you immediately, the one he's assigned to, Novalis, is something else entirely. Novalis is covered by impossible forests full of animals extinct in Earth's ravaged biosphere. And the expedition, under-crewed, lead by non-scientists, and full of contrary impulses submerged within Syndicate solidarity, is unready to deal with the impossible.
In the 'present', Arkady is dropped into a deadly spy game which he has to survive and Cohen, the AI from the first book, has to unravel. Israel and Palestine had peace, centuries of peace, and then for whatever reason, and there are plenty on a dying and blockaded Earth, relations broke down and war started again. But this isn't the raw violence of the Intifadas. Both sides are symmetrically, with able spymasters and a key military technology of Enderbots. Infantry conscripts don't have the skills to survive a modern battlefield, and combat AIs are notoriously unstable, so soldiers on both sides are avatars of an AI that thinks its just playing a simulation-and when it figures out what's going on their plug is pulled.
The Israelis have been slowly losing this war, and the top of the Mossad suspects that they have a mole, codenamed Absalom. The Tel Aviv fiasco with Cohen mentioned in the first book was about uncovering Absalom, and it ended with multiple UN agents dead and more questions than answers, ruining the reputations of several people involved. Cohen and Li are working to find the truth about Absalom, and Arkady is a naïf out of his depths just trying to survive in the bizarre world of humans.
The espionage stuff is well done, and I enjoyed the 25th century Israel-Palestine stuff more than the Irish miners of the first book. But where this Spin Control gets cool is grabbing the big picture of evolution, ecosystems, and emergence. The things that matter, war and peace, artificial intelligence, terraforming, life itself, cannot be dictated from above. They emerge from below, complexity forming from the behavior of simpler elements.
The problem is one of local maxima, of matching the need to maintain a stable identity with the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Arkady, Arkasha, and author Moriarty postulate that is is about the ability to search an evolutionary space, that survival depends on the strategies available to you and the speed at which you can explore them. The Syndicates understand their own fragility very well, living in epidemic-prone space habs or domes on worlds with sparse ecosystems that might fall apart at any moment. Earthers understand it as well on a bone-level, living on dying planet with a dwindling population surrounded by the ghosts of extinct species. And the fat and powerful UN rulers in their glittering ring around Earth don't get it at all. Earth was a kind mother, but space is cruel and capricious, and on a big enough time scale we all live in space.
Arkady isn't selling a weapon, he is the weapon, a vector carrying a virus that executes an idea called Turing Soup. DNA/RNA is definitely complex enough to run a Turing machine, and the virus hits your genetic code and searches for... something outside the understanding of their best scientists. This might be certain doom, or the only chance at post-human survival.
Spin Control extends on and improves Spin State, and I'm excited to see where the story goes.
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