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Michael Burnam-Fink's Reviews > Ghost Spin
Ghost Spin (Spin Trilogy, #3)
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Ghost Spin didn't quite stick the landing for me, which is a damn shame. The story starts promisingly enough with Cohen, the centuries old AI from the previous books, in the frontline navy planet of Crucible. His mission has been blown, and as the hunters come through the door, he puts a gun to his human host's head, and *bang*. Turns out even machines can die.
His fragments are everywhere in the datasphere, and if Catherine Li is smart enough and brave enough, she might be able to put them together and get her husband back, and finish Cohen's mission. The stakes are nothing less than the future of post-humanity.
Because the loss of Bose-Einstein condensates from Compton's World means that the UN's FTL system is falling apart, and humanity will die as outposts go dark all the way back into Sol. The best hope is the Drift, a strange region of space where FTL travel is still possible (or maybe it's parallel universe hopping-the math is clear, the implications impossible). Either way, the Drift is where everything matters, and UN ships of the line are duking it out with pirates with both human and Syndicate allegiances.
Llewellyn is a pirate captain, ex-Navy, former co of the USN Ada, Countess Lovelace. Piloting and fighting in the Drift requires the best AI available, and Llewellyn gets an upgrade that puts a ghost of Cohen inside his head. Llewellyn is being hunted by Astrid Avery, his former first officer and lover who betrayed him and now captains the Ada, along with the creepy people who killed Cohen in the opening.
There's a lot of intrigue and double-dealing, made even more confusing by the fact that there are two Li's after she scattercasts to Crucible. But the plot plays out mostly in Cohen's interrogation of Llewellyn's memory, a retrospective that offers few surprises since we already know where it winds up. The moment to moment writing is still solid, but the big picture stuff, especially what does it mean to survive as a human person in this universe doesn't quite hit.
His fragments are everywhere in the datasphere, and if Catherine Li is smart enough and brave enough, she might be able to put them together and get her husband back, and finish Cohen's mission. The stakes are nothing less than the future of post-humanity.
Because the loss of Bose-Einstein condensates from Compton's World means that the UN's FTL system is falling apart, and humanity will die as outposts go dark all the way back into Sol. The best hope is the Drift, a strange region of space where FTL travel is still possible (or maybe it's parallel universe hopping-the math is clear, the implications impossible). Either way, the Drift is where everything matters, and UN ships of the line are duking it out with pirates with both human and Syndicate allegiances.
Llewellyn is a pirate captain, ex-Navy, former co of the USN Ada, Countess Lovelace. Piloting and fighting in the Drift requires the best AI available, and Llewellyn gets an upgrade that puts a ghost of Cohen inside his head. Llewellyn is being hunted by Astrid Avery, his former first officer and lover who betrayed him and now captains the Ada, along with the creepy people who killed Cohen in the opening.
There's a lot of intrigue and double-dealing, made even more confusing by the fact that there are two Li's after she scattercasts to Crucible. But the plot plays out mostly in Cohen's interrogation of Llewellyn's memory, a retrospective that offers few surprises since we already know where it winds up. The moment to moment writing is still solid, but the big picture stuff, especially what does it mean to survive as a human person in this universe doesn't quite hit.
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