Ryan Viergutz's Reviews > Ghost Spin

Well, I have at last finished Ghost Spin, a book I've probably waited the longest to read of anything I've read possibly evar.

It's also one of the few books that I've read within months of its publication.

That said, Ghost Spin is a thoroughly complicated, complex and difficult to describe book. Like in its two precursors, there's a lot of quantum mechanic referencing and parallel universe examination in here that I didn't completely comprehend. I'm going to be toying with what all of it meant for a while and what was actually going on.

The basic plot isn't too hard to grasp. The ancient Emergent AI Hyacinthe Cohen commits suicide (in the first chapter!) and his lover (on a very deep level) Catherine Li tries to put the pieces back together.She isn't the only one after him: a pirate captain named Llewellyn, the hard-as-nails commissioned captain Astrid Avery, the psychotic, ruthless AI hunter Holmes, the corporate-controlled Syndicates and possibly the spymaster Helen Nguyen want to find him, too.

The stakes are centered around the Drift, a section of space that exists right between the human-led UN and the Syndicates. It's pretty mysterious (so much that I can't remember what it all amounts to) and the Datatraps, huge, alien devices that exist in a whole TON of different universes at the same time. Yeah, you got that.

All of this ends up actually coming together, believe it or not, and it even largely works as a conclusion to the trilogy as a whole. I have the impression Chris had a challenging time trying to juggle all of the parts of the plot, and that she has a LOT more planned for further books, if not in the same series than the setting.

I definitely can't wait for more. Like the best large-scale science fiction Ghost Spin feels like there's an overwhelmingly massive universe around it, and trying to fill in those gaps will keep my imagination going for just as long as the first two books.