Nicholas Whyte's Reviews > Spin Control

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2007/04/the_2007_philip.shtml[return][return]This is a future spy story, a loose sequel to Moriarty's earlier Spin Control; its setting alternates between an unsuccessful research mission by a crew of cloned scientists to the planet Novalis, and the process of selling the secret they discover to the highest bidder in a 26th-century Jerusalem. The two settings are truly memorable, the alien planet - which, as it turns out, is not quite alien enough - with the crew of clones from the space-based Syndicates, struggling with their professional and personal tensions, balanced well against the convincing sordidness of the dying earth with mutual paranoia of Israeli and Palestinian security services, each (rightly) convinced that they have traitors within their own ranks. There are some gems of description and characterisation along the way; this was the only book on the short-list where I found myself reading the best lines out loud to my wife.[return][return]However, the huge amount of technical vocabulary supporting the book's themes of biology and artificial intelligence got very distracting after a while, especially since the plot of potential betrayal and counter-betrayal is already fairly heavy going. In addition, I have to wonder if a far future Middle East will be as similar to today's Jerusalem as Moriarty depicts it here; consider how much the region, unlike some, has changed since the sixteenth century, and then add centuries of peaceful coexistence to come between the Israeli and Palestinian states, followed by a sudden return to conflict. If we take the Middle East of Spin Control as an ironic reflection on today's situation, then it is indeed a thought-provoking exercise, but one that comes at the expense of the credibility of the rest of the future universe as extrapolation rather than parable.