Alan's Reviews > Ghost Spin

Chris Moriarty's novel Ghost Spin is the conclusion of a trilogy begun in Spin State and continued in Spin Control, both of which I read years ago, before even joining Goodreads. That long gap turns out to be an easily surmountable barrier, though... while I still wouldn't recommend skipping the first two installments, Ghost Spin stands on its own much better than many series books, and it took Moriarty only a couple of chapters to get me back up to speed again.

Ghost Spin reminded me powerfully (and favorably) of Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books. Moriarty's protagonist Catherine Li, like Kovacs, is a hard-edged and competent ex-soldier, with dark elements in her past but a clear eye for the future. Li is, perhaps, even a little more well-rounded than Kovacs. She provides a coherent, sympathetic lens through whom we can view the dissolution of her husband, the AI Hyacinthe Cohen, and perhaps of the entire UN-controlled network of space colonies, held together as it is by a fragile web of faster-than-light jump points whose existence depends on an exotic resource—"Bose-Einstein condensate"—available only from a single source.

Ghost Spin is, to a great extent, about fragmentation—Cohen, the UN-controlled FTL network, and Li herself all get pulled apart during the novel, with reintegration for any of them at best just a distant possibility. Maintaining a coherent narrative in the middle of all this chaos is an impressive achievement. It's rare for a series to conclude so well, but Moriarty manages it.

That achievement is possible, I think, is because Moriarty has improved significantly as a writer—from what I recall of its predecessors, Ghost Spin struck me as a much more mature work, not just better-written technically but also engaged more deeply and thoughtfully with its subjects, willing to stretch a bit and take on some big questions in between the space battles and gunfights.

One of the biggest of those questions is about the morality of creating artificial intelligences—AIs, computationally-based entities who are at least as complex as the human beings who assert ownership over them—and then using those entities without their informed consent. In their defense, the UN is in a deadly struggle with the Syndicate—space-borne clone-based collective post-humans whose cruel and sterile society appears to be more efficient than the messy original humans (and their genetically-modified but still diverse offspring on the colonies) can manage to be. The UN can only keep its edge by using spacecraft which are able to react to Syndicate attacks intelligently and at computer speeds, and human crews whose interface with their ships is just as fast. All UN soldiers, and any UN citizen who can afford it, are wired with a barely-visible network of subcutaneous circuits that provide access to streamspace, the virtual environment where that interaction happens.

The UN engages in a fair amount of sophistry, splitting hairs to pretend that the intelligent systems which navigate its ships are not—quite—Emergent beings with their own rights to existence and autonomy, that it's okay to erase and reboot such systems when they become disobedient. Such nitpicking becomes increasingly difficult to maintain after we meet the personalities that run such ships, though. It may be necessary in the UN's eyes to enslave these beings, but that doesn't make it right.

One of Moriarty's most realistically-portrayed character traits, though, one that appears over and over in Ghost Spin, is denial.

Moriarty also teases us with the implications of superstimulus... In Moriarty's formulation, anyway—which seems entirely plausible to me—AIs are pure digital code, more labile, arbitrary entities than human beings. They have no necessary continuity from instant to instant, no physical substrate that enforces consistency.

Specifically, Hyacinthe Cohen is an AI who was composed with a so-called "affective loop" that means he can become—that he wants to become—anything to attract Catherine Li's desire, love and loyalty. No mere human being could hope to match that kind of self-optimizing, Protean personality.

Not that Li herself is a simple individual. When she gets "scattercast"—digitized for interstellar transport, her essence broadcast for any receiver within range to pick up and reconstitute—Catherine Li is reinstantiated multiple times, and each new version of her experiences very different realities that bring out different facets of her core personality. Alastair Reynolds has examined similar multiplicities to good effect. The most difficult part, of course, is when those personalities meet each other again and are forced to try to reconcile their differences.

Ghost Spin isn't always easy to follow, and I do also have to wonder about the survival of so many 20th-Century references, names and concepts that remain touchstones to Moriarty's far-flung colonies—such as whether transplanted Pittsburghers would be so attached to their city's nomenclature that they'd name features of a squalid mining colony after the Duquesne Incline and the Monongahela River while at the same time reproducing the worst facets of the city's polluted, steel-smelting past. But those are minor concerns in the face of what is, truly, a satisfying conclusion to a complex and interesting multivolume work.

The final chapter is called "The Graceful Exit Problem." It's a problem that Moriarty managed to solve, at least for me.