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If you were wondering if Chris Moriarty is Jewish, this book definitely answers that question. Plus we get to find out what happened in Tel Aviv (kinda).
3.5 StarsLike the first, this one had slick, smooth writing with a plethora of great futurism world-building with some interesting characters that ended up way too convoluted for it's own good.Reduce the character count, trim the book by about 200 pages, and make the story more focused and I think you could have had something really special here.As it is, it reads like an incredibly talented writer did a whole bunch of research and wanted to show everybody her hard work. Sometimes you need to kn...
Actual story was not as good as the first book, but I still love the characters, especially Cohen. The story took almost exclusively took part in Israel on Earth. A spy story that just as easily could have taken place in the 1970s in a non sci-fi book. Still the writing was good.
Catherine Li and Cohen are back in action and as entertaining as ever.
Not since mid to late 1980s William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have I read a book that's nearly as well written and as grandiose in scope with regards to the potential impact that a computer-based technological future may have on humanity. With "Spin Control" Chris Moriarty has written what can be described as the finest post-cyberpunk space opera novel ever written, effortlessly capturing the gritty realism of William Gibson's street-wise "Sprawl" short stories and "Cyberspace" trilogy ("Neuroma...
I read Spin State years ago and had vague memories of a fairly interesting take on AI but not much else, so I picked up this follow up when I saw it at a used book sale. It does continue the exploration of the intriguing AI concept, as well as extending (or introducing?) the idea of Syndicates of genetically engineered people, created in series and deployed in pairs. There is also the terraforming plot line presented in flashback, which adds another potentially interesting angle.However, Moriart...
You can tell a book is ambitious when it takes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and this book is at least as smart as it is ambitious. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one of the threads in the story, but I think it is done justice. In the future, the Strip is irradiated, and the battles are fought on both sides by soldiers piloted by AIs who think they are war-gaming, rebooted whenever they begin to suspect the war has a human cost. (The soldiers are colloquially referred to as 'End...
I liked this book without really understanding what was going on. Like most books in the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, the concepts usually lose me. I guess I just don’t have the mind for them. It’s kind of like being a luddite while working in the computer industry, which I am, and in which I do. Still, I really liked reading this book. The prose was terrific. It was very readable. My problem though was that the author threw around a ton of jargon that I only partially comprehended. Th...
I would never have thought that a story could be spun out of a wild mix of the Arab-Israeli conflict, ants, AIs, clones, water, fertility and space exploration, plus love, loyalty, and more. It kept my interest throughout each switch in perspective or timeframe, and kept my curiosity high to see how each aspect would play out and fit together. Every scene felt vivid and real, from atmosphere or emotion, without being cumbersome or overdone.I saw somewhere that Moriarty was contracted for a third...
Very different from the first book. Ideas remain fascinating. Perhaps more improvement will come with a third book.
wow this book was meeesssssyyyyit got increasingly problematic and distracting that the setting is that it's like 2400 and palestine and israel are at war (again, after 200 years of peace), and depicting palestine as sort of in an equivalent and symmetric actor to israel in this war. chris moriarty is jewish, and i have no idea what her politics are really, but what i got from this book was that sort of insipid apathy or two-side-ism that itself sort of takes sides, right? at one point a charact...
Overall this was a pretty good book! I really enjoyed the world building and found the specific science tidbits regarding the main characters respective interest of ants and genetics really interesting. That said there were some plot points that kind of took me out of the story. I have a hard time believing that despite humanity resettling across the solar belt the Israel-Palestine conflict is still very much happening (but maybe that's just cause it bums me out?). ALSO if you can terra-form how...
Generations in the future, those willing to embrace AIs, body mods, and genetic manipulation ascended to live technologically advanced lives far above Earth's atmosphere. Now variations on humanity and sentience travel throughout the galaxy, looking for new planets, resources, and adventures. Those left behind on Earth content themselves with religion, endless rehashings of old wars...and controlling the best known source of water and wild-type genetics. Ordinarily, a Syndicate clone like Arkady...
With some reservations, I enjoyed the first book (“Spin State”) in Chris Moriarty’s “Spin” series. But I’m not happy at all with her 2006 sequel, "Spin, Book 2: Spin Control.” I’ve got three major problems:- The first can be boiled down to the same major issue I had with the first book: she sets up a society and its technologies, then utterly ignores them to use some ridiculous setting as the backdrop for the whole thing. In this book, we’ve got two such settings. On the UN side, Earth has theor...
This is set in the same universe as Moriarty's Spin State, but is not a direct sequel. Because I was so completely impressed with the use of current-state physics in Spin State, it took almost half of this book to get over my disappointment that this book is not the same. Sure, there is passing mention of Bose-Einstein and particle entanglement, but that is not part of this story at all. Moriarty here digs into evolutionary informatics, but that didn't engage me as much. However, after I accepte...
I really was excited to read this book, and it had the potential to be really great, but fell flat.The author decided to focus on making a very bland, boring commentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict instead of focusing on any of several very interesting sci-fi elements of his world, that could have perhaps stood with the great social commentary sci-fi of the 60s and 70s if done well.Aliens with a virus that can make the infertile population of Earth fertile again? A society of clones coming into
I swithered between giving this three and four stars. The quality of the writing is very good indeed, and a huge amount of research and thought has obviously gone into things like terraforming, the future of the Israel-Palestine conflict, clone society, Emergent AIs, and ants. But overall it didn't hugely hang together very well for me - long sections of exposition on the various topics just made it feel a bit disjointed and slow. The plot was often lost under layers of things Chris Moriarty obv...
Arkady's a clone from the Syndicates, a post-human offshoot of humanity that mass-produces genetically superior bodies and considers them one, distributed, person. In practice, it doesn't quite work quite so well, there is variation between clones and sometimes they think of themselves of the superorganism. Arkady, in particular, a meek scientist specializing in ants, has defected to Earth, a ruined landscape with low birthrates and constant wars on the few settled areas, in order to sell a pote...
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 th...
Ahhhh, much better. I was far more pleased with this than I was with Spin State. I think Betsey was right about Moriarty coming into herself as a writer with Spin Control. It goes a long way to proving just how much the writing can make or break a story. See, Spin State had all the ingredients of a kick ass sci-fi space drama, but it wasn't mixed properly. Spin Control had even less of those ingredients, was set in middle east earth, (I don't know about anyone else but I get tired of the middle