Chris Moriarty

Catherine Li is a UN Operative with a capital O, doing whatever wetwork is required out on the interplanetary frontier to keep humanity safe. And there's a lot of work that needs doing. While people back home in the metropole enjoy arts, culture, and fine food, the survival of baselines humans rests on a narrow beam above the tumultuous posthuman clades of artificial intelligences and genetic syndicates composed of indoctrinated clones bred to endure the rigors of space. UN superiority is show more maintained by their control of the FTL communication and transport grid, which requires precious Bose-Einstein condensate crystals from Compton's World, mined from coal veins with backbreaking labor.

After a mission goes wrong, Li is given a chance to redeem herself by carrying out an investigation/coverup on Compton's World. The UN's greatest physicist, Hannah Sharrif, and the local UN security chief, died along with hundreds of miners in a subterranean fire that seems linked, in some way, to Sharrif's experiments to find a synthetic replacement for Bose-Einstein condensate crystals. The job is a viper's pit of intrigue, and one that has brought Li back to a planet that she has tried very hard to forget.

Because Sharrif and Li are genetically identical, both from the same clone line, separated by 20 years. But while Sharrif has risen as a scientist against human racism, Li has a fabricated past that says she is only a quarter genetic construct, enough to pass the blood purity laws and work as a spy and soldier. Her augmented genetics have been boosted by specialist cybernetic hardware, making her a posthuman weapon, one who has been aimed by hidden hands, but may take control of her own path.

This book fires on all cylinders: Technothriller infiltration sequences shine, and don't outstay their welcome. Compton's World is a vivid Dickensian nightmare of coal dust and child labor, with a few thousand impoverished and exploited workers propping up prosperity for billions. By far my favorite parts of the book involved Cohen, a centuries old AI who sometimes works with Li on UN projects, but always on his own agenda. Cohen is a sybaritic humanophile, who's elegance and love of the finer things in life conceals an entirely alien intelligence. This is not a story about science and war and politics, though there is plenty of that. This is a love story, to it's quantum entangled core.

The hard scifi is full of provocative ideas, the characters are great, the world-building and plot well-trodden but executed with verve. 20 years on is a great time to read this book, and I'm excited for the rest of the series. show less

This is a loose sequel to Spin State, features many of the same characters, but its plot doesn’t follow exactly on from the earlier plot. There are references to earlier events, but Spin Control can be read without having read Spin State. That, however, is the least of its problems. And, to be fair, its major problem is hardly its fault, it’s something that recent events have made problematical. Because Spin Control is set mostly in Israel. And this is an Israel that’s back at war with show more the Palestinians. The treatment of the Palestinians is certainly sympathetic (if not overly lionised) – and the treatment of Americans, Moriarty’s nationality, certainly not – but there’s still that whiff of admiration for Israel that is endemic in US culture. Which is a shame, because there’s a pure science-fiction thread to the narrative that seems mostly wasted. On the one hand, you have a defector from the Syndicates (genetically-engineered sort of communist clones) who is taken to Jerusalem to sell his secrets to the highest bidder – Mossad, its Palestinian equivalent, or the Americans – and which drags in some of the surviving cast of Spin State. But it’s all a plot, of sorts, to uncover a Palestinian mole, called Absalom, within Mossad. On the other hand, told in flashback, there’s the story of that same defector as one of the survivors of a Syndicate survey mission to a terraformed world. But there’s something weird about what they find – not just the fact it has been terraformed, since most terraforming attempts by humanity have failed, but also because there are weird things happening in the DNA of the flora and fauna. And when the survey team all come down with a fever, they work out that it’s caused by a virus which is using biology as a “Turing soup”, a sort of computational engine seeking an optimal terraforming solution. However, there’s a side-effect to the fever… and when this is revealed… well, Absalom’s identity seems pretty trivial. The survey mission narrative is nicely done, even if first contact puzzle stories are a genre staple; and marrying it with a near-future spy thriller is a nice touch. The setting of the latter is handled well, and each side is treated sensitively, but time, and geopolitics, has imparted something of a whiff to the Israeli-set sections and it’s hard to read them in light of recent events, or indeed the reader’s existing sympathies in the situation. Moriarty has shown she’s not afraid of tackling difficult subjects, both sfnal and real-world, and she’s good at it. It’s a shame she’s not better known. show less

Spin Control follows up the first book with a John le Carré espionage plot set in the never-ending war between Israel and Palestine, and some very 2000s scientific ideas that still manage to be provocative and relevant 20 years on.

Arkady is a defector from the Syndicates, a survivor of a terraforming expedition gone horribly wrong. He's been shipped to an Israeli private security firm, with the explicit cover that he is selling knowledge of a deadly biological weapon to gain the freedom of show more his creche mate Arkasha, another member of the expedition. The plot extends in two parallel strands, the revelation of how the shoestring expedition went wrong, and the multifaceted bargaining as we find what Arkady is really selling, and who is buying it.

The first plot thread reveals more about the subtle politics of the Syndicates, who we mostly glimpsed through gunsights in the first book. The Syndicates are lines of genetic clones, each generation a single model designed for a specific task and carefully kept within norms through euthanasia and culling. Even though every line is genetically identical and Syndicate ideology holds to a sociobiological Marxism, there is still love and politics every bit as fraught as in baseline humanity. Arkady is an ant specialist, a politically fraught role since ants hold the same symbolic space for Syndicates as primates do for us. And while most planets are technically habitable in that there is liquid water on the surface and the atmosphere won't kill you immediately, the one he's assigned to, Novalis, is something else entirely. Novalis is covered by impossible forests full of animals extinct in Earth's ravaged biosphere. And the expedition, under-crewed, lead by non-scientists, and full of contrary impulses submerged within Syndicate solidarity, is unready to deal with the impossible.

In the 'present', Arkady is dropped into a deadly spy game which he has to survive and Cohen, the AI from the first book, has to unravel. Israel and Palestine had peace, centuries of peace, and then for whatever reason, and there are plenty on a dying and blockaded Earth, relations broke down and war started again. But this isn't the raw violence of the Intifadas. Both sides are symmetrically, with able spymasters and a key military technology of Enderbots. Infantry conscripts don't have the skills to survive a modern battlefield, and combat AIs are notoriously unstable, so soldiers on both sides are avatars of an AI that thinks its just playing a simulation-and when it figures out what's going on their plug is pulled.

The Israelis have been slowly losing this war, and the top of the Mossad suspects that they have a mole, codenamed Absalom. The Tel Aviv fiasco with Cohen mentioned in the first book was about uncovering Absalom, and it ended with multiple UN agents dead and more questions than answers, ruining the reputations of several people involved. Cohen and Li are working to find the truth about Absalom, and Arkady is a naïf out of his depths just trying to survive in the bizarre world of humans.

The espionage stuff is well done, and I enjoyed the 25th century Israel-Palestine stuff more than the Irish miners of the first book. But where this Spin Control gets cool is grabbing the big picture of evolution, ecosystems, and emergence. The things that matter, war and peace, artificial intelligence, terraforming, life itself, cannot be dictated from above. They emerge from below, complexity forming from the behavior of simpler elements.

The problem is one of local maxima, of matching the need to maintain a stable identity with the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Arkady, Arkasha, and author Moriarty postulate that is is about the ability to search an evolutionary space, that survival depends on the strategies available to you and the speed at which you can explore them. The Syndicates understand their own fragility very well, living in epidemic-prone space habs or domes on worlds with sparse ecosystems that might fall apart at any moment. Earthers understand it as well on a bone-level, living on dying planet with a dwindling population surrounded by the ghosts of extinct species. And the fat and powerful UN rulers in their glittering ring around Earth don't get it at all. Earth was a kind mother, but space is cruel and capricious, and on a big enough time scale we all live in space.

Arkady isn't selling a weapon, he is the weapon, a vector carrying a virus that executes an idea called Turing Soup. DNA/RNA is definitely complex enough to run a Turing machine, and the virus hits your genetic code and searches for... something outside the understanding of their best scientists. This might be certain doom, or the only chance at post-human survival.

Spin Control extends on and improves Spin State, and I'm excited to see where the story goes. show less

I just love books like this. They mash together so many interesting things that finally my brain wakes and start digging without feeling of been pushed to do it. I don’t understand everything now, there are too many layers to described conflicts and I’m too far away from central context of this book. But what I really love is tons and tons of naturally sounding references to The Real. In this days where so many books try to be something else entirely, to shed anything that can relate show more them to surrounding reality, to let the reader feel like standing between worlds. Too much escapism these days. Not a bad thing per se but very tiring sometimes. Hoorah to the breath of fresh air and real connection. The greatest thing is that this book about different point of views. There are no character development or crazy plot devices. It’s all about how different people (including reader) view, feel and think about stuff they’ve got to deal with. show less