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Spin State by Chris Moriarty
01/05/2005 . Source: Andy Stout 
pub: Bantam-Spectra. 597 page paperback. Price: $6.99 (US), $10.99 (CAN). ISBN: 0-553-58624-6. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.bantamdell.com
Chris Moriarty's debut novel, 'Spin State', points to some really good things in the future for her. It's a sure-footed, accomplished book, that weaves post-cyberpunk futures, quantum mechanics, a deftly drawn universe and a distinctly noir-ish murder investigation into one big, heady, enjoyable soup. It's probably about 100 pages too long, but it's still a good read for all that.
Major Catherine Li is a UN Peacekeeper who, very much against her wishes, gets despatched to the mining colony of Compson's World to investigate the death of the most famous physicist in human space, Hannah Sharifi. She was up to something, so much is obvious, but what exactly, for whom and why she got murdered as a consequence is a bit more tricky to deduce. So Li starts on her investigation and as she peels back the layers, slowly the reader gets glimpses of the wider universe beyond and the struggle between human, UN controlled space and the post-human Syndicate planets.
All of this is further complicated by the fact that Li herself is a genetic construct, albeit one that's successfully managed to cover up her identity up 'til now. She also has one of the most powerful Emergent AIs in UN space, Cohen, infatuated with her, though Cohen's motivations are never easy to reveal. To paraphrase another book that's even longer, 'Do not meddle in the affairs of AIs because they are quick to anger and difficult to understand.'
Moriarty has definitely come up with an intriguing universe with 'Spin State'. What's being mined on Compson's World is Bose-Einstein condensate, a quantum entangled substance that's the key to FTL travel and communications and thus humanity's place in the universe. Naturally, it's a finite resource and Moriarty's extrapolation of the economic pressures that would entail, as well as her portrayal of the disadvantaged mining community and the politics and tensions that seethe below its surface, is spot on.
All in all, it's a tense, fairly hard-boiled SF thriller whose layers of subtlety wriggle like mine shafts under the surface. It's also rock solid hard SF, with seven pages of bibliography pointing towards texts on quantum mechanics. It's also a slightly unusual SF love story. It is a lot of things to a lot of people, in other words, with enough richness and detail in its pages that different readers can pull different things out of it. Perhaps best of all, there's a sequel on the way later in the year. One to watch for certain.
Andy Stout
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