n the future of this action-and-information-packed first novel, genetically and cybernetically enhanced humans have fled an environmentally ravaged Earth for a vast artificial ring habitat and planetary colonies administered by a Machiavellian United Nations that sees two threats to its continued dominance.
First are the Syndicates, a collectivist culture of post-human clone constructs who rebelled against their human creators in a vicious war that has given way to a le Carréan détente characterized by spying and espionage. Second are the emergent AIs, self-aware programs that inhabit streamspace but can temporarily incarnate through humans fitted with special interfaces. Too powerful to trust, too useful to eliminate, the AIs possess limited autonomy, though the United Nations keeps a kill switch handy.
The U.N.'s empire depends on quantum teleportation, "the worst system of faster-than-light travel—except for all the others." Moriarty's punning title refers to this technology, which uses crystals known as Bose-Einstein condensates to take advantage of quantum entanglement. There is only one source for these crystals: Compson's World, a hellish planet made worse by the aptly named Anaconda Mining Company. Compson's World is in U.N. space, but the Syndicates are looking to break the UN's dilithium crystal—er, Bose-Einstein condensate—monopoly.
Enter Maj. Catherine Li, U.N. peacekeeper and hero of the war with the Syndicates. She's also a clone construct passing for human, a serious crime. With the threat of court-martial and exposure hanging over her head following a bungled mission, Li is posted to Compson's World to investigate the murder of Hannah Sharifi, the genius construct responsible for quantum teleportation technology.
Sharifi had been conducting mysterious experiments in the mines. Unfortunately, no trace of her discoveries can be found. But whoever killed her wants that data and will kill again to get it. The list of suspects ranges from Hauss, Anaconda's on-site boss, to his beautiful assistant, Bella, a Syndicate construct under contract to Anaconda, to an assortment of Syndicate spies, U.N. operatives and members of various factions among the miners. Soon Li is caught in a web of deception and betrayal that will test her loyalties and threaten her life ... and change the universe forever.
Raymond Chandler dons cyber-drag
Spin State is an assured and accomplished first novel. It's not nearly as original as it wants to be, however, in its fusing of the hard-boiled detective story with cyberpunk, post-human space opera and military SF. Moriarty is a vivid writer, with an enviable grasp of quantum physics, but her story is overly familiar, her future too reminiscent of futures already imagined by the usual cyber-suspects. The shadow of the past lies heavily over this novel as well; characters and events have a secondhand feel to them, a predictability based upon Moriarty's unwavering adherence to the template of noir fiction. This makes important characters like Bella, and even Li herself, act in ways dictated less by who they are than by the role assigned them from some Noir Character Handbook: femme fatale, gunsel, etc.
The most fully realized character is not Li but an emergent AI named Cohen. A Jewish AI—you gotta love it! Cohen, like the AI in Scott Westerfeld's Evolution's Darling, is sexually omnivorous, with a stable of beautiful humans through which he "shunts," but he—or it—carries a torch for Li, for reasons that are not, at least to this reader, apparent. Yet if love is blind, why shouldn't that be as true for "the affective loop cognitive program that eventually grew into the emergent phenomenon that called itself Cohen" as it is for humans (and post-humans)?
Like the plethora of side spurs that shoot off the main tunnels in the mines of Compson's World, a welter of subplots complicates and ultimately confuses Moriarty's twisty plot. For example, Li was born on Compson's World (though, since she is a clone, "born" is not quite the right word), yet this is no help in her investigation, for her memories cannot be trusted: A side effect of quantum teleportation is memory loss. A lot might be made of such a weakness, yet Moriarty largely neglects it in favor of a dozen other subplots, none of which gets the attention it deserves. Even so, Spin State is an enjoyable and, at times, provocative read. A writer with Moriarty's abundant talents can only get better.
