Spin State and Spin Control
Over the break, I picked up Spin State and its sequel Spin Control, written by Chris Moriarty. I realized almost immediately that the plots, pigeon-holable as a who-dunnit and a spy thriller, wouldn’t hold me, but other aspects of the books kept me reading.
For one, Moriarty does a credible job of constructing a future in which genetic technology has become the central ideological and political issue: the Syndicates, whose populations consist of vat-grown geneered humans culled to ensure physiological and physical perfecton and conformity, are in the midst of a cold war with the United Nations, in which geneered humans are considered socially and legally to be less than human. This ideological schism is the framework on which Moriarty hangs traditional elements of hard sci-fi: AIs, faster than light travel and communication, organic-computer interfaces, …
But, similar to Peter Hamilton, Ian Banks, and Alastair Reynolds, Moriarty impresses his own style and character on these old-favorites: FTL travel is accomplished using Bose-Einstein condensates and quantum entanglement, FTL communication exploits quantum foam theory, and the AIs are (in part) emergent Kohonen neural networks. Nothing shockingly original, but nicely put together, and the expostion of the technological state of the world is enticingly spread over the course of the books.
It’s clear that Moriarty did his homework before constructing his world: he quotes Lotka, Norbert Weiner, and other relatively obscure scientists. In part because of his success at tieing in these historical figures and their various sociobiological and scientific theories, I found myself more anticipating the description of the workings of the political and social systems and the future history of his world, as well as the technology, than any plot developments.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Back to Physics (9/28/2003)
- Waiting in the Library (3/28/2002)
- No nanowrimo novels freely available? boo! (6/11/2008)