Ghost Spin
The good news for Moriarty’s many fans is that this stand-alone novel is set in the world of her Spin State (2004) and Spin Control (2006). The bad news for readers unfamiliar with those books is that, at least at the outset, this new novel might seem baffling. It begins with a man—really an AI currently inhabiting a boy’s body—taking his own life. The man’s wife, Catherine, a sort of freelance soldier, is angry: without her knowledge, the dead man’s various AI networks have been sold off (“You held a yard sale?” she says, baffled), and, without any functioning backups, bringing her husband back seems almost impossible. By means of a method of interplanetary travel that essentially creates multiple copies of herself, Catherine tries to hunt down her husband’s scattered networks. The author plunks us down in this vividly realized environment and lets us assimilate it as we go along, which won’t be a problem for those well versed in the rapidly growing subgenre of posthuman sf (see authors such as Greg Egan, Neal Asher, or Alastair Reynolds). --David Pitt