There is no question in my mind that Chris Moriarty is much smarter than I am. (Not that that is any great feat . . . .) Her newest book, Ghost Spin, demonstrates that she is a thoughtful, imaginative writer, whose vision for artificial intelligence spans the universe. It's an ambitious book, more ambitious than my little mind could enjoy.
Ghost Spin is set in the same future setting and returns characters from her previous novels Spin State and Spin Control, neither of which I have read. The novel opens as Cohen, an AI who is inhabiting a human body, shoots himself/the body in the head. His . . . wife, Li, . . . if that makes sense for an AI to have a wife . . . spends the rest of the novel seeking to find out what happened. In the course of the story, Moriarty takes the reader on a tour of the possibilities of sentient AIs who can exist in a variety of settings, including inhabiting humans.
The result is a confusing mess. The time frames shift inexplicably with flashbacks and changing perspectives. There are long passages of dialogue, including characters talking to the AI within themselves. When Cohen inhabits a ship's captain, there's a split-personality, dual identity thing happening. When Li comes along and sees her "husband" in the captain's body, I couldn't help thinking of Whoopi Goldberg/Patrick Swayzee and Demi Moore.
There is some awesome, solid speculative science in Ghost Spin. Besides AI, the world of the future comes alive with references to terraforming, faster-than-light space travel, and colonization that has dispersed humanity from a ravished Earth. But I had a hard time making myself enjoy the book. Halfway through I began skimming to the end. Again, I'm probably just not smart enough, not a careful enough reader, or maybe I should have read the other 2 books first.
Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!
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