I'm not sure I get more than half of what's going on in the story. Still, I like it. ( )

I really wanted to like this book better. It has a lot of difficult concepts, many which arose in the first two books. The first book in the series ("Spin State") came out 10 years ago and the second, "Spin Control" was from 7 years ago. The method of interstellar space travel was explained in the first book, and frankly, I couldn't remember how it worked. Something about Bose-Einstein gates. Spaceships could travel faster than light somehow. Individuals could be beamed somehow?

This is important to this book because the major character, Catharine Li, needed to travel a long distance in a hurry, elects to be "scatter-shot" to her destination. This allows anyone to capture the signal and 'reconstruct' her somehow. So we end up with multiple copies of Li, all but two of which are killed instantly upon reconstruction.

Why did she undertake such a dangerous journey? Her husband, Cohen, an Emergent AI (which means he was a fully sentient AI) was killed/murdered/committed suicide on the back end of UN controlled space and she wanted to know why/exact revenge/reconstruct him. The reconstruction part comes in because, apparently, an Emergent AI is composed of a network of sub-sentient parts. Upon his death the parts were essentially sold for scrap. She hopes to recover the parts.

I liked very much the story of Catherine/Caitlyn (one of successfully reconstructed Lis changes her name or the story would have been impossible to follow). Due to where they ended up and the experiences they undergo, they grow into different people by the end of the story.

Catherine ends up on a pirate ship where one of the major parts of Cohen is. How she came to be here is part of a weakness in the storytelling that prevents me from giving the book a higher than 3 rating. Her being on this ship is a major plot point but we never learn how she ended up there. It seems like pure chance.

Caitlyn ends up on New Allegheny, where Cohen died. A barely terraformed planet, New Allegheny, populated by natives of the Pittsburgh area from back on Earth, is a vast steel mill tunring out the raw materials for a new breed of spaceships built to explore a nearby weird section of space called "The Drift". There's lots of techno-hocus-pocus here but that was OK.

Lots of good concepts here. What are the rights of Emergent AIs? How is the UN secretly exploiting them to run their spaceships? In an entirely post-human future, why are "normal" humans at war with the Syndicate humans? So called normal humans are barely human as we would think of them being totally wired up with internal computing power. The Syndicate humans are as well but they go in for artificial gestation and gene splicing. What are the implications of there potentially being multiple copies of yourself?

Eventually all the major characters come together in a vast construction is space called the Datatrap. Was it built by humans? The Syndicate? Aliens? Clearly this is where the entire story was aiming, a big climax where all the questions would be answered.

Everything was here, Catherine/Caitlyn, the various parts of Cohen, the formidable UN ship that was chasing the pirates, the pirate captain, another Emergent AI (named Ada) which had been driven crazy by the UN, and more. And the mysterious Datatrap which seemed to be some sort of alien sentient being, existing in multiple universes. Wow!

Here's my other disappointment in the book. What happened at this point? Truthfully I don't know. Cohen and Ada infiltrated the UN networks and something. The pirate captain disappears. Several characters get killed. It was all so underwhelming. ( )

Ce 3e volume de la sérié est sympa, mais beaucoup plus lourd à lire. Les 2 premiers livres étaient énergiques, celui-ci s’embourbe, embrouille le lecteur, et fatigue rapidement avec sa narration torturée de l’histoire.

L’auteur fait de nombreux parallèles avec Les aventures d'Alice au pays des merveilles; je trouve ce lien plutôt questionable car non seulement il n’apporte rien à l’histoire, mais en plus ajoute de la confusion. Déjà que la présentation de l’intrigue n’est pas claire, ça complexifie encore plus la lecture. ( )

This seems like it is the final book of the Spin series, but I could be wrong. As a continuation of the previous two novels, this one was much more metaphysical than the previous two, with lots of questions about parallel universes, identity & self, and so forth.

The story starts with Catherine Li (former UN peackeeper soldier, rogue soldier/troubleshooter/troublemaker, married to an AI) finding out that Cohen (the oldest AI, manipulator, enigma) is dead and his various sub-systems have been sold off in a "yard sale". At the urging of Cohen's associates including an AI known as Router-Decomposer, formerly a part of Cohen, she travels to the port planet New Allegheny on the edge of The Drift to discover what happened to Cohen and try to re-assemble him if she can. Since the Bose-Einstein relay network is collapsing after Li cut off the supply of critical material in the previous novel, she has to travel by scattercast. Think of it as putting many copies of yourself into pellets in a shotgun shell, firing it off in the general direction you want to go and hoping that at least one of you gets there.

After a brief montage of what happens to all of the "other" Catherine Lis fired into the universe, the story settles down on two of them that make it to the Drift. One arrives on New Allegheny colony where the UN is fighting both the locals and Pirates while agents of the Syndicates clone civilization stir the pot. The other as crew on a pirate ship captained by Llewellyn, a notorious rogue Navy captain (as are most of his crew, and apparently most pirates). On New Allegheny an insurrection underway and a "wild AI outbreak" where an AI turned virus is infecting most of the population. In the midst of all of this, the two Catherines find different bits of Cohen and the one on New Allegheny is press-ganged by Avery the Pirate Hunter.

The Drift it self is some sort of cosmic/quantum anomaly that can only be navigated by AIs and where you probably don't come back out in quite the same universe you left from. Now that the Bose-Einstein condensate mines are shut down and the BE network is collapsing for want of replacement unobtainium, The Drift is the only means of faster-than-light travel once. Resolving control of The Drift, what happened to Cohen, the mystery of why Navy captains are turning on the UN, the nature of the wild AI outbreak, and the nature and nurture of AIs is, of course, all intertwined.

There are probably less convoluted ways to get to the end, at least from the outside viewpoint, but the main characters are all well-realized people with all of the attendant baggage, shortsightedness, blind sports and motivations that sends them down their twisted journeys rather than taking the direct route. In the end I didn't like this as well as the previous two novels, mostly because I liked the more straightforward noir mystery/adventure aspects of Spin State and Spin Control. Questing into the nature of reality and self can make a good story, but in this case it never felt like Chris Moriarty had control of those questions, resulting it what seems to be a final ending, but also a bit hasty and vaguely unresolved. None the less, a worthwhile read if you've enjoyed the rest of the series. ( )

I enjoyed the first two books in this series, but Ghost Spin is fantastic. There are great ideas here, and complex characters, and background on Cohen, the AI, that actually makes a lot of sense. ( )