Ghost Spin

Moriarty’s third near-future Spin novel (after Spin Control) is both rewarding and frustrating. As the brutal but reliable framework of the UN-Syndicate war collapses into anarchy in the wake of the depletion of Bose-Einstein Condensate, the material needed for reliable faster-than-light travel, Cohen, an artificial intelligence sometimes housed in a human body, commits suicide on the industrial world of New Allegheny. His lover, Catherine Li, gets word of Cohen’s death but refuses to believe that he would kill himself. She undertakes the extraordinarily dangerous journey from Earth to New Allegheny and soon gets tangled in the affairs of corrupt officials, rogue intelligence agents, and pirates. Dense prose sometimes conceals as much as it reveals, and while some elements—the adaptations humans make to survive in the hostile environments of other worlds, a galaxy teetering on the edge of singularity—are genuinely visionary, others leave the reader wanting more. Agent: Scott Hoffman, Folio Literary Management. (May)