The Shock of the New: Chris Moriarty’s Spin State
My reading’s defined, largely, by sheer chance. I stumble across something at a used-book sale, buy it along with a box of other books, put it on my shelf and forget about it, then finally years later take it down and read it and, often, realise I should have started in on it long before. Which is a long way around to explaining how I just now came to read Chris Moriarty’s debut novel Spin State, which was published in 2003. And why I’m only now writing about the best work of 21st-century science fiction I personally have read.
The first book of a trilogy (the second, Spin Control, came out in 2007; the third, Ghost Spin, was published earlier this year), Spin State was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and the Spectrum Award. A frenzied yet controlled mixture of hard sf, cyberpunk, space opera, political saga, hard-boiled noir, war story, and any number of other genres, Spin State captures the mind-shredding sense of wonder of science fiction as well as any book I’ve ever read. It’s densely written, intricately and dextrously plotted, and boasts dialogue both fiercely dramatic and bluntly true. It also always seems to aim at character, using its twists to generate powerful scene after powerful scene.
It ought to be a mess. It’s a long book, but covers much ground; it seems that every scene, every line, is doing three different things — touching off fuses to detonate later. But it never falls apart, never distintegrates into noise. It challenges you: I had to read the opening pages twice before I caught the rhythm of it. Set hundreds of years in the future, AIs possess wired human bodies, genetic constructs build interstellar Syndicates, and quantum technologies make distance something different than what we understand: you can physically be located on a space station in a far solar system but sit down to a full meal in an elegant restaurant on the Moon in the light of the environmentally ruined Earth. Technologies and politics are complex, and in fact the history of this future is complex all along the line: there’s a kind of take-no-prisoners ferocity to the unrelenting beat of new and wild ideas the book throws at you. Which is to say it’s in the best tradition of science fiction.
