Review: Spin Control

Spin Control by Chris Moriarty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The future-y universe that this trilogy inhabits is absolutely fascinating. It's a time of post-human space colonies, populated with robots, AIs and "constructs." Humans still exist and generally maintain the arrogance of believing themselves the superior species in our local galaxy. However, despite the accompanying loss of "status" there are humans who opt to become "constructs."

Constructs are essentially augmented humans. They're people who have been able to afford and acquire non-natural enhancements to their bodies. The way this is achieved is often novel and interesting... picture viruses that are designed to implement changes at the cellular level, to reinforce your skeleton for an example. You've probably noticed the similarity with the Borg "nanobots" on Star Trek, but the idea behind those is far more general, those nanobots seem to work to augment all internal systems upto an established state of optimum efficiency. The viruses used in these stories are designed specifically to achieve a set of improvements and you but each enhancement as you can afford to, if you so desire.

The characters (many of whom we have been following since book one) are believable. This one has a large focus on another story of entangled lovers, which was excellent for the development of these characters but dulled the overall plot for me.

The political and social settings are quite interesting and partly believable.

I certainly didn't enjoy this one as much as the first, but I can't say that I've been overly disappointed by it either.

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