Spin State by Chris Moriarty

I finished reading Spin State by Chris Moriarty this weekend. I was a bit disappointed. The book was sort of an amalgamation of several common themes: AI trying to gain its freedom, virtual reality immersion, the difficulties of faster than light travel when it relies upon scarce resources, with a bit of cloned-humanity warring against normal humanity thrown in. It started out as a hard scifi book and sort of flowed into more of a virtual reality/cyberspace book by the end, and the hard scifi was more interesting, so that just wasn't the direction I was hoping it would tend. At times it was also somewhat difficult to follow, and I actually had to hop back a few paragraphs to reread a section to make sure I hadn't missed a turn in the plot. I'm not sorry I read it - it was handled very well from a character perspective (at least the primary characters, some of the subcharacters were simply uninteresting and extraneous) - I just wish it had been about two hundred pages shorter considering the plot, and that it had stuck to some of the harder scifi it seemed to promise in the beginning. I won't be handing it off to Mean Mr. Mustard, he can read my copy of China Mieville's The Scar instead.