
The most irritating thing about Spin State is that everything about it tries to make you believe it’s hard SF, the title, the quotes, the reference section at the end of the book and some reviews on the net, but when you actually read it, you realize that the setting and the book is as much hard SF, as Simmon’s Hyperion/Endymion sequence is.
The second annoying thing about the book is that large sections of the book deal with mining that makes you feel like you’re reading a novel about mining in the 18th century. I’m aware that this doesn’t make it completely unbelievable, technology isn’t evenly distributed in any civilization, but assuming that what they dig out is the most important thing in this future setting, you’ll wonder why the UNSC (the major power) doesn’t just take over and installs a modern and secure mining operation, that uses remote-controlled robots instead of humans.
The third annoying thing is that the book is far too long, without providing an equal amount of content. A much tighter narrative could have helped make the story more focused and thus more concise.
Despite these gripes, it’s an interesting future, where baseline humans try to control and contain any activity of transhuman powers, be it biological constructs or artificial intelligences. The book starts out as a mystery, but at the end the mystery has become a side-plot to the conflict between baseline humans and transhuman powers. It’s far from perfect, but at times it’s a good read, sometimes, for a few moments, even passing into the domain of greatness. And it does provide what everyone is expecting from the beginning, the system frozen on the edge between the baseline past and a future with a multitude of transhuman beings, has been allowed to unfreeze and go forward.