You can tell a book is ambitious when it takes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and this book is at least as smart as it is ambitious. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one of the threads in the story, but I think it is done justice. In the future, the Strip is irradiated, and the battles are fought on both sides by soldiers piloted by AIs who think they are war-gaming, rebooted whenever they begin to suspect the war has a human cost.
(The soldiers are colloquially referred to as 'Enderbots,' and I wish the book hadn't stopped to tell me where the name came from, because it ruined my feeling of cleverness for knowing.)
Earth is largely poisonous from years of war, with a moribund fertility rate, but it does have the one thing the colonies and ring need and cannot manufacture: water. The only people left on Earth are those who have refused to leave: religious fanatics and die-hard nationalists. The ring despises those who live on Earth as backwards and superstitious savages, and Earth hates the off-worlders for their embargoed technology.
Another book would have been satisfied with this, but Moriarty simultaneously explores the culture of the Syndicates, a society created by second generation genetic engineering. Arkady, a clone from the syndicates, is unfamiliar with words like 'employer' and 'mother,' but lives happily enough surrounded by his clone-sibs, until he gets sent on a terraforming mission where they discover something which will change the balance of power in human and post-human space.
The Syndicates don't seem to have crime, only 'deviancy', which can mean anything from ideological impurity to heterosexuality. Actually, it's unclear whether the perversion is heterosexuality, or sex with anyone who isn't one's genetic twin, and I suspect it's the latter. Then again, if you're a society bent on perfecting itself by genetic engineering, sexual reproduction is fairly perverse.
Obviously, Earth and the Syndicates are not going to get along very well, and of course, poor Arkady, a scientist who specializes in ants, finds himself on Earth, in Jerusalem, the focus of politics, espionage, and power brokering, out of his depth and out of his element, with no one to trust and everyone trying to figure out how to use him.
And of course, this book also has Li and Cohen, as well as the fairly adorable router/decomposer, a character I wouldn't mind seeing again.
It's interesting to me that although this is (among other things) a classic spy thriller in which no one can be trusted, and there are no good guys or bad guys, the novel still manages to be uplifting in its end, as if, after all, it believes in something. Kindness, perhaps.
You will probably not stop reading this book until you finish it, so do not, like me, start reading it at 9:00 at night.
The only thing not fantastic about this book is the cover, in which a wire-frame woman's body is composed of a mesh of lines that all converge awkwardly on her crotch, looking like Kotex ad from the nineties.
