We are taken to the mysterious planet Equatoria, a world apparently engineered for humanity by the inscrutable machine intelligences known as the Hypotheticals. Turk Findley, a man with a criminal past, runs an aeronautical charter service on the newly settled planet. Lise Adams, who hires Turk, is a would-be journalist searching for her vanished father, a scientist obsessed with the Hypotheticals and their illegal life extension technology. Meanwhile, young Isaac, genetically manipulated by rogue scientists so that he may become a conduit between humanity and the AIs, is coming of age, and something enormous and unknown is assembling itself far underground.
On its own, it probably deserves more than 3 stars, but it just felt kind of thin reading it directly after Spin. Whereas Spin was a very character-driven, human story, Axis just felt more plotty and more like a standard sci fi novel. Will finish the series, natch.
I have a fuller review up at my site; here I will say that I was not keen on Axis most of the way through, which disappointed me on account of how much I really liked Spin, its predecessor. You don't care about the characters in Axis the way you do in Spin until very late, but once you do, the book's promise is, I think, fulfilled. Appropriately one star less than Spin, but all said and done, a very worthy sequel.
