Chris Moriarty

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Chris Moriarty (born 1968) is an American science fiction writer.

She has lived in the U.S., Europe, Mexico and Southeast Asia. Before becoming a science fiction writer, she worked as a horse trainer, ranch hand, tourism industry employee, guide and environmental lawyer. As of early 2008, Chris was married with one child.

Moriarty's first novel, Spin State, was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick, John Campbell, Spectrum and Prometheus Awards. Her second, Spin Control, published in 2006, won the 2007 Philip K. Dick Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for SF.

The two novels feature common characters in a future where Earth has undergone ecological collapse. A large part of humanity has migrated to various planets and space habitats, both in the solar system and around nearby stars such as Barnard's Star and 51 Pegasi. The technologies feature cloning, artificial intelligences, genetic constructs and use of a material referred to as "condensate" which allows instantaneous communication and teleportation.

Groups known as Syndicates, who manufacture their members as genetic constructs, have broken away from humanity, referring to themselves as posthuman. Their technology is rigorously suppressed in human space by "UNSec", a descendant of the United Nations. The inhabitants of human space may be augmented with wetware interfaces so that they can directly interact with the "spinstream", the flow of data based on quantum entanglement. Some parts of the computer network have become self-aware, and are allowed to exist under restrictions imposed by UNSec. They can talk either through the spinstream, or by using "shunts", people who have been implanted with devices that enable them to be "operated" by AI's, or even by other people.

Both novels occur during a time of uneasy peace between UNSec and the Syndicates, after a devastating conflict in space. Recurring characters include Catherine Li, a construct masquerading as three-quarters human, and Cohen, an AI who is in love with her. Several Syndicate characters recur, but since they are clones it is not certain if they represent the same individuals.

Li is a UN officer responsible for the victory which ended the Syndicate war. She is caught between the sinister machinations of UNSec and the unknown motives of the Syndicates. The stories feature murder investigations, espionage, high-tech firefights and explorations of sexuality and human emotions. Spin State revolves around Li's assignment by UNSec to investigate the murder of a scientist on Compson's World, her original home, and the source of "condensate" which is found in coal deposits on the planet. The scientist in question, whom Li claims as a distant relative, was actually a genetic construct from the same line as Li herself. In Spin Control a Syndicate member goes to Earth, apparently to sell the secret of a bioweapon he found on a terraformed planet. He finds himself shuttled back and forth across the conflict line in a revived Israeli-Palestinian guerilla war, with Li as one of the interested parties.