Skarbo is an insect. At least in this life – in previous ones he was a human. He chose this body because it is durable, giving him enough time to complete his life’s work: building a large scale model of The Spin. Although he has never visited the articial star systems, it interests him boundlessly. Now that his life is nearly over, Skarbo’s discovery about The Spin seems to have piqued several other parties’ interests; but theirs is not pure curiosity.
Zeb works on a dying planet, maintaining the virtual strata housing limitless numbers of virtual people. Zeb also likes to dip his toe in the vr – sometimes just a bit too much.
Like the other two books set in the Spin universe, Stone Clock is a stand-alone novel. Their settings and stories are different but the scope of their civilizations, time and their imaginative stories make the Spin novels very suitable for fans of Iain M. Banks’ The Culture series.
The story lines are well designed; the proza descriptive but not a word longer than necessary; and the characters are interesting and grow even more so as the story gets underway.
I really hope Bannister will write a lot more books set in the Spin universe. Nominally the three books form a trilogy but in practise they are far from that and there is no reason no other books would fit here.