Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very inventive and fun, but not Williams' best work, August 1, 2008
Walter Jon Williams is one of my favorite authors. His novels share two broad characteristics. First, they are fantastically inventive -- Williams doesn't like to stick to one genre, and has written cyberpunk, a SF police procedural, alien contact novels, space opera, high farce, and more genres than I can name. Second, no matter what the genre, Williams' works typically incorporate a physicality that is missing from most SF. A martial artist himself, Williams is at his strongest writing about the ronin of the future, and, with various variations, usually does exactly that.
Implied Spaces is a mix of fantasy and sf that reminds me a little of Heinlein's Glory Road or Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, with a higher-tech background and the plotline of Williams' high nanotech novel, Aristoi.
The novel is set in the far future, where humans have become effectively immortal and generally live in artificial and tailored universes created by the humans and their AI. The protagonist, Aristide, is another one of Williams' ronin characters, a man who has outlived his original sense of purpose and is essentially drifting. Together with a magic sword and a talking cat (both of which are scientifically explained, of course), Aristide wanders the various universes, studying the "implied spaces" -- areas of the world which were not intentionally created, but arose by implication.
While studying these unintentional areas, Aristide comes across a universe-spanning threat, which kicks off a plot too idea-packed and fast moving to really summarize. He ends up on a very fast paced quest that uses Williams' original premise to dip into new genres every chapter - zombie movies, war movies, existential novels, philosphy about the nature of identity, and a quick moving conspiracy thiller.
This book has enough clever ideas to fill four or five novels, and is well worth reading. Still, I can't say that it's Williams best work. First, there are so many ideas that it often feels like none of them is getting enough screen time -- this might have been better as a multi-book series. Second, while not identical, the plot is disconcertingly similar to an earlier (and IMHO better) Williams novel, Aristoi. Williams is a daring and experimental writer, and it wouldn't surprise me that he *deliberately* set out to write a variation on a previous book, but as a reader, I found it disconcerting.
All in all, I would recommend this book to any sf or fantasy reader, and especially to fans of Williams, but it's not the Williams book I would start a new reader with. IMHO, new readers should look at Voice of the Whirlwind, Aristoi, or the Metropolitan/City on Fire series, which I think show Williams at his absolute best.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
not unreadable, August 3, 2008
I just wasn't that impressed with this book. While it had some interesting ideas, they were kind of a hodge-podge of technologies thrown together without any rhyme or reason. Want AI, it's there. Want wormholes and bubble universes, got that too. Functional immortality, check. Nano tech, sure thing. Heck, we even got zombies!
I also found the characters very one dimensional. While the hero has a back-story, it's slightly implausable. I could get over that if there was any type of inner conflict to explain why he does what he does. After all, he's the oldest human alive, there have to be SOME inner deamons to drive him. The other characters, including the love intrest, were so paper thin I had trouble remembering who they were.
It's always hard to build tension in a book where the characters are immortal, but it can be done. In this case though, even during a multi-universe war, there's always the knowledge that the worst that can happen is he'll be restored from a backup minus a few months memories. Not excatly the right motivation for a white-knuckle thriller.
Overall, this book misses on both the small and the large scale. However I'm glad to see books like this out there. After too many years of sequels and fantasy taking over the sci-fi label, it's good to see authors taking up the challange of 'real' science fiction again. In this case it's a miss, but not a horrible one, just not to the level of some of the masters of the genre.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sword and Singularity!, July 19, 2008
It's not often that you read a novel which creates a subgenre, sui generis. Implied Spaces, by Walter Jon Williams, manages that feat with the inauguration of the "Sword and Singularity" subgenre of SF.
For those who don't know what a Singularity is, in brief, its the idea that when trans-human intelligences (be it computer, cyborg or what have you) come into existence, life and history as we know it will be utterly transformed, and life after it will be as alien to us as our modern technological existence is alien to our ancestors in the Paleolithic era.
In Implied Spaces, Walter Jon Williams creates a "sword and singularity" novel. What this means is, pace S.M. Stirling, is that fantasy ideas, tropes and even settings are convincingly melded with the high technology of a post-Singularity environment. We start off the novel in a fantasy world environment that, if it were just a random tidbit found on the internet, would at first look like a well written but ordinary fantasy novel. Aristide has a talking cat, sure, but in a world of trolls and monsters, that's not unusual.
When his sword comes out, and starts acting like Morgaine Chaya's Changeling, complete with a wormhole, the reader starts getting an inkling that there is much more to the universe than meets the eye. We soon get ever grander vistas and situations as, with Aristide as our guide, we meet A.I.'s, post-human characters, wormhole technology, mass drivers using wormholes as weapons, and technology capable of affecting the most fundamental elements of reality.
As Keanu Reeves famously once said: "Whoa!"
The book is philosophical, comic, action packed, thoughtful and stunningly well written. I've been a fan of Williams work for a long while, and he hits all cylinders here. This novel is precisely for people who can read good fat fantasy, and yet strongly appreciate the High-tech SF of, say, Charlie Stross.
Highly Recommended.
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