Customer Reviews

Implied Spaces

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I've been a fan of Mr. Williams ever since discovering "Voice of the Whirlwind," but "Implied Spaces" goes a long way toward making me stop looking for his books in the future. Too reminiscent of "Aristoi" in a number of places but not done as well; too many different SF tropes (including borrowing an idea from John Barnes' "Meme Wars" stories) that left me feeling like I was on a whirlwind bus tour that gave a smattering of everything but not enough of anything; no character development to speak of; narrated by someone who comes across as fairly numb to what's happening around him. There is no excitement and no tension here. I wish I had waited for this book to show up at the library, and that's where my copy is headed.

It's telling that a lot of the people who didn't think this book was anything special called it derivative of other books I've never heard of. From my uninformed perspective, this was high entertainment, action leavened with enough philosophical speculation to keep from seeming mindless or pandering. Go ahead and buy it if you don't know Williams's work and apparent sources very well. (If you do, I suppose you can listen to these other reviewers--so much the pity.)

On a side note, certain parts of this book appalled me, but nobody else seems to have reacted to them at all, so I won't discuss them. I'm curious to see if any other reviewer thinks as I did.

Walter Jon Williams' "Implied Spaces" is kind of a "throw-back" science fiction novel. The overall story is big - the risk that the protaganist faces is nothing less than the enslavement or death of every human being. Moreover, the story is studded with the kind of "big idea" projections of science and technology that made the "Golden Age" golden.

The story follows Aristide, a swordsman, who runs into a mystery in a land of wizards, giants and trolls. The land is a strange one with a melange of fantasy tropes and a sun that apparently doesn't move, requiring that time be kept with hourglasses. Adventures happen and Aristide, it turns out, has a magic sword that makes people disappear, which seems to surprise the trollish and other weird denizens of this fantastic land. Aristide also has a talking cat, which seems to be as much of a surprise as the magic sword. There is a battle between Aristide and his companions and a cult of evil wizards who can also make people disappear, a talent that seems to puzzle Aristide.

After the reader gets used to the idea that Williams is actually writing a fantasy story, Aristide returns to civilization via a wormhole, and we find that the fantasy land is one of many universes created by humanity and their eleven great matrioshka array super-computers. We then are introduced to a super-science fiction world of nanotechnology, wormholes and a technology that records memories that can be reloaded into nanotechnologically designed replacement bodies in the event of death.

But Aristide has a mystery to solve. Where did the wizards get the ability to make people disappear?

The story then takes off as we are treated to visions of world building - the fantasy land was actually a Dyson sphere, which is why the sun never moved, and Aristide gets his body modified into an amphibian form so he can follow-up on the mystery by visiting a designed ocean "world" that is shaped as a tube with the living space on the inside and a wormhole channeling the sun's energy at one end, with the result that a person on this world can look up and see the ocean, islands, and storms "hanging" overhead.

We also see the dark side of this future. "Viruses" that can reprogram the mind, battles involving 40 million men, all of whom die, and possibly the ultimate endpoint of all weapon development. As Aristide observes, "you mean we've gotten to the point where we are hurling hostile universes at each other?" You will understand that reference when you read the book, and you will see that it isn't a metaphor.

So, the book definitely has a "gosh-wow" sense of wonder going for it.

The plot of the book progresses in a fashion that keeps the reader engaged. The "Deus ex" of chance is kept fairly well hidden, although why Aristide should run into a particular minor character on three different worlds in three different contexts is one place where the "willing suspension of disbelief" was challenged.

As other reviewers have noted, "Implied Spaces" has a resemblance to Williams' "Aristoi" novel, at least with respect to presenting the dark side of technological progress. I didn't find that to be a negative; in fact, it makes me want to re-read "Aristoi."

I also liked the coinage of the term "Sword and Singularity" to describe the sub-genre of this book.

All in all, I felt that I got my money's worth of entertainment value, and I have no hesitation in recommending it. In fact, I did recommend it to my 13 year old daughter, who particularly liked the talking "cat," "Bitsy."

I've been jonesing for some science fiction since I've been a bit heavy with the fantasy lately, but few sf books have been catching my eye. Than came the mass market release of Implied Spaces, which I had been eyeing in hardcover with the tag line "Sword and Singularity." Let me start by saying that Implied Spaces didn't turn out to be quite what I expecting or looking for. Judging by the cover art and back cover copy I thought it would basically be people in space with swashbuckling along with some sort of grand conflict, which it lives up to in some ways yet this book is so much more. The first section is a big fake out as you are in a fantasy world where trolls and orcs exist, which lends credence to my first inclination about swashbuckling. However, Implied Spaces quickly turns out to be grandeur and much more philosophical. The central idea is "What does it means to be human?"

This is a future where people have everything they could ever want, can change their body at a whim, and evade death eternally with science of galactic proportions. Technology is so evolved it might as well be magic at a time where the society can create entire pocket universes for no more reason than a place to take a vacation or as a power source. The main character, Aristide, even carries a seemingly magic sword while followed by a highly intelligent cat, which both get explain in their own fashion. Aristide is in search of a reason to keep on living as he is over 1,000 years old and is one of the few people to remember a time when you couldn't live forever. He has a great wit about him and I found him endearing.

Williams has amazing ideas about technology and what could happen to society given the chance that I wish he had spent more time exploring and explaining. There is so much going on and so many things are thrown about it was almost too much. Williams somehow mashes up conspiracies, zombies, AIs, government bureaucracy, planet crushing weapons, and galactic war yet it never seems absurd. His characters are well done, although Aristide is bit over the top as the alpha male at points and his love interest is screwed with so much I lost the connection to who she is supposed to be. The sword fighting goes by the wayside quickly, which was a bit disappointing, but the battles were well done.

The many plot twists were better than expected, especially one in the last quarter. The ending was a bit anticlimactic yet it was a great and never slow journey to get there. Williams is definitely not done with this universe and I hope to read another great novel from him set here hopefully exploring the setting and themes in-depth. I recommend this to sf readers who love far out technology.

Implied Spaces is an enjoyable page turner with so many new an intriguing ideas coming at you it can be hard to keep up. You might think that you've picked up maybe the fifth or sixth book in an ongoing series, the backstory is so rich and complex. But no, it seems that Implied Spaces is just an incredibly fast-paced, deeply immersive stand-alone.

One of the many SF tropes in Implied Spaces is the idea that every person can "upload" to some sort of a computer so that, if they die, they can be brought back to life with all memories, emotions, and personality traits in tact. This technology is even used for long distance space travel, in which people "upload" into a small ship and leave their bodies behind. This is interesting, to be sure, but I found the characters cavalier attitude toward this process, and toward death itself, a bit disturbing. If you die, you are in fact dead. I'm not sure how the idea that an exact copy of you will be walking around, using your stuff, and interacting with your loved ones is supposed to be in any way comforting.

And one very minor quibble about the typesetting. The book uses a double space between sentences. While this may be how many of us learned to type in the 80s and before, it is certainly a no-no in publishing and makes for some jagged looking copy. Night Shade Press, please take note!

I've always liked the work of Walter Jon Williams. His very first book, Knight Moves, was a Zelazny knockoff but he soon moved on to Cyberpunk and high tech sf. This book returns to the earlier form, with a preternaturally competent hero whose life spans centuries. Zelazny's heroes usually (though not always) worked in the shadows. Their actual identities were often unknown to the people whose lives they manipulated. Our hero in this book, Aristide (real name Pablo Perez) started life as a top computer scientist, participated in the establishment of the artificial intelligences which now run civilization, and spends much of his time as a vagabond swordsman investigating the "implied spaces," the spaces that grow naturally out of the artificial building of pocket universes.

On one such adventure, Aristide runs across a plot to take over all the Universes. After alerting the authorities, he volunteers to be a secret agent on a pocket Universe from which many kidnapping/brainwashings seem to have taken place. He sets up a persona named "Franz Sandow," an obvious homage to Francis Sandow, the protagonist of Zelazny's excellent Isle of the Dead. In Zelazny's book, Sandow was a "worldscaper," who could call upon mystical, even godlike powers to do his work. In this book, Aristide is almost as powerful, but his power depends upon his alliance with Endorra, one of the great artificial minds that run civilization.

My only complaint is the deus ex machina nature of the ending. Aristide gets a brilliant revelation about the nature of the Universe that the minds are able to use to come up with new technology. More than a little too pat, but still, I loved the concept, I loved the characters and I loved this book.

This novel was like my personal energizer bunny. It just kept compelling me to keep reading. How can you go wrong with pocket universes, matrioshka arrays, wormholes, immorbid societies, clones, customized bodies, and AI pets? Sure it's a mashup of a lot of current SF ideas but that what makes those ideas great - they are worth reading about more than once. And yes it does appear to be a reworking of Aristoi but I loved that book too. And, thank you, it does actually qualify as entertainment - it doesn't end on a low note or ask the reader to supply the ending. And finally it stitches together a number of the things the author clearly enjoys writing about which translates to fun for the reader (and probably to tax deductions for those scuba trips!).