Customer Reviews

This Is Not a Game: A Novel

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I've been reading Walter Jon Williams since he wrote Hardwired and Voice Of The Whirlwind. But I have not found his recent work as good as the books he wrote all those years ago. For example, I thought that Implied Spaces was a weak book. I was pleasantly surprised by This Is Not A Game, which I found to be Williams' best book in some time.

The book is written in a three act form. The first part of the book is fascinating and sets the context for the moral issues that arise later in the book. Reading this book it seemed to me that Williams was "doing" an impression of William Gibson, picking up on some of the themes that Gibson has touched on. I enjoyed this, especially because Gibson hasn't been doing Gibson much these days (sadly his Spook Country was one of his weakest books). Nor do I see anything wrong with one artist being influenced by another.

This Is Not A Game is set in the relatively near future. One of the things I enjoyed about this book is its technological speculation. I am a computer scientist and I found most of the speculation reasonable. There was some suspension of disbelief required when it comes to the ability of software to "learn", but I didn't find that this detracted from my enjoyment of the story.

One way I judge a book is whether I'm still thinking about it after I've finished reading it. I keep thinking of bits and pieces of This Is Not A Game.

I like Williams' work, and both "Aristoi" and "Metropolitan" are favorites. "Game" is a couple of steps below those. The first (and best) segment, in which a Dagmar, game producer is forced to rely upon strangers on the Internet for help escaping a collapsed state, is tense and tightly-plotted. The second, longer segment, which tells the story of Dagmar's game and a few real-life murders that may or may not be attached to the game's events, works less well.

Part of the problem may be that Williams simply doesn't have anywhere to go: he introduces only four characters of any consequence, and one of them is the narrator, so any mysteries will be solved after the second murder. That limited scope is a feature of the work in general: although we're told about 3 million people playing the game, there can't be more than six or seven people named in the book. Williams keeps only a very narrow window open on the action. Because of this, the book flies by, but there aren't any surprises for the alert reader.

A couple of moments in the novel that don't amount to much--the inept Israeli security company, the kung-fu Muslims who save Dagmar--gave me the impression that this book might have been trimmed down from something longer. If that's the case, it's too bad; a little more flesh on the bones of this story might have made the second half of the novel feel less inexorable.

This Is Not a Game (2008) is a standalone SF novel. It is set in the near future within Jakarta and Los Angeles.

In this novel, Dagmar Shaw is the executive producer of Great Big Idea, an alternate reality game company. She stages fictional conspiracies that involve thousands of players. She developed her interest in games at Caltech, where she played roleplaying games with Charlie, Austin and BJ. She married BJ for nine months, but then remarried and moved to England.

Charlie Ruff is the owner of AvN Soft, a software company that produces various forms of computer agents. He also owns the Great Big Idea game company.

Austin Katanyan is a venture capitalist. Charlie had helped him start his own business, which has been a huge success.

Boris Jan Bustretski is a customer service representative. BJ had been a partner with Charlie in the AvN Soft startup, but they had gone broke and Charlie kicked him out of the company. Now he is poor and bored.

In this story, Dagmar has just completed a game in India and is flying to Jakarta to catch a connecting flight to Bali. Her plane is late getting to Jakarta and she misses her connection. She gets tickets for another flight the following day and looks for a place to stay. The American hotels are full, so she takes a room at the Royal Jakarta.

Indonesia is suffering from a currency collapse. The government has fallen and the military intends to take over again. Many citizens have lost their jobs as well as their savings. People are rioting in the streets.

Dagmar informs Charlie of her situation. Other countries are planning to evacuate their citizens, but all American naval forces are committed to the Persian Gulf. So Americans in Indonesia have no way to leave.

Charlie hires a mercenary company to get Dagmar out of Jakarta. All the local security firms are already busy, so he hires an Israeli group. They will have to get their resources to Southeast Asia before Dagmar can be rescued.

Meanwhile, Dagmar appeals to her fans on Our Reality Network. She explains the situation and lets them start planning a rescue. The ARG fans get her out while the mercenaries are still trying to get their equipment in order.

When she gets back to Los Angeles, Charlie presents her with a new task. Dagmar uses her experiences in Jakarta to create a new scenario. Then someone murders Austin and Dagmar uses the ARG fans to discover the killer.

This tale also leads Dagmar to distrust Charlie and to hire BJ as a consultant. There are other murders and the ARG fans keep providing information on the real life crimes. Although Dagmar's rescue was TINAG -- see the title -- some fans are beginning to confuse reality with the game.

BTW, the chapter titles can be a little irritating. All start with "This is not...". Just keep on reading and eventually you can ignore the titles.

This novel drew my interest from the first page. It is mostly about Dagmar developing a healthy dose of suspicion in her culturally naive mind. Read and enjoy!

Highly recommended for Williams fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of roleplaying games, realworld murders, and smart women.

-Arthur W. Jordin

First I would like to say that one previous reviewer seems to equate this with a war/combat book. It is not. It is more akin to Michael Crichton's "Prey." Nor do I agree with the reviewer who felt that the female protagonist became too much of a good thing. Did she save the world? No, not by herself. Because of the deaths of others, the final actions fell to her.

Why she does what she does in the end is shaped by what happens in the beginning. That beginning is, putting yourself in her position, rather scary. Finding yourself in the middle of a financial and social meltdown in a different culture would be pretty scary. I like the way Williams plays out the situation. It has the ring of truth. There are bad people and there are good people. Different people have different agendas. Our girl is lucky she has not only a rich friend, but a resourceful group of people who use the "six degrees" to arrange an escape.

One of the interesting things is how the group functions. There are a couple of references to "the group mind" which do not seem so far off.
In fact, we see intelligent agents in the form of software and wetware.
The former are an example of the law of unintended consequences. And of the idea of emergence, where from the (not quite random) small-scale actions of many low-level software agents a large scale action can occur.

The use of the resource of the multitudes playing the game (which is of the type known as alternate reality game, where players get clues and points for solving intermediate puzzles on the way to running the script to its conclusion) is fascinating. Not only do you use the player's computing powers but also their real-life skills. Some are innocent pawns serving the aim of the villain, some the aims of the game or of the meta-game that involves the life and death situation the heroine finds herself in.

The book in some sense does not break new ground, but it does tell a good story well. The netbots, for example, could be the programs that currently do automated trading. We have seen in real life how it is sometimes necessary to thwart them to prevent major financial damage. Those are fairly simple codes. The kind let loose here are not so controllable.

And it is important to realize that whenever something bad does happen because of the actions of the software, it is because humans have created the situation that the software is able to exploit. The evil ultimately derives from human action or inaction.


All in all, a very good read. Lots of good ideas, well exploited.

This is not my favorite genre. But I figured Walter Jon Williams would put a new twist on the cyber thriller. And he does. This is not a serious work. The subtitle, "a novel of greed, betrayal, and social networking," whether supplied by the author himself or the publisher, gives that away. This is not a true whodunnit. There are only a few suspects, and the last part of the book, after the villian is revealed, is more of a how'll the protagonist will thwart the bad guy and, oh yeah, save the world than anything to do with the science of deduction. This is not a complaint. Mr. Williams does this smoothly, credibly, and with a great deal of suspense.

This is not a ponderous tale. It's fun, you'll probably like the way the online game players get together to first extract Dagmar Shaw, the protagonist-game creator, from a riot-torn Indonesia and back to LA, and then how they get together to help her thwart the bad guy and, oh yeah, save the world. But it's all more than a bit tongue in cheek. And one of the characters is really more of a running gag than anything else.

This is not an era that the author particularly likes. Along the way you'll get his take on the way science fiction writers are treated by their publishers, as well as his feelings about toilers in the service-industry vineyards--to say nothing of his obvious discontent with the present politico-economic system. This is not a book to pass by, if you're looking for something to pass the time.

It's a technothriller with large tokens of a murder mystery, all wrapped around an intricate knowledge of online forums and live roleplaying. The knowledge of this type of sub-culture is where the book's strengths really lies, with a lot of humor and some interesting scenarios embedded into the plot. The characterization and plot is decent, and the above high points are enough to get pass some melodramatic silliness with the Russian Mafia.

The core of the larger idea here is on the basic danger of an unregulated market, the way profit can emerge through ripple effects that cause violence and chaos in the short term, and global collapse longer term. Specifically, there's a system of automated trading viruses that have become very good at mindlessly increasing wealth for their creator, up to the level of netting billions by collapsing entire national currencies. As a sci-fi metaphor this works decently, and some of the strongest work in this vein occurs through description off all the very real human suffering and death produced by such (coerced, in this case) market forces. However the resolution, as practically mandated by the style and techno-thriller format, is far too pat and simplifies everything. Foil the psychopathically greedy villain, use millions of online players to carry out a complex Internet-wide debugging operation, end the economic menace. It's possible to quite literally put the genie back in the bottle here, and there's little sight of any more complex evaluation or possible remedy towards economic meltdowns conventional or SFnal. Perhaps that's expecting too much from this, more than Williams really aimed at. Still, the field could always use more ambition and depth, particularly in a time like this dealing in a speculative fiction way with this particular theme.

This book reminded me of and was better than: Stross' Halting State.

This book reminded me of and was worse than: Reynolds' Chasm City.

While some of the science fiction fans have given this book somewhat tepid reviews, as a mystery fan, I really enjoyed it. It was a fun read and quite suspenseful enough for me. The plot was complicated enough without bringing in many more characters, and I felt like I got two books for the price of one, with the two plot lines. Since I practically live on-line, I found some of the social commentary on the online world to be quite amusing. I would love to see another book like this one from Mr. Williams.

This is more of a modern thriller with a tech-heavy plot than full scifi. The main thrust of the story revolves around Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). Think World of Warcraft with a real world component. Now add in several murders, illegal online daytrading (to the tune of several billion dollars), and potential global anarchy. Starts strong and doesn't let go. Highly reccomended for anyone who likes thinking about the future in real terms. TINAG!! (This Is Not A Game)

My only quibble: the heroine is perhaps a bit too heroic towards the end. She manages to outwit the antagonist and the police with no previous law-breaking experience...while dealing with the murders of some close friends and a threat to her own life. All in the space of approx 4 weeks. Oh and {spoiler alert} she saves the world.

I finished the book just before the conflicker net bot scare of last April so I was able to imagine some interesting scenarios. Also, I'm an old 'Hard Wired' fan so I was glad to see some of Mr. Williams' new stuff and was quite pleased. His ability to weave current and "over the horizon" technology is both entertaining and thought provoking.

The Good: Great premise, likable characters, feels "today", an idea we haven't seen before

The Bad: Characters feel a tad generic, rushed ending

What would you do if MMO's were real? No, I actually mean real. That is what Walter tries to bring onto readers in This is Not a Game. They are called ARG's (Alternate Reality Games) and a mega corporation invests in writing the scripts, hiring actors etc. to plant clues in real world locations for people to solve, but what if the players were to solve real world murder cases in these ARG's? That is what Dagmar Shaw does and tried to find the mystery behind her three college friends. The book is chalk full of mystery, suspense and quite a bit of drama. Walter also tried the keep the book in "today" using internet terms like Facebook, YouTube, Xbox, etc. to keep it hip and cool. Does this make the book a sell out? No it does because Walter uses it sparingly and when it's appropriate.

Thanks to the book being very "now" a lot of younger readers might be interested, but the game has a huge political plot twisted in that has to do with attacks on foreign currency, and this may turn some of the dimmer minded away. The characters are very strong and likable in the book, but you always feel you not getting the whole picture. The book has great pacing and doesn't really jump around characters since it evolves around one (Dagmar) and you see what goes around her and in her mind. This makes you really like Dagmar, but she does seem a bit generic and average some times.

The book just really shows how social networking can get out of hand and become a nightmare, and thanks to Walter's choice of setting and sticking to the "now" this can actually happen today. The ended tended to be a bit rough and rushed, and I wished we could have known a bit more of what the characters were going to do after the end or if there was going to be a sequel (knowing Walter's work probably not). I highly recommend this book to gamers, social networking fanatics, sci-fi buffs, and anywhere into the "now".