Implied Spaces

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!).

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.

The plot isn't terribly deep but it moves fast and is never boring. What more do you want?

My wife picked up this book for me at the library on a whim, and I read it with some skepticism (the cover art is a bit cheesy). But I was quickly hooked -- this is a wonderful book! It starts out with the appearance of a simple swashbuckling fantasy novel, but there are very early hints dropped that all is not as it seems. As you get further into the story, you see that it is not fantasy at all, but hard SF. The world Williams has created is believable and engaging, as is the plot, which contains plenty of twists and surprises, without any of them seeming arbitrary or artificial; in hindsight, one thing leads very logically to the next and it all fits together artfully. I was pleased with every chapter, delighted by every plot twist, emotionally engaged with the characters, and disappointed only at the end when I was forced to leave the thoroughly enjoyable universe of the book. I read a lot of science fiction, and I'd say this is in the top five of all time. It's what hard SF should be.

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.