Implied Spaces
By Walter Jon Williams
Hardcover: 265 pages
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-59780-125-6
Plot Summary:
In the pretechnological universe of Midgarth, the swordsman Aristide and his talking cat Bitsy are traveling across the desert when they encounter a group of caravan guards. From the group’s leader, a troll, he learns that a band of particularly vicious marauders has caused a pile up at the local oasis since less well armed groups have been disappearing and everyone is afraid to move until they either build up their forces or the caliph’s army shows up to protect them. Curious, Aristide continues to the oasis and in short order organizes things sufficiently to get all the various caravans together to attempt to make the crossing to the coast and safety. The resulting adventure ends with the marauders being destroyed, disturbing intelligence being gathered, and Aristide taking off as fast as he can for the Womb of the World, the gate that leads out of the universe and into the places beyond.
Cut to…the very technological Myriad City in the universe of Topaz where Aristide is meeting with friend and former companion Daljit and discussing what he discovered during his time in Midgarth. And now we begin to learn what is really going on.
The time is over a thousand years hence, and humanity has come a long way. The solar system has been reengineered, nanotechnology has been mastered (bringing, among things, immortality, resurrection from backup, and Xeroxing of people on demand), colonies are established around the nearby stars, and vast artificial AI platforms arranged in a “Matrioshka array” around the sun generate wormholes linking to artificial universes that can be customized to various useful (or at least whimsical) purposes. And the man who made all this possible, Pablo Monagas Perez, is nearly a thousand years old and has recently taken to calling himself Aristide…
What follows is a grand romp through conspiracies, war, revelations about the nature of the universe, and a cautionary tale about ones past really coming back to haunt you.
OA Relevance: Moderate to High
Although the technology and society depicted here share many similarities with OA, there are sufficient differences (particularly in humanity’s relationship with its AIs) that the match is not as broad as one might think.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
This is a fun, well written story and I greatly enjoyed reading it. Williams creates a likable, fairly well fleshed out main character and a complex and interesting future. Reading the story I found myself wanting to know more about the future world he depicts. That said, the focus of this story is all on Aristide and the development of the other characters in the story suffers somewhat for that.
Overall Rating: Very Good
Overall this is an interesting, imaginative, and rich story filled with neat ideas and great imagery. While the average OA reader won’t find anything shockingly new here, there is a nice spread of neat concepts and the view is from a somewhat different direction than what we normally depict here. Buy it.
More about the reviewer, Todd Drashner, here.
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