Book Review: Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams

Book Review: Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams

Published in 2009 by Night Shade Books

Cover illustration by Dan dos Santos

Walter Jon Williams is one of the foremost writers of Cyberpunk and related fiction living today. His novel Hardwired, is a classic in the CP genre, with Voice of the Whirlwind paving ground and expanding his repetoir.

His novel Angel Station is a CP (almost BioPunk) novel dealing with a pair of genetically engineered siblings fighting to save their father’s merchant spaceship, along with making a living and staving off larger more commercial shippers. It carried the CP envelope into the deep portions of space and the details of pharmaceutical use as well as planetary descriptions should be de rigueur required reading for the enthusiast.

From there comes the novel Aristoi, toeing the line between Cyberpunk Fiction and what would come to be called Singularity Fiction a few years after its first publication. This is an excellent read with some incredible concepts, several of which I really wish I had come up with, or were available in the Here and Now (Daemons mostly).

Now comes Implied Spaces. This novel came to the reviewers attention as a feature on the Science Fiction Book Club website (of which the reviewer has been a member of the SFBC since somewhere in the late 70s when it was all hardbacks and via the postal service), where it was spotted. Not until a copy was found in paperback at a Mass Market Bookseller was it picked up.

The novel is blazoned as A Novel of the Singularity and it fulfills this statement. There are AIs galore, wormholes as an everyday tool of civilization, uploading and downloading of personalities, and memes everywhere. It is a decent read, as the story progressed it felt more and more like a rehash or a reworking of the basic plot to Aristoi, which as the ending approached the 374 total pages, it really did remind me, the antagonist motives, etc, it really felt like a weaker version of Aristoi.

That said the ending was poignant and sweet, and while it is in this reviewer’s opinion the weakest of the five of his novels read so far, it is still worth picking up and giving it a chance. There are some superb concepts, especially the idea of The Implied Spaces (which bears investigation and elaboration) and the overall end ideas relating to the antagonist as well. Those are almost worth the price of admission by themselves.

Where to find him on the Internet:
Walter Jon Williams Website

Also a Gallery of Artwork for Dan DosSantos on Tor Books