Implied Spaces
If you’ve looked at the cover of Walter Jon Williams’ Implied Spaces, you already know that it’s all science-fictiony, despite the fact that it starts off reading like a Fritz Leiber-esque sword ‘n’ sorcery novel. If you actually read the cover — a practice I thoroughly disrecommend — you’ve probably been spoiled further than that, which is a darn shame, because Williams paces out revelation just about perfectly, and a lack of knowledge about the contents of the book is the best way to appreciate that. If you know what the story is, the early part is probably going to seem a bit slower than it really should. Stupid book covers.
So anyway, my relationship with Walter Jon Williams continues to be weird. When I read Aristoi five years ago, I talked about how I’d mistakenly classed Williams as a “worthy” writer, but now that I realized he was actually a really good writer, I was going to go out and read a bunch of his other stuff. And then I proceeded to not do that for five years, and even now as I was reading Implied Spaces, I was surprised that he wasn’t all soberly respectable, and was instead writing fun SF. You’d think at some point, I would actually remember this.
I will say, though, that Implied Spaces wasn’t as good as Aristoi; in fact, I think it wasn’t even as good as Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol books, with which it has a lot in common. In particular, McCarthy seems to have thought through the implications of his world-building with a thoroughness that Williams lacks. Still, fun book, and this time I really will try to read more Williams books inside of five years.
Comments
I thought this was fun at the start, but ultimately crippled by the fact that the villain’s reason for trying to TAKE OVER the WORLD!!! didn’t make any sense.
That didn’t bother me, due mostly to the part where everyone treated it with the ridicule it deserved. A supervillain having a grandiose, adolescently silly goal isn’t a demerit in my book.
I don’t share your love of superhero comics, so I’d like something a tiny bit more coherent from my fictional villains.
By the way, your comment counter system is broken— the front page shows zero comments even for posts that manifestly have comments, like this one. If it makes a difference, I’m using Chrome in Windows Vista.
Almost certainly a caching problem Hold down shift while clicking the refresh button.
As for the villain, post-scarcity villains almost need to be motivated by some idosyncratically egocentric reason that doesn’t make rational sense — and it’s not like there’s any shortage of examples of real-world people being so motivated, so it’s plausible enough to me, as long as the book makes it clear that this dude is being semi-ridiculous, which this book did.
My main gripe was about their “backup” procedures. When you can back yourself up and make copies at leisure, you pretty much need to explain why there aren’t 40 of you running around at all times, to my mind. That’s the main area McCarthy thought through that I didn’t feel Williams had.
I end up thinking that “post-scarcity” supervillains are inherently kind of goofy for this reason, which is why I want something more sensible from them than from ordinary supervillains.