Book recommendation: Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams

April 4th 2008 at 5:09 am

I just finished reading Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams last night. I’ve enjoyed Walter’s books over the years, Voice of the Whirlwind being one of my favorites, Hardwired another. I’ll be working on an IGMS review of Implied Spaces for this month’s column, but I wanted to give it a shout out here because it is my favorite SF novel so far this year.

From the back copy:

Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, is a scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays, Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening to set off a nightmare scenario, perhaps even bringing about the ultimate Existential Crisis: the end of civilization itself. Traveling the pocket universes with his wormhole-edged sword Tecmesssa in hand and talking cat Bitsy, avatar of the planet-sized computer Endora, at his side, Aristide must find a way to save the multiverse from subversion, sabotage, and certain destruction.

This novel buckles some swash, along with some great SF-nal settings and crazy cool ideas and situations.

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