Implied Reviews

Hey,

So I finished reading Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams (author of Hardwired and Metropolitan).

It's a pretty darn good book. If you're into transhuman, post-singularity Sci-Fi, this is definitely a volume you want to pick up. In just under 300 pages you get an immense amount of speculative goodness.

It's the far future and humanity has constructed a group of giant AIs who build little wormhole universes for billions of people to live in. If you die, your backup gets spawed and while you're alive life is healthy and happy. The burning philosophical question is the Existential Crisis -- when you can do or be anything, what's the point of it all?

In an effort to relive the tedium, Aristide wanders about the various pocket universes investigating their "implied spaces", the parts of the universe that were not explicitly designed, but which must exist because of what has been designed. While off in the Adventure-Land universe, he stumbles across a plot to seize control of all humanity. This sets of a series of cat-and-mouse games and eventually a brutal war.

The writing is very strong and also includes one of the most unsettling chapters I think I've ever read. The ultimate enemy in the book is the only spot where it's a bit weak because he's pretty strongly implied from the beginning, but otherwise, there's just tons of great ideas all jam-packed together. I liked it quite a bit and I heartily recommend it to my sci-fi friends.

later
Tom

Implied Reviews

Hey,

So I finished reading Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams (author of Hardwired and Metropolitan).

It's a pretty darn good book. If you're into transhuman, post-singularity Sci-Fi, this is definitely a volume you want to pick up. In just under 300 pages you get an immense amount of speculative goodness.

It's the far future and humanity has constructed a group of giant AIs who build little wormhole universes for billions of people to live in. If you die, your backup gets spawed and while you're alive life is healthy and happy. The burning philosophical question is the Existential Crisis -- when you can do or be anything, what's the point of it all?

In an effort to relive the tedium, Aristide wanders about the various pocket universes investigating their "implied spaces", the parts of the universe that were not explicitly designed, but which must exist because of what has been designed. While off in the Adventure-Land universe, he stumbles across a plot to seize control of all humanity. This sets of a series of cat-and-mouse games and eventually a brutal war.

The writing is very strong and also includes one of the most unsettling chapters I think I've ever read. The ultimate enemy in the book is the only spot where it's a bit weak because he's pretty strongly implied from the beginning, but otherwise, there's just tons of great ideas all jam-packed together. I liked it quite a bit and I heartily recommend it to my sci-fi friends.

later
Tom