Implied Spaces by Walter John Williams

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So if someone had cryogenically frozen Robert Heinlein mid-late career, let's say The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress…ish, before he got too . . . y'know. And then they revived him in the mid-aughts and gave him a crash course in modern computer science and fantasy role-playing games? This would totally be the book he'd write in response. It was the talking AI cat that really got me there. But the self-obsessed semi-immortal adventurer who treats every occasion as an amusement park built specifically for his entertainment, with an overlapping string of interchangeable lady friends didn't hurt either.



It's not an insult, exactly. This is fun, universe-hopping sword-swinging scifi, where we start inside an RPG so big, millions of people live and die in it, and move on to a war for the future of the solar system. But the stakes are so deliberately low -- no one can actually die permanently -- that the war is as much an RPG as the opening fantasy game setpiece. And one could be forgiven for reading the whole thing as a charming but hollow, and vaguely masturbatory, trip through an entire universe devised to entertain and reflect the protagonist. Who is just not that interesting.



. . . The brilliant AI cat was built by the protagonist to be female, and has a cutesy, belittling name (no seriously, it's actually Bitsy . . . get it?). Because it's totally that kind of book.



In conclusion: Heinlein.





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