_Implied Spaces_, by Walter Jon Williams

[alexxkay]

Exceedingly enjoyable space opera.

kestrell received an advance review copy of this, and I was able to read it after her. It's just been published, so a review now seems timely.

Although one cannot generally judge a book by its cover, in this particular case, you won't go far wrong. I am extremely impressed with the cover artist, Dan dos Santos. The cover is not only an attractive, eye-catching piece of work, but it *does* clearly indicate what kind of book you're getting; the artist clearly both read and 'got' the book. In the foreground, we see a moustached adventurer in an Arabian Nights-esque costume, turban on head, sword in hand; by his side, a small black-and white cat. Ok, so we're clearly in for some sword-and-sorcery hijinks. But behind the central figure is a high-tech wormhole, leading to a city full of fantastic green towers. So our Sword and Sorcery is imbedded within an SF background, check. Further dimensional portals are visible in the background, two clearly enough to see details. One shows a dolphin cavorting, foreshadowing the undersea society out hero will visit for part of the book. And crowning it all, a portal showing planets spinning in space, giving some indication of the scope we will be expanding to before we're done.

The one inaccurate note hit by the cover is in the copy, where it refers to this as "a novel of the singularity." In fact, the book makes an explicit point that humanity deliberately avoided a "Vingean Singularity"; though they have advanced AIs, all of them are fitted with "Asimovian Safeguards". So humans are still humans, though they have fantastic wealth and effective immortality. Uploading, memory backups, and designer-crafted bodies are all commonplace. There has even been some interstellar colonization, albiet at STL speeds (with immortal uploads, you can afford to take lengthy trips).

Even more impressive, humanity has the technology to create wormholes to artificial pocket universes, designed as new worlds for particular human interest groups. Or, sometimes, coalitions of groups, as shown in the quote below. They have made a few dozen of these, and several feature prominently in the plot, offering a wide diversity of settings without (in some sense) ever leaving the solar system.

The science is rather hand-wavy, to be sure, which is part of why I class this as space opera. One of my few disappointments with the book is that some of the 'discoveries' of how to weaponize certain technologies struck me as blindingly obvious implications, and not the sort of thing that should take anyone by surprise. On the other hand, I regularly read james_nicoll's LJ, and he's never seen a dense energy storage device without calling attention to what an excellent bomb it would make, so I am perhaps not the typical reader in this regard. But this is a minor quibble about an otherwise excellent work.

Our hero, Aristide, is only incidentally an adventurer at first. He's mostly a traveling scholar, studying implied spaces. And what are implied spaces? I think it's time for a quote, which will also give you an idea of Williams' engaging prose style:

She rested her chin on her fist as she looked at him. "What are the implied spaces, exactly?"

He considered for a moment. "If we turn to the window," he said, and illustrated the point by turning, "we observe the Dome of Parnassus."

She turned. "We do. It wants cleaning."

"The dome, you will observe, is supported by four arches, one at each cardinal point."

"Yes."

"Presumably the architect knew that the dome had to be supported by something, and arches were as meet for the purpose as anything else. But his decision had consequences. If you stand beneath the dome, you'll see that there are blank triangular spaces beneath the dome and between the arches. These are called 'squinches,' believe it or not."

Daljit smiled at him. "I'm delighted to know there are things called squinches, whether you invented the term or not."

He bowed to her, then looked out at the dome again. "The point is, the architect didn't say to himself, 'I think I'll put up four squinches.' What he said is, 'I want a dome, and the dome needs to be supported, so I'll support it with arches.' The squinches were an accident implied by the architect's other decisions. They were implied."

"Ah." She straightened and took her chin off her fist. "You study squinches."

"And other accidents of architecture, yes." He turned to her, put a hand down on its reflection in the polished onyx surface of her desk.

"Say you're a die-hard romantic who wants to design a pre-technological universe full of color and adventure. Say you want high, craggy mountains, because they're beautiful and wild and inspiring and also because you can hide lots of orcs in them. Say you also want a mountain loch to reflect your beautiful high-Gothic castle, and a fertile plain to provide lots of foodstuffs that you can tax out of your peasants—many of whom are brain-clones of yourself, by the way, with a lot of the higher education removed, and inhabiting various specially grown bodies of varying styles and genders."

"You know," said Daljit, "I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when the medieval scholars and the Compulsive Anachronists, or whatever they were called, discovered that they couldn't afford their own universe without financial aid from the fantasy gamers, and that their tidy little recreation was now going to be full of trolls and dinosaurs."

Aristide grinned. "Perhaps you're underestimating the percentage of medievalists who play fantasy games."

"Perhaps."

"But in any case, the fertile valley has to be adjacent to the ocean, because the river's got to go somewhere, and in the meantime you've got this mountain range with its romantic tarn over here... so what goes in between?"

She looked at him. "You're going to tell me it's a squinch."

"Bingo. By the time you've got all your computations done and dumped all the energy into inflating a wormhole from the quantum foam..." Aristide made little rubbing gestures with his fingers, as if he were sprinkling alchemical powders into an alembic. "...and you've stabilized the wormhole gate with negative-mass matter, then inflated a soupcon of electrons and protons into a pocket universe complete with a flaming gas ball in the center... Once you've got your misty mountain range and your moisty river valley, what goes between the mountain range and river valley is implied by the architecture, and is in fact a high desert plain, like the Gobi, only far less attractive..."

A whirring began as one of the machines in the room turned on its fans. Daljit looked briefly at her displays, then turned to Aristide again.

"So you study this desert?"

"I study what adapts to the desert. The desert wasn't intended, so whatever lives there wasn't intended to live there, either. It's all strayed in from another ecosystem and adapted to the desert, and it's adapting with surprising speed."

Remember how I said I was really impressed by the cover art? In the city visible in the portal behind Aristide, there is a dome supported by four arches, squiches clearly visible. (Williams did not invent the word, by the way. It's a real architectural term, and one of my favorite new-to-me words of the past few years.)

While exploring the squinches, Aristide happens to discover rather more than he was bargaining for: a secret threat, perhaps potent enough to put all of humanity at risk. The scale gradually expands from that of single sword-duels, to hurling around matter and energy in quantities that E.E. "Doc" Smith would envy. But even at the grandest scales, human nature is still what's driving the plot.

There are plenty of surprises, many pulled off by clever writing tricks. The pacing was superb, with periods of intense action alternating with calm and/or suspense. There are romances, albeit rather elaborately star-crossed. There's just a touch of philosophy, as well, though that touch turns out to be surprisingly relevant to the plot. I found the ending quite satisfying, though it was bittersweet enough that some might not agree. Hollywood would probably change it, but I like it as is.

Having dealt lightly with setting, plot, and style, it remains only to say that the story is full of memorable, likeable characters. (Well, the villian turns out to be something of a prat, but he is the Bad Guy, after all.) They're competent without being supermen, and I celebrated their triumphs and sorrowed at their failures.

Come to think of it, this book reminds me rather a lot of mature period Heinlein, at the peak of his writing ability, but before he grew self-indulgent. It resonates especially with _Glory Road_, though it has different themes. Highly Recommended.