Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams

Implied Spaces is an incredibly detailed voyage through a multi genre world, shot through with barbs at our own pop culture. It starts with Aristide, a man who comes off like the all knowing NPC at times, traveling through a desert world inhabited by trolls, ogres and other fantasy creatures. With his magic sword and his talking cat Aristide joins a motley crew turning against a large band of thieves and their blue skinned priest overlords who have been attacking caravans and plundering supplies for months.

Did I mention that this is a science fiction novel?

Aristide, it soon turns out, is overly knowledgeable because this fantasy world is actually a constructed world, part of a larger multi-cosim where humans have advanced to the point of being able to “save” their personalities and memories, much like we save games on memory cards. The ability to reincarnate themselves into new, healthy and highly adapted bodies at will has lead to quite lengthy life spans.

Complications arise when the strange blue priests in the world co-created by gamers and anachronists wield the same power as Aristide possesses in his sword, a curious ability to say the least. In fact, the ability leads directly to the more modern world, where Aristide and his allies discover that someone, or something has been funneling humans from the unwired worlds elsewhere and reprogramming them as mental slaves. Call them zombies or pod people, someone, or something is building an army.

This barely scratches the surface though. Implies Spaces is packed with incredible amounts of detail. In the first few chapters the long description in nearly painful detail seems a little odd, but by the time the story stretches into an expansive multiverse the sheer amount of detail makes the story absolutely solid.

Aristides himself is an interesting tool used to establish the limits of the world. Given his position as an aged, respected and highly intelligent member of society unlike many other books on the market Aristide doesn’t have to figure out motives or plots, the reader eventually learns to trust his leaps of logic and suspicions as true. Of course, considering that A.I.s with brains the size of planets exist in these worlds Aristide’s intelligence is quite challenged.

The depth and detail of this book simply cannot be explained in a simple review. Expanding through both social and hard science fiction, as well as touching on mystery and fantasy, Implied Spaces is an impressive tale that’s surprisingly human at its core.