Night Shade Books inked a deal with Electric Velocipede a while ago. Subscribe to the magazine before 31 December and get two books from Night Shade for no extra charge. I couldn’t pass up that deal, particularly since they published a couple of books from Walter Jon Williams. One of my picks was this one, Implied Spaces.
Implied Spaces contains an interesting (to me) twist on the god/origin of the universe question, one that is kind of similar to the Deist view. What if we live in a created universe? But instead of an active god or even one that created the universe and then watches what we do, we live in an unintended experiment. Kind of like someone created everything that’s known to prove that 1 plus 1 equals 2, and life is the number 4. We were implied by what the experimenters were trying to do, but not what they cared about. What’s even more interesting to me is the idea that the creators aren’t intrinsically more powerful or righteous than us. More advanced, perhaps. Implying the idea that we could go to war with god
for creating such an effed up world.
Now, that whole idea of a created universe actually doesn’t really have a lot to do with the story, despite it being at the center of everything. It’s interesting, but it’s a MacGuffin. Two sides of an incredibly advanced human culture fight a war over the idea, but the motivation really could be anything. They could have been fighting over the last peanut butter cookie. Technologies used in the culture and war: human reincarnation, life extension/immortality, pocket
universes, interstellar travel, artificial intelligence, human brain/computer integration, nanotechology, and I’m sure other things I don’t remember.
The beginning of the war, where Aristide (the main character) learns humanity is under attack on a deliberately iron age pocket universe where he plays at being a swordsman, is pretty strong. The end, where the two sides throw massive space weaponry against each other, is solid as well. The middle kind of lost me a few times though. I didn’t understand the prose sometimes. And the constant If I can think of this, so can the enemy, so the enemy must have something else planned
argument got pretty tiresome. But that was the middle, not the end. So overall this is a thumbs up.
Other blogged reviews:
Title: Implied Spaces
Author: Walter Jon Williams
Cover creator: Dan Dos Santos
Imprint / publisher: Night Shade Books
Format: Hardcover
Length: 265 p.
Publication date: June 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-59780-125-6
