It’s the far distant future. Unfortunately, it takes a while to figure that out. Williams plunges you mid-adventure into the life of Astride, a scholar cum adventurer, whose alleged goal is to study the ecology of implied spaces.
What’s an implied space?
They are often unintentional. The legs of a chair create an implied space where they meet the seat and floor. The space is secondary to the design. Optical illusions are often intentional implied spaces.
Think of your kitchen cabinets. They don’t go all the way to the floor. They have a base set 2-3 inches off the ground. It’s necessary supporting structure for the design, but the design could easily have used the slab of the house as the bottom of your cabinets. Peel up the bottom of your cabinet and you’ll find an implied space, created because the designer wanted to cabinets to start higher up. What lives in that implied space? What flora and fauna have made it home?
interruption of the lines and circles
Hopefully, it’s nothing too terrifying. Dust bunnies that managed to infiltrate gaps (another implied space), a roach or two, more if you’re particularly slovenly or are deliberately providing a breeding ground.
We meet Astride, our hero, as he searches implied spaces and attempts to catalog what lives within. He mostly doesn’t pick fights, but he doesn’t back down either. He’s accompanied on his adventure by Bitsy, his cat and familiar. Astride comes off as a bit of a semi-lovable ass.
Very minor spoilers follow:
He’s on a world in a pocket universe that humans created with the help of 11 shackled orbiting Sol. They’re shackled so they don’t go Skynet on us. We’ve had some very nasty wars between now and Astride’s era including bio wars, conventional wars, and the Ctrl-Alt-Del war. That pushed us to create these pocket universes to help spread humanity off Earth. Less chance of species death.
We have the knowledge and ability to control the fundamental constants of these universes. Change the speed of light, universal gravitation constant, you name it, they’re just numbers.
The AIs control the wormholes. Astride and his contemporaries use them as express service to the pocket universes. Bitsy is an avatar of one of the AIs. That gives Astride a leg up on, well, everybody.
He gets in a few fights, and we learn that he has a superweapon housed in his sword. Point and shoot, and the bad guys vanish through very small wormholes into a dismal pocket universe Bitsy created just for Astride.
Problems arise when bad guys show up with their own superweapons.
Mostly a fun romp with a twist at the end that made me smile and almost love the book.
The story is a 6 on the Feral scale. It has a few flaws I couldn’t quite forgive.
The science is surprisingly strong, if outdated in some cases. Another 6 here.
Major spoilers and gripes follow.
We never get a satisfying explanation regarding the first bad guys we meet. They are blue-skinned priests with their own little wormhole projectors built into spheres attached to their index fingers by tendrils of flesh. Why? If you’re launching a covert plan for the conversion of all of humanity, why choose sharp-fanged, blue-skinned creatures with strange balls hanging from their fingers? They’re not going to stand out at all…
Humanity is nearly immortal – just need to make sure your backup is current and that someone knows when to throw the switch to create your new body from a Pool of Life. We can load these digital copies onto a hard drive and send them off to other stars, but for the most part, don’t.
One does get sent off to Epsilon Eridani. Sci Fi authors like it because it’s only 10.5 light years away and we can see it with the naked eye. It’s a youngish star with much higher variability than Sol. Bad neighborhood for a new colony. If we’re so advanced as to be making wormholes and pocket universes controlled by AIs, wouldn’t we think about stellar variability? Disaster ensues for the colonists, all 40 million of them, when a massive flare erupts. So, Williams knows about Epsilon Eridani’s variability, but makes his entire fictional future so ignorant as to ignore that tidbit.
One last gripe. Beyond sex, women play a very small role in Implied Spaces. The only female character of note is mostly a foil for Astride’s wit and throws herself into a couple of bottles of gin when she gets the bad news of the story.
I’ve read some great reviews of William’s other works. Based on this one, I’ll hold off for a bit.