Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams

From the Publisher

From Walter Jon Williams, the celebrated and influential author of Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, and Angel Station comes Implied Spaces, a new novel of post-singularity action, pyrotechnics, and intrigue.
Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, a scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays, Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening to set off a nightmare scenario, perhaps even bringing about the ultimate Existential Crisis: the end of civilization itself! Traveling the pocket universes with his wormhole-edged sword Tecmessa in hand and talking cat Bitsy, avatar of the planet-sized computer Endora, at his side, Aristide must find a way to save the multiverse from subversion, sabotage, and certain destruction.

Publishers Weekly

In this grandly scaled space opera from bestseller Williams (Hardwired), swashbuckling computer scientist Aristide explores pretechnological "pocket" universes in search of interesting "implied spaces," the unintended regions that come into existence between deliberately designed structures. Then he uncovers evidence of a dark collective that's kidnapping people and sending them to pockets where a virus co-opts their minds and turns them into willing spies and assassins. Evidence implicates one of the Eleven planet-sized quantum computers, somehow corrupted in spite of its "Asimovian safeguards." Armed with a wormhole-edged broadsword and accompanied by his sidekick, Bitsy, an avatar of one of the Eleven in the form of a talking cat, Aristide finds himself hunted, brainwashed, killed and resurrected more than once before he learns the truth. Williams tells the tale with enthusiasm and a crisp, dry wit well suited to this entertaining blend of high adventure, intrigue and postsingularity technology. (July)

Jackie Cassada - Library Journal

In a distant future where artificial intelligences care for humans' needs and death is curable, computer scientist-turned-swordsman Aristide, along with his talking AI cat, Bitsy, explores the pocket universes created by machine intelligences, searching for the implied spaces-pieces of sculpted reality created out of necessity to support these worlds' architecture. On a primitive pocket world called Midgarth, he encounters evidence of a plot that could destroy civilization, and his travels suddenly take on a desperate importance. The versatile author of Voice of the Whirlwind and other hard sf and cyberpunk novels now uses the trappings of fantasy to explore some of science's most sophisticated ideas. Ever surprising, ever provocative, Williams's latest sf adventure belongs in most sf collections.

Kirkus Reviews

From Williams (Conventions of War, 2005, etc.), a far-future science-fiction yarn that employs sword-and-sorcery trappings to investigate philosophical questions. Thanks to native ingenuity and the computing power of an array of several planet-sized artificial intelligences orbiting Earth, humanity has consciously avoided a technological singularity; instead, wormhole engineering offers access to limitless artificial worlds, and nobody dies permanently-you simply resurrect your last memory back-up in a cloned body. Aristide, a computer scientist turned swordsman, perpetually amused both at himself and the universe's ability to astonish, studies implied spaces, disregarded regions not specified but suggested by the subtleties of architecture and geometry. While exploring the artificial world Midgarth, carrying his wormhole-tipped sword and accompanied by the talking cat Bitsy-she's actually an avatar of the AI, Endora-Aristide stumbles across a warrior-cult led by needle-toothed alien priests armed with tiny wormhole weapons. Recognizing the signs of a vast and deadly plot, Aristide returns to his home in the orbiting habitat Topaz to discuss the matter with persons he can trust. The allies must act before a bad situation deteriorates into another Seraphim Plague or a full-blown Existential Crisis . . . and that isn't even the half of it. An intelligent, delicate and precise novel of real depth: a pleasure to read, an undertaking to savor.

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