Walter Jon Williams, This Is Not a Game. Victor Orbit, 2010, 461 pp. ISBN 978-1-84149-664-1

Rating: 6 out of 10

 

 

 

 

 

At the recent WorldCon75, one of the guests of honor was Walter Jon Williams. Although I had seen his name before (mainly on Amazon reading recommendations), I had never read anything from this author before. I liked his presence at the meeting and found his remarks insightful and funny, so I decided to buy one of his books, which he graciously signed for me.

This book is the first in a series of four (for now) about a character named Dagmar Shaw. Dagmar works for a company that creates huge multi-player on-line games, that have real-world components, for which she is the responsible operative. I am not into this kind of games at all, so I can’t tell whether this is a thing that already exists or not. However, it is not difficult to imagine that something similar could probably be done with current technology. The recent hype around Pokémon Go comes to mind, for example.

After some initial adventures, one of the protagonists is murdered and the story becomes a whodunit, with Dagmar using the possibilities offered by the game that she’s developing to find the killer. I found the story interesting, but not really fascinating, although there is admittedly quite some suspense at the beginning when Dagmar is caught up in some serious civil unrest. (I won’t go into more detail, to avoid spoilers). However, I would almost not think of this book as science fiction. As I said, the main theme of the book concerns the on-line game with real-life components, and that is not really all that original a thought (not even when taking into account that the book was written about 8 years ago). The story is placed in a world in the near future, but the political and societal background really is only that, background, and instead of the near future, the present could likely have been used without any fundamental changes to the narrative.

The fact that this, in my eyes, barely qualifies as science fiction is the main reason for the low rating that I give this book, but I cannot finish this without pointing to one thing that after a while started to irritate me mildly. The (generally brief) chapters have titles and all start, like the title of the book, with “This is not” (…a rescue, …a Batcave, …a dream, etc). This is slightly funny in the beginning, but by the end of the book, the gimmick runs thin.

In conclusion, I would recommend this book if you’re really into on-line role-playing gaming. If not, then your reading time is probably better spent elsewhere. I’ll give Williams another try and get one of his works that is more obviously science fiction, but will probably steer away from the other volumes in this series.