This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams – Review

This Is Not a Game: A Novel by Walter Jon Williams

To be fair, This Is Not a Game might have scored much higher on science fictional sensawunda had it not been for the big news stories of the last twelve months—global covert networks and the economies of entire countries collapsing are quite literally last year’s stories, and make This Is Not a Game more of a book of its day than I imagine was ever planned. Knowing a little something about the length of the publishing cycle, I rather suspect Williams, as he watched the news over the last year and a half, has been torn between feeling satisfied at having spotted the possibilities and frustrated at seeing the novelty bleed out of his plot.

As such, I feel we should read This Is Not a Game as a genuine hybrid, an effort to take the best bits of the technothriller and the SF novel and combine them into something that can straddle both camps. It’s perhaps more of a reflection on this reader in particular that this hybridisation should lessen the book’s appeal as science fiction, but nonetheless: This Is Not a Game is a technothriller with the distinction of being written with a respect for the reader’s intelligence, and I would love to see more books like it on the shelves at supermarkets and airports.

via Strange Horizons Reviews: This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams, reviewed by Paul Raven.