City on Fire
I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t read the whole thing myself - five hundred pages in the present tense, all from the same character’s perspective. I couldn’t put it down.
I know I should do the proper book review thing and summarize the plot,
but City on Fire is a series book. The war from last book was not
quite over, nor was Aiah’s ascent from minor clerk to major power. The book
carries both of these on - nothing much else happens, except for [spoiler
deleted]. Walter Jon Williams appears to be in the middle of a trilogy.
I don’t know that I would have been so drawn in if I hadn’t read
Metropolitan. There were few new characters, none of them major. The world was the same,
and the glimpse into space just a one-scene preview of, presumably, the next book.
City on Fire was about power. The world produces plasm,
a bit of technobabble for which WJW has called it fantasy rather than sf. Plasm
produces anything you want. The economics of near-infinite power are handled
without any obvious contradictions, but it’s the politics of power that make the
novel shine. This is not, to paraphrase “Falling Onto Mars”, a love story. The
first chapter makes that clear, fuzzy as it may get later on.
Maybe the next book will be a love story. You never can tell.