The Praise is Endless as the Sea

This Is Not a Game has grown up, into a mass-market paperback! (Yeah, okay, that doesn’t make sense, but bear with me.)

Probably on that account, there have been a lot of reviews appearing in the last few weeks, so I’m going to take a few moments to point to them with pride.

From Hornswoggler:

And if you know anything about Williams — if you’ve read his sophisticated and witty Drake Maijstral novels; or Aristoi, the great lost SF novel of the early ’90s; or the two magnificent far-future science fantasies Metropolitan and City on Fire; or incredible short stories like “Prayers On the Wind” — you know that he’s one of the best writers in the speculative fiction field, as consistently inventive and exciting and as compelling a storyteller as anyone. If you haven’t read Williams yet, go grab whichever of those earlier books sounds the most intriguing — or Days of Atonement, one of the best near-future police-procedurals ever written, or the great cyberpunk novel Hardwired, or…you can get this book, which is still available, and practically new . . .

This Is Not a Game has one of the best subtitles I’ve seen in many years — “A Novel of Greed, Betrayal, and Social Networking” — and that’s a good description of this novel. It’s a compelling story about the kind of people that have been driving the future for the last generation, and what might be next; a thriller on both a conceptual SFnal level as well as in its plotting. As always, Williams tells a story that keeps the pages turning while creating real, rounded characters in a deeply believable world — he’s just one of the best out there at the SF game.

From Mystery Book Blog:

For a 462-page book, this is a pretty fast read, because Walter Jon Williams does a great job of moving this action-based thriller along. One of the underlying concepts is complex, but Williams doesn’t let that stand in his way of writing a good tale. He distills what readers need to know into digestible packets and lets it rip . . .

I’m going to use that word again: surprise. It was a pleasant surprise to find a realistic female character who didn’t feel it necessary to be a superwoman or to compete with the big boys, but who turned out to be brave and resourceful despite her self-doubts.

And from Fantasy Book Critic’s list of Favorite Novels of 2009:

Expertly written and executed, scarily relevant, and massively entertaining, “This Is Not A Game” should be on everyone’s reading list…

That summed it up rather nicely, I thought.

Now that the book is available at popular prices, you should be able to afford to buy lots of copies.

And by the way, isn’t the new cover purty?