And thus we complete the Dagmar Shaw trilogy, a very neat merging of very real games theory writ large upon a near future world just one step away from something very bad happening somewhere pretty much all the time.
Stop here if you’ve not read the previous two volumes as I will be briefly discussing events in the previous volume as they’ll be needed to understand what’s happening here. There’ll be only a few spoilers as such for The Fourth Wall as I’ll try to avoid doing that.
Dagmar Shaw has survived the events of the last novel and her personal life is doing much better as she’s married Ismet Kadri, a Turkish raised American citizen she met in the previous novel, and pregnant with their first child. ( Yes, it’s a spoiler, but a needed one.) So things are looking much better for her, but that state won’t last…
Williams throws a spanner in the works by making this novel a first person narrative by having it told from the viewpoint of Sean Makin, a way down on his heels out of work actor who was a well liked child actor whose career ended when he become a spectacularly ugly adult and is fit for almost no roles at all. And his millions were legally, more or less, stolen by his parents who of course pissed them away so there’s nothing to recover.
So he was surprised when he’s hired without even an audition for a series (!) of films she’s producing that have an ARC (Advanced Reality Game) component to them. And her backer is a billionaire Indian venture capitalist who Sean thinks is dabbling in films as a hobby but has other reasons for why he’s doing so. Sean’s going to play an alien in the films which will be adapted to do well in myriad cultures, so he’s very delighted to both being an actor again and being quite well-paid for it.
And then, as is often true, the center doesn’t hold and things go spectacularly wrong. Multiple people are murdered, conspiracies are put forth and some might even be true, and Sean discovers that the Devil you sign contracts with cares very little for you unless you serve their plans. And such plans they are.
If this is truly last novel in this series as I believe it is (though I mistrust Wikipedia a lot which is the source for that fact), the author has created a science-fiction trilogy has truly original as William Gibson’s three novels starting off with Zero History .
(Orbit, 2012)
