The Fourth Wall

December 19, 2011
Williams turns in a sedate and sinister near-future mystery to follow thrillers This Is Not a Game and Deep State. Sean Makin is a former child star who at 29 has resorted to humiliating himself on reality TV. The protagonist of the earlier books, Dagmar Shaw, hires Sean to star in an unusual multibranched movie serial, and soon he’s being stalked and his co-workers start turning up dead. Has his deepest secret made him a target, or has the mysterious Dagmar drawn him into something terrifying? Sean is not a sympathetic character, but his in-depth moviemaking knowledge and experience with Hollywood’s dark side are engaging. Dagmar appears enough to satisfy fans, though she may look undeveloped to those who missed her previous adventures. Williams is a master of the little details that add depth to his exceptional writing and bring his world to life.

January 1, 2012
Another tale about AR (augmented reality) games designer Dagmar Shaw (Deep State, 2011, etc). Present-tense narrator Sean Makin, a highly successful child actor whose parents stole all his money, is now reduced to near-penury, alcoholism and appearances on Celebrity Pitfighter, a reality-TV show wherein washed-up actors like Sean duke it out. Until he meets Dagmar Shaw. Dagmar, six months pregnant, has a project in the works, Escape to Earth, part movie, part serial, part game, in which Roheen, an anthropologist from another dimension, is stranded on Earth by evil beings and, in a globe-spanning series of adventures, enlists smart, youthful allies to help him try and get home. Sean is perfect for the part because his condition, pedomorphosis, has given him a huge baby-like head and freakishly long arms and legs. Sean grabs the opportunity, promises not to drink and even welcomes Joey da Nova, Dagmar's has-been director, with whom Sean once worked well (and about whom he holds a guilty secret). Everything's perfect for Sean—until somebody tries to kill him. Worse, members of the production team are being murdered. Sean begins to wonder about Dagmar, whose secretiveness seems extreme even for Hollywood, and her backer, a shadowy Indian businessman who made billions from information technology, and if he can stay alive long enough to figure out what else is going on. Despite his guilty secrets, Sean's an enormously appealing protagonist, while the tightly woven, expertly pitched narrative brims with Southern California ambience and in-depth knowledge of movies, games, surveillance and information. So it comes as only a small disappointment that the resolution of the murder mystery is a bust. Williams and Dagmar fans will rejoice, and it should attract the near-futurists and techno-thriller crowd as well.

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Starred review from February 15, 2012

Former child actor Sean Makin finds himself reduced to taking gigs on the lowest type of reality television shows to make ends meet--and support his agent. A chance meeting with producer Dagmar Shaw, who is suspected of having connections with unsavory international cults and activist groups, lands him a starring role in a revolutionary film that is part reality TV and part scripted story. However, Sean discovers to his dismay that death seems to follow Dagmar, striking those close to her--thus making Sean a prime target. One of the founders of cyberpunk along with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Williams (City on Fire; The Rift) has previously demonstrated his talent for speculative fiction as well as for hard-science sf. In his latest novel, he brings 21st-century technology to the fore but never loses sight of his characters' humanity amid a steadily dehumanizing world of mad media and instant everything. VERDICT Fans of Williams, cyberpunk, and authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson should enjoy this savvy take on technology and entertainment.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2012
The third novel to feature game-designer Dagmar Shaw (although she isn't the lead character this time) is a hybrid of near-future science fiction, Hollywood story, murder mystery, and family drama. The central character, as well as the book's narrator, is Sean Makin, a former child actor whose career has sunk so low that he's putting in an appearance on something called Celebrity Pitfighter. Then, out of the blue, comes an offer of the lead role in a high-profile, big-budget epic produced by Shaw (who, in previous novels, was involved in some pretty harrowing intrigue). The book is a rather radical departure from the previous Shaw novels, which were told in the third-person, with Shaw as the protagonist; but it's a smart departure, allowing readers to see Shaw through the eyes of a very likable observer. And the blending of mystery-thriller, science fiction, and traditional Hollywood-story elements is hugely successful. It's one of those ambitious, genre-bending books in which you keep seeing, as you read, ways the story could fall apart under its own weightbut it never does. Surely the best of the Dagmar Shaw series and one of the author's finest novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)