Knight Moves by Walter Jon Williams
🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊
Walter Jon Williams never wrote a book I didn't like and this one is no exception. Easily among his best work, but in a very different vein than his most popular works. It lacks the tightness and narrative propulsion of Hardwired or Voice of the Whirlwind, and it's nowhere near as ambitious or gonzo as Aristoi. It's a much quieter book working in a lower register, but I think it's a work of genius in its own way.
On the surface it's a play-it-straight hard science fiction story about quasi-immortal scientists in a post-scarcity future trying to solve one last physics puzzle and settle some unfinished romantic business. The main character is a philhellene who has built himself a luxury cocoon at Delphi, styling himself as the new Apollo, and as a result the book is stuffed full of classical allusions (and even a bit of original verse!). All of that is catnip for me, and I'd have probably enjoyed this book even if it were a shallow genre exercise, but it's much more than that.
Scratch the surface and there's a well of deep feeling and some sharp psychological portraiture. The book is a poignant meditation on what life can even mean without death and adveristy, coupled with an exploration of the risks of outliving our passions. WJW's characters have been living hundreds of years in lives of perfect ease, and our lives may be brief and hard by comparison, but their predicament is (as with the best science fiction) an exaggeration of our own moment carried to its logical conclusion. I've always had a soft conviction that freedom from constraint deranges people, but it's not a popular observation, so I was pleasantly surprised to see WJW exploring the same idea at length with all his usual cleverness. He's imagined what a not-quite-dystopian "soft landing" for our seemingly endless technological progress might look like, but also held up a mirror to the boredom and aimlessness of middle age in modernity (or at least to modernity as it was before that boredom was replaced by a growing omnidirectional dread).
Recommended if you're feeling old, heartsick, or lost, which is to say I'd recommend it to anyone at all.