Walter Jon Williams’s Dagmar Shaw series have come to embody, for me, one of the oft-angsted-over perils of writing fiction set in the very near (albeit unevenly distributed) future.

While the plot device chugging away out on the back-lot of The Fourth Wall hasn’t quite been pipped to the post by reality (unlike those from the series-starting This Is Not A Game, say), its convergence of ideas suffers a surplus of plausibility. Serial web-delivered science fiction TV-movies with social media and alternate-reality game promo up the wazoo? Sure thing, bindun. Oh, you want the audience to make the protagonist’s next decision, choose-your-own-adventure style? No worries; if you’ve got the bandwidth, we’ve got the flops and the code. And while the concealed purpose behind said innovative media vehicle is not only far more profound but more ethically intriguing than the technology itself, it gets very little stage time and hardly a handful of lines.

No sensawunda, no gosh-wow, no leap of imaginative faith required: a technothriller of sorts, then, albeit with a low-median value-set for the variable “thriller”. (For what it’s worth, The Fourth Wall also fails Bruce Sterling’s snarky technothriller litmus by neglecting to feature the POTUS as a walk-on character.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I? So, for the synopsis-hounds: The Fourth Wall follows on from This Is Not A Game and Deep State, which introduced us to Dagmar Shaw, an alternate-reality games director whose career arc is littered with leakages between the worlds she creates and the world she creates them within. Having been implicated in incidents of international terrorism (even if subsequently exonerated) her reputation precedes her—especially in Hollywood, gossip capital of the world, where she’s just begun pulling in talent for a highly secretive new project.

So even a washed-up child star like Sean Makin is smart enough to do some digging of his own when Dagmar asks him to audition. But given he’s fallen so low that he’s wrestling fellow Z-list nobodies in vats of cottage cheese in the hope of a few favourable column-inches, Sean’s in no position to be fussy. He does a test screening and takes the gig, winding up as the lead star of a sf-nal media vehicle that mashes up alternate reality and serial cinema in unusual ways, and to ends obscure.

Which is great for Sean: after years on the skids, his parents having absconded with his childhood earnings just before he reached legal maturity, and with his unusual physiognomy excluding him from all but the sort of novelty roles that exist for an adult guy with a baby’s face, he’s stoked to be working again, even if someone in a battered SUV keeps trying to run him over. Then other talent and members of the production crew start dying; cue a selection of skeletons, stage right and left, tumbling out of Sean’s closet just as often as Dagmar’s. Hijinx ensue.

In truth, I found Sean a very difficult lead character, and I suspect this emerges from a deliberate attempt to seek out an ambiguity of morality in him. He has suffered through no real fault of his own, true—but he’s insufferable as a result, and the only reason the pathos wins out is that the Hollywood doldrums can only be survived by meekly taking your knocks in the hope of a helping hand upwards; he must squelch his own sense of entitlement, sit up and beg like a good doggie.

Of course, he’s (partly? mostly? hardly?) a product of his environment—and, while I can’t speak to its accuracy, Williams’s portrayal of the venal narcissism of Hollywood and the celebrity circuit certainly comes across as believably banal. But Shaun lacks the will, determination or depth to be an anti-hero, lacks a graspable past for the reader to relate to. This makes a certain amount of sense: he’s an actor, after all, and wearing masks of performed emotion is what actors do. But following events from his point of view has a documentary feel to it, a falseness of affect familiar from low-budget ‘reality’ shows in which cheap actors play way below their paygrade, their suppressed shame leaking into their performances…

Perhaps, then, The Fourth Wall‘s true target is not technological at all. Perhaps it throws open the lid on a cynical industry long past its peak, ripping off mask after false face after veneer, portraying it—without, importantly, a whit of satire or subtext—as something akin to Hunter S Thompson’s famous depiction of television journalism: “a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.” The few nice characters are bit parts or bodybags-to-be; even Dagmar, seen from Sean’s vantage, comes across as an unstable and manipulative megalomaniac whose most redeeming feature is her long line of shadowy credit. Just another producer, in other words, albeit one who will make him the star he’s always believed he deserved to become.

What is sorely lacking, however, is any thematic depth, any exploration of implication or situation, any criticism of or engagement with the multiculti-technocratic meddling implied by the plot engine or the privileged worldviews that inform it. The raw material is all there, but it is used only as a distant backdrop for a busy and rabbit-from-hattish whodunnit with a side-serving of desserts that don’t feel entirely just.

All of which leaves me sounding like a critic with a book that refuses to be read the way he wants to read it. Which is exactly what I am: despite the near-future setting, despite the technological novums, and despite the genre pedigree of its author, the hard-to-define intellectual kicks that that make a book science fictional are almost entirely lacking in The Fourth Wall. Which isn’t necessarily to say it doesn’t more than pass muster as a contemporary technothriller… but it lacks the verve and energy-in-delivery of earlier books from the same series.

Put it this way: Walter Jon Williams has written a number of fine science fiction novels; this novel is neither science fiction, nor particularly fine.