The clues point to a mysterious golden city called Otherland, but everyone who tries to find out what's going on ends up dead. Some of the younger kids, including her brother Stephen, have logged into the net, but they can't get back out. $150,000 ad/promo.īest-selling fantasy author Tad Williams ( Tailchaser's Song, the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series) begins a far-reaching cyberpunk saga with Renie Sulaweyo, a teacher in the South Africa of tomorrow, realizing something is wrong on the network.
TAD WILLIAMS OTHERLAND VOLUME 1 SERIES
Also I'd give my right arm to play Middle Country it sounds bloody marvellous.The first of a four-volume series journeys into a strange world of the near future, where virtual reality encompasses all aspects of society and boundaries are limited only by the power of the imagination, and a dark conspiracy involving the worlds's most powerful individuals threatens to destroy everything. If you can look past the sheer length of City of Golden Shadow you'll find great story with some fantastically memorable characters that you can't help but care about. The perk of the length is that the diverse cast has time to develop and you will truly care about all of them. The villains are suitably villainous, the kind you love to hate while the protagonists are diverse, deep and fantastically rendered. What really shines, as in all the Tad Williams books I've read, is the characters. The protagonists must then delve into that virtual world in order to thwart the bad guys (as yet undefined) plans and save the people they love. This idea that VR is ubiquitous forms the main conceit of the book with the rich villains setting up a ridiculously complex virtual playground for themselves and trampling everyone in the process.
I did eventually get to the end of this but I can legitimately say that it is one of the very worst novels I have ever actually read in its entirety and I certainly won't be reading the remainder of this series - the very thought of another 3000 pages of this tripe makes me gag.Ĭity of Golden Shadow is a sci-fi epic set in some undefined future where the Internet has gone all VR a bit like Ready Player One but written years before. A novel about VR and conspiracies provides rich material for dramatic storytelling but here this promising concept has been squandered utterly.ĭo everything you can to avoid reading this and make sure you warn others who might be tempted by the tantalising cover blurb. What makes this whole desperate endeavour even more disappointing is that there is actually the germ of a good idea buried (very deeply) somewhere in this mess. In its place are endless, wordy, barely literate paragraphs of what ultimately, when all is said and done, amounts to textual diarrhoea. Completely absent is any concept of story, plot, pacing, characterisation or anything else that would vaguely resemble an actual novel. Tad Williams is a man who clearly loves the sound of his own voice but evidently is so boring that he can only get himself heard by writing devastatingly tedious tomes such as this one.
Badly written, dull and horrifically long to an extent that is actually beyond belief (in the sense that I'm forced to ask: how did this utter rubbish ever get published?).
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