City of Golden Shadow (Otherland, Volume 1)

This book is amazing. I realize that a few people didn't enjoy it very much, but that is there perception,(plus they have probably read more books then I have) however, this book satisfied the hunger I have had for a deeper reading experiance. This book really brings you into Tad William's world. You may look at the book and think it is to big for you to read, but once you start you can't put it down. Everything in William's world, characters, ideas, technology, and culture, is slowly taught to you just as it would be in the real world. It is easier for the mind to remember something if it is taught slowly and regularly. Not just having a huge sum of information shoved into it suddenly and then expected you to remember it at the end of the book. That is one reason why the book is so long, most of it is familiarising you with the surrondings in William's world. There is just so much information in this one book its amazing. You will learn about African history, Bushman history, some very very very probable ideas of the future, some computer knowlege, (this book it for you if you love computers and the internet) and so much more that the list would go on forever.

You should probably learn the rest out for yourself and buy the book. It is a book for people who love computers and computer technology. I have a real apreciation for technology and I beleive that helped me enjoy this book even more. Also if you love books that ask a lot of indirect question on life, this is a book for you. I myself give it five stars and can't wait to read the next book, but you should read it and rate it yourself.

In many ways, this is an unconventional work.

It is not a series of four books. It is one big honking book published in four chunks.

In pacing and plotting, it reminds me of a 100-issue run of a comic book. There's a continuously unfolding series of events, building out from the center, but not necessarily toward ever increasingly dramatic climaxes.

What Williams has done here is ingenious. He really hasn't created any new plot devices or directions; you'll see few things here that you've never ever seen before. What he has done is to combine them all.

Sure, we saw (for just one example) human minds wired into vast virtual reality in the Matrix, but we have no idea how they got there. Plenty of government conspiracies, plenty of power-mad scary guys. But ordinarily these works get fuzzy around the edges, and the writer asks us to accept that some things just ARE so he can get on with the main story.

What Williams does is shuffle these several different novels together and set them up to lean on each other. And where other authors follow a narrative thread only so far and then say, "Well, yeah, there's another story over there, but we don't have time for it, so come on back here," Williams shows us all of everything, and shows us some combinations of plot elements that we might never have imagined.

If you like reading these multivolume works for the enormous drama and a payoff whose operatic grandeur is proportional to the page count, you may nod off around book three here. And the characters are moving and effective, few stick in your head weeks after you've finished the work. But what Williams gives us instead is a vast, far-ranging, multi-character, multi-multi-themed tapestry that is enormous in scope and which has to be walked over a section at a time.

After reading the series "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" several years ago, I mentally noted Tad Williams as fantasy-writing force to remember. Even though that series fit the stock formula fairly well, it did it with panache. The heroes were not morally squeaky-clean and were a little rough around the edges. That is to say, they were living, breathing people who would have fit in with the masses of humanity in any era. They were Everyman thrust into extraordinary circumstances.

So, when I saw that Mr. Williams' next series strayed from the realm of fantasy, I feared that he might be over-reaching himself. I was a fool to have worried. Although I have only read the first book of "Otherworld" so far, I have to place Mr. Williams in that small group of writers (Jules Verne, Stephen Donaldson, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe, and a few others) that have been able to produce masterworks in both the fantasy and SF genres.

And what SF it is! For a half-baked synopsis, we are thrust into the middle of the 21st century, where the entire planet Earth has become an electronic global village for those of enough means to afford it. What we think of as today's world-wide web has grown beyond all bounds and has practically taken on a visceral presence. To those with good enough equipment, the net has supplanted the physical world as their place to shop, to sight see, and to seek pleasures undreamed of in real life (or, RL as it is known to the citizenry of the day). Of course, as is always the case, much of the world's population still lives at a third-world level while the super wealthy have managed to transcend even the bounds of the known net to devise their own fantastic playland, known to the few who are aware of it as Otherland. The creators of Otherland are performing some evil deeds that somehow involves trapping pre-teen and teenage hackers in a state of stasis for some yet unknown sinister purpose. The story centers around a group of friends and relatives of some of the kids imprisoned in the net, others with axes to grind against the founders of Otherland, and a few rouge constructs loose in the net that are out to bring down the powers that be. I don't think I've given anyway any secrets that will decrease your enjoyment of the book.

Does this sound suspiciously cyberpunk, or what? But, it is cyberpunk with panache. Mr. Williams shamelessly mixes in a little "Jack in the Beanstalk", a little "Alice in Wonderland", a taste of Philip Jose Farmer's "Riverworld", and just enough "Martian Chronicles" to know it's there. It is cyberpunk with a sense of humor, but also with a sense of dread. As is the case with George R. R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire", this is not a series for everyone. It is intense and some characters come to rather gruesome ends. It is not quite as graphic as Mr. Martin's series, but there are some unsettling moments. Having said that, I will also say that it's no more frightening than anything else in the genre, so take that as you may. Also, like Martin's series, each book is a segment of the larger whole, hence the book ends with a cliff-hanger. I don't know about you, but I prefer this to a contrived resolution at the end of each book just for neatness sake that could blow the whole flow of the story.

The main characters are sometimes a little rough, but are sympathetic. They have their times when nothing will go down better than a cigarette and a beer, but they also have their moments of nobility. The advances in computer networks and virtual reality are a reach from today's technology, but are plausible (a main requirement for high quality SF). And, I say this as a career systems engineering professional. There is only one instance of *deus ex machina* concerning the character Dread, but it does help advance the plot so nicely that it can be overlooked. There was one section of the book that almost stuck me as being cartoonish, but I felt a tad (groan. . .) of vindication when Mr. Williams used the same adjective in the synopsis of this book that appears in the second book of the series. The high points so far outweigh the low that I feel almost criminal mentioning them. . .

I have had this book in my possession for several years now but waited until all four books of the series were in print to begin reading. So far, the wait has been worthwhile because I'm not planning on slowing down my enjoyment of this series for anything!!

The vision this book projected nearly blinded me. The book opens spectacularly and keeps hitting you with a brilliantly protrayed world and facenating characters. This is the best sci-fi fatasy blend that I have ever read. Williams weaves in and out of sub-plots, building up suspence with remakable effectiveness(I bought the sequal the day I finshed it).

Children are collasing into unexplianable comas after trips on the net. People are finding mysterious keys, and visions of a golden city. A dreaded serial killer is attacking a secret society, to protect his employers. All these events lead to the golden city where some answers are held. This story is a fun ride through a world that is a remarakable feat of imagination. Anyone can think up of a story like this, but it takes real talent to make it work.

This book is really the first part of four, of what is one book. Williams comments on this, saying he wrote the outline as just one story, but he obviously cannot publish one 3,000 + page book.

Otherland Vol. I is an excellent and highly imaginative blending of SF and Fantasy which can proved a great deal of enjoyment for readers who don't have the wrong expectations. This is not actually a complete book but merely the first fourth of a gigantic story being published in 4 parts. Unlike some other massive sf adventures on this scale (David Wingrove's Chung Kuo for instance), Otherland does not cover the lives of dozens of characters over the course of several years, but only a handful of characters over a span of time measured in days. Needless to say the story is extremely detailed and progresses slowly toward its goal. Reader's expecting a speedy resolution to the story's plot will be disappointed. Rather, enjoy each moment for what it itself contains. Even as the main story thread procedes slowly forward, interesting events occur on the charcters lives. This story is a long road, but the real joy in it is the journey.