City of Golden Shadow (Otherland, Volume 1)
by Tad Williams
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tad WilliamsEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-01-01
ISBN: 0886777631
Number of pages: 792
Publisher: DAW
Book Reviews of City of Golden Shadow (Otherland, Volume 1)
Book Review: Every game needs some rules. Meet the Otherland Rule Book.
Summary: 5 Stars
Picture an imaginary chess board. Half black squares, half white squares-only instead of clearly defined pieces like pawns, castles, knights, bishops, kings and queens you have plain, uniform, rectangular blocks. Gray blocks, so not only can you not tell what piece plays what role but what side of the board it plays for.
It would be confusing right? Because you can't play any kind of game without knowing what the rules are, who the players are. That's why games come with instructions.
A lot of the reviews for "Otherland: City of Golden Shadow" complain that there is too much unnecessary background-that there are whole sections of the book that could have been cut out and still achieved the same goal in the end. I respectfully disagree. This novel is not only background for the massive undertaking that follows, but the instructions the reader will need in order to recognize the players for what they are.
Because, this is a complicated book. Not only are their multiple characters and points of view-the characters themselves are often shadowy and ambiguous, leaving the reader to guess what team-if any-they are really playing for.
This Otherland saga that Tad Williams has come up with is a massive and complicated undertaking, encompassing highly advanced technology, a host of old cultural myths from around the globe and highly secretive politics. It is endlessly complicated, a series of riddles within riddles. And I don't see how anyone who thought that the first book in the Magnus opus was a waste of paper could ever hope to understand the series as a whole.
Explaining the whole plot of this novel would take too long and give away way too much info to the potential reader so I'll try to keep this brief. It's the late 21st century and the internet has evolved into an interactive virtual reality world called the net. Just like the real world (RL) wealth determines much of what you can do on the net.
Renie Sulaweyo is a professor of virtual reality. Living in post apartheid South Africa she's just barely managing to hold what's left of her family-an alcoholic old world father and a younger net obsessed brother-together when a strange tragedy strikes Stephen and he is left in a coma-with no apparent cause. More strange and violent occurrences happen around Renie the more she investigates the cause of her brothers illness with the help of a Bushman student named !Xabbu and it soon becomes apparent that not only were more children stricken in the same way but that something huge beyond imagining is going on...
At the same time a sick fourteen year old boy in California is following a strange trail across the net that leads towards a golden city unlike anything he has every seen-a golden city that is haunting his dreams.
Somewhere on an American military base a very old man is pulling strings for some larger purpose, with only the help of a young girl. But are his intentions helpful or harmful?
In an Egypt that's more mythological than historical a god king orders minions around and affects the real world through his god of death-a strange sociopath killer named Dread who has terrible ambitions.
And last of all, apparently floating adrift in time and space is Paul Jonas- a man with no memory aside from the vague recollection of a winged woman. He is the key to something-and a source of fear to some of the most powerful men in the world. Men who have a plan-a plan they named the Grail...
I don't know why there are any negative reviews for this book. It is amazing and complex like a perfect maze or puzzle with not one boring page. Yes there is a lot of information in the book that could have been simplified down and made shorter but if Tad Williams had gone that way then the reader's chances of figuring out the who's, what's and how's of the virtual chess board would have been much, much worse. And then none of the other books would make sense because the rues of the game wouldn't be apparent. And all the fun of the book, the guessing of plots, would have been taken out of it.
Aside from the actual plot reading this book was such a pleasure because Tad Williams is such a wonderful writer. He doesn't seem to know how to string a dull sentence together. Excitement, adventure, action, some romance and the occasional funny oddness that Williams seems to always work into his books keep every paragraph captivating.
The first book of Williams I read ("The War of The Flowers") I'll admit to not liking very much. But after reading this book I am prepared to make a vow. Tad Williams, I will read every book you have written. I will follow you wherever your typewriter/ word processor takes you. I will re-read "The War of the Flowers" because I am now positive I missed something that I would now see. And of course, I will speed through the remaining three Otherland novels as though my life depended on it.
Last but not least, if you are daunted but the seemingly sci-fi nature of this work (as opposed to fantasy) worry not. The genera's are blurred enough in this book to make fans of both specialties very happy.
Five stars.
Summary of City of Golden Shadow (Otherland, Volume 1)
Otherland...
Surrounded by secrecy, it is home to the wildest dreams and darkest nighmares. Incredible amounts of money have been lavished on it. The best minds of two generations have labored to build it. And somehow, bit by bit, it is claiming the Earth's most valuable resource--its children.
Surrounded by secrecy, it is home to the wildest dreams and darkest nighmares. Incredible amounts of money have been lavished on it. The best minds of two generations have labored to build it. And somehow, bit by bit, it is claiming the Earth's most valuable resource--its children.
Best-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. Some of the younger kids, including her brother Stephen, have logged into the net, but they can't get back out. The clues point to a mysterious golden city called Otherland, but everyone who tries to find out what's going on ends up dead. Settle in for a long, enjoyable ride, because this 770-page monster is just the first of four projected novels.
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