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45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining, October 26, 2002
If you're going to pick up the first book of a mammoth quadrology, you want to know that the time invested will be worth it in the end. Accordingly, this is a capsule review of the Otherland series as a whole, rather than this single work. The short answer: it depends on if you like Tad Williams' narrative style so much that you can overlook the flaws. Fans of the author are likely to love Otherland. It contains well-drawn, generally sympathetic characters swept up in an epic story that draws on established cyperpunk themes, but with Williams' characteristic focus on the internal thoughts and feelings of the protagonists rather than on the action. The VR settings are interesting, the story is epic in both scope and length, and Williams does manage to bring most (not all) of the strands of the story together fairly convincingly in the last book. The problems? First and foremost, the books are too long. The series could be chopped down by two-thirds without losing any of the important plot elements. Fans of cyberpunk as a genre, where the pacing is usually frenetic, will be exasperated by seemingly interminable scenes that, while prettily drawn, do little or nothing to advance the overall story. Second, the characters are too static. By early in book two you've learned all you need to know about how most of the numerous central characters. While their relationships to one another evolve (albeit very slowly) the characters themselves reveal no new facets to surprise or entertain the reader. Renie is always lovably stubborn, Orlando always stoically perservering in spite his medical condition, etc. etc. Third, the metaplot is unoriginal. While Williams has an interesting take on VR, the 'epic story' driving the books is essentially a rehash of the big themes in Neuromancer, William Gibson's seminal work from 1983. Told in a very different fashion, but the same basic ideas nonetheless. Fourth, and most damning IMHO, the way the 'secrets' of Otherland are revealed can only be described as [bad]. Williams has serveral *thousand* pages to expose you to his imaginary world, yet when it all comes down to the cruch he resorts to the cheap expedient of having one of the major characters explain to all the other characters 'what is really going on' in a scene more appropriate to the climax of a 1940s murder mystery than an SF novel. Having the characters discover the deepest secrets of Otherland piece by piece as they travel would have been fun. If Williams had borrowed another convention of mystery fiction and given the reader just enough clues to allow them to, if they were very clever, put it all together, then the tell-all speeches at the end would at least have the redeeming quality of letting you know if you'd guessed right. Sadly, Williams keeps key pieces of the backstory from you until the end, and the trip around Otherland is more of 'An Extended Tour of Virtual Reality as Imagined by Tad Williams' than it is plot exposition. I'm sure the author wanted to save some ideas to maximise their emotional impact, but, for me, the manner in which he finally reveals them made the Big Secrets seemed hackneyed and trite rather than "oh, wow!" Fourth, the capture of the main villain of the piece was pure Hollywood, and I do not mean that as a complement. That part of the ending was so blatantly predictable (if you have watched any horror movies at all) and so obviously designed to set up a sequel, that I found myself wondering if Williams wrote it specifically to appeal to people who might want to buy the film rights. Blech. Enough carping. All in all, for me Otherland was an entertaining, though not gripping, story. I enjoyed much of it, liked several of the characters enough to care about them, and although I was disappointed in the way the ending was handled, I have to give the author credit for keeping me interested through four very lengthy books. Is it good enough to read again? Not for me. Do I recommend it to others? As I said at the top, it depends on whether or not they like Tad Williams' books in general. If you do, go for it.
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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Drawn out beginning to a satisfying end, January 18, 2002
A short synopsis (without giving too much away): A woman cyber-researcher stumbles onto a 'virtual world' within the virtual world of the 'near future' internet. This 'Otherland' is something magnitudes greater than the prosaic virtual worlds on the net. And it is deeply secret. She begins to attempt to determine its possibly nefarious purpose with the help of a cast of other 'stumblers'. Much of the series takes place within both the public virtual worlds of the net and this otherland. First, allow me to give this caveat: I have read all four books in this series and this is the first time I've read something by Tad Williams. From my reading of the reviews of this book so far, I believe these two things strongly influence what kind of review someone will give this book. If you have read Tad Williams' fantasy books before, you might be expecting something similar here. Though there are aspects of fantasy, they are tangential to the plot (though fun reading). If you go into reading the book thinking of another Williams fantasy you will be disappointed. Also, I must agree with many of the reviews here. This first book is very difficult to get through. The characters and the plot take a long time in developing and sometimes it feels if you are wading through too much without gaining much in understanding of the characters or the plot. I put down the book twice after reading the first chapters, it did not catch my interest. I had finally read the book on a vacation with nothing else to do, it wasn't till the end that my interest was peaked. When Williams gets to the second and third books, he starts to shine in this series. The plot starts making sense and most of the characters start to gain some substance. I absolutely loved going through some of the virtual worlds (cartoon kitchen, I loved it) and some of the characters were great (I need the beetle!). Once I got into the second book in the series, I was hooked and read the the next 2 immediately after. They were very enjoyable and well worth the time. Perhaps this series would have been better as a trilogy with large portions taken out of the first book, but..if you decide to buy this book, you should do so realizing you are making a commitment to get through 4 books and the first one will be difficult to get through. If you do so, it will be worth the time. I still smile with the memory of some of the characters and events in the book. I would give the first book a 3 and the next 2 a 5 and the last a 4, since they are a series and should be read and reviewed as one book (these 4 books are not stand alone, but I don't see much 'demarcation' between them, more like one very large book that could have been cut in various combinations with equal results), I give the whole series a 4.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cyberpunk on steroids. . ., May 6, 2001
This review is from: Otherland, Vol. 1: City Of Golden Shadow (Hardcover)
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!!
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