City of Golden Shadow (Otherland, Volume 1) (Paperback)

by Tad Williams (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
When Renie Sulaweyo's younger brother, Stephen, returns from the Net after visiting Mister J's, a virtual reality equivalent of the Hellfire Club, she's worried about him. When his next Net trip leaves him in a coma, Renie is terrified and angry. Soon she discovers evidence that other children have lapsed into comas under similar circumstances. A professor of computer science and an adept user of the Net, Renie retraces Stephen's trail and enters Mister J's but barely escapes with her own mind intact. After her adventure, she discovers that someone has downloaded into her computer the impossibly complex image of a fantastic golden city. Then her apartment is fire-bombed, she loses her job and another professor whom she has recruited to help her decipher the mystery is murdered. It's clear that Renie has angered someone with almost unlimited power, but she remains determined to save her brother. In the first book in what is projected to be, in effect, a single, enormous four-volume novel, Williams (Memory, Sorrow and Thorn) proves himself as adept at writing science fiction as he is at writing fantasy. His 21st-century South Africa, where blacks run the government and pursue careers but where whites control most economic power, rings true. His version of the Net, although obviously indebted to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and other novels, is detailed and fascinating. Best of all, however, are Williams's well-drawn, sympathetic characters, including Renie and her family, her student !Xabbu, the mysterious invalid Mister Sellars and a host of other folk, all of whom hope to solve the mystery of the terrifying VR environment called Otherland.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 792 pages
• Publisher: DAW (January 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0886777631
• ISBN-13: 978-0886777630
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 4.1 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (293 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #115,737 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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• This is item 1 in The Otherland Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Drawn out beginning to a satisfying end, January 18, 2002

By	Warren C. Lathe (San Francisco) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, October 26, 2002

By	Christopher Rodrigues Macias (Canberra, Australia) - See all my reviews

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.

43 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How on Earth can something this boring be so intriguing?, June 21, 2000

By	Patrick Burnett "penngos" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I had no expectations about "Otherland". A friend lent me the book, saying there was no hurry to return it. So it sat on my shelf for days and days.

I finally got around to opening it and was less than impressed at first. The story took too long to develop and once it did, went no where. The writing is as bloated as a corpse that has washed up on the shores of the river of blue fire. Because the writing is episodic, taking the point of view of different characters, I was sometimes compelled, sometimes not, depending upon my opinion of the hero of that chapter.

It was an odd experience, then, reading this book. I would race through one chapter, anxious to learn more about the lead character, then turn the page and be so bored I could hardly pick the book up again.

I finally made it through and was compelled enough to pick up the next one. But I think the story could easily have been told in one book.