Otherland, Vol. 1
City of Golden Shadow
Tad Williams
Daw, 780 pages
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I'm not a major fan of Big Fantasy. I don't enjoy waiting several years to finish a story, or reacquainting
myself with the world and the characters with every book--not to mention suspecting that the author could have
wrapped things up in three volumes instead of six. But Tad Williams is an exception. His enthralling stories are
well worth that multi-year, multi-volume, multi-page commitment.
Volume 1 (there are to be four) of Otherland, City of Golden Shadow, is basically a quest
story, in which several people receive a summons, and in the process of following it learn that the importance
of what they're doing transcends their own personal concerns. Renie Sulaweyo is an instructor at a South African
university, an expert in the net, the huge virtual world in which most twenty-first-century commerce and entertainment
takes place. When her brother Stephen falls into a coma that seems to be associated with his net use, she sets
out with her student !Xabbu, a Bushman, to locate a cure. Instead, she finds herself in danger, a threat that has
something to do with a virtual vision of a beautiful golden city.
Orlando Gardiner, a fourteen-year-old netgame player, has also received this vision--and has his own reasons for
pursuing it. Separately, Renie and Orlando journey toward the city, a quest that takes them to places they had
no idea existed, and into greater and greater peril. Meanwhile, other characters follow their own paths. Paul Jonas,
a soldier apparently lost in both time and space, flees from two ghastly enforcers. A group called the Grail Brotherhood
engages in a very secret, very costly, very dangerous virtual reality project. A psychopath named Dread, whose
job is to implement others' evil visions, begins to fulfill his own. And a mysterious man named Mister Sellars,
who in some way is in touch with everything, pursues his own unexplained agenda.
City of Golden Shadow is a hugely complicated work. Williams does an admirable job of manipulating the multiple
story threads, which gradually interweave over the course of the book, and all join up at the end. Though the novel
finishes on a cliff-hanger, the reader has acquired a basic understanding of the story's frame, as well as an inkling
of what's at stake. Yes, the book is basically setup; there's the strong feeling that the real action will begin
in the next installment, River of Blue Fire. But it's fascinating setup. Things do get off to a bit of a
slow start--something I don't think could have been avoided, given the enormous amount of information Williams
needs to convey to set up the principles of his world--but the pace picks up about a quarter of the way in, and
from then on never slackens.
Williams has created not one, but two richly detailed, thoroughly convincing realities: the actual reality of the
twenty-first century, and the virtual reality of the net. In some ways Williams' vision of a multi-realmed virtual
world existing in parallel with our own is reminiscent of the Virtu and Verite of Roger Zelazny's posthumous Donnerjack;
but Williams' vision of virtuality is far less mythic and far more pragmatic than Zelazny's--a net that can not
only be imagined, but might actually some day come to be. And though it would be easy to slap a "cyberpunk"
label on this book, with its net-traveling and troubling images of the future, the worlds Williams has created
are to my mind much more subtle and nuanced (and plausible) than the standard cyberpunk dystopia.
Williams has a fertile imagination, and City of Golden Shadow is chock-full of strange and wondrous images:
a virtual nightclub-cum-chamber-of-horrors, a shadowy ersatz Egypt, a very funny Edgar Rice Burroughs-ish virtual
Mars, the golden city of the title. His characters are well-drawn and sympathetic--a good thing, since the reader
will be traveling a long way with them. In !Xabbu, the aboriginal African who possesses an instinctive understanding
of the technological wonders of the net but hasn't left behind the spiritual insights of his ancestors (many of
which parallel, in a mythic way, the action of the story), Williams treads a thin line between symbol and cliché,
but he manages to pull it off. And although I was initially annoyed, for the same reason, by the pairing at the
start of each chapter of an image of primitive artwork with a snippet of bizarre twenty-first century news, I stopped
being bothered by it about halfway through the book, mainly out of admiration for Williams' amazing inventiveness.
City of Golden Shadow is an impressive work. It's clear that a huge amount of worldbuilding has gone into
it; that the effort of this is so nearly invisible is a tribute to Williams' mastery of his craft. I'm eagerly
awaiting the next in the series.
Copyright © 1998 Victoria Strauss
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