Review: Otherland

John "Kate" Looney has sent us a review of Tad Williams' new book Otherland. For those of you familiar with Williams, you can attest to his storytelling abilites. The first book in his new series, Otherland shows off his writing abilites. This new series blends in elements of Williams' view of future technology as well as interesting characters. If you want to laze away August with some reading, read the review below.

Review of "Otherland"

Author: Tad Williams
Reviewed by: John Looney

I loved Tad Williams previous saga "Sorrow, Misery and Thorn", so when I saw this in a bookshop, I thought why not. I was very pleasantly surprised.

On the cover is a very pretty picture of a city. Another light hearted fantasy book I thought. Boy was I surprised. It starts off quite confusingly - an English World War I soldier in the trenches, feeling miserable. Ah. It's going to be one of those "He dies and goes to a dream world, with fairies, and leprachauns, and eskimos".

Surprise again. He ends up in a scary version of Jack in the Beanstalk.

Straight off, I knew this was going to be a unique book. Over the next few chapters, it introduced the main characters. A confused man with bad memories, travelling through wierd places, from the Somme to Mars. A Kalahari Bushman who comes to Durban. A Conan-type warrior called Thargor, who kicks ass. A South African woman that's a researcher in VR (suddenly you cop on that this could be set in the future). And, an old man, who can't leave his house because years ago, he was scalded badly by a Jet's exhaust, and has to stay inside, in a 100% humidity house.

The first few chapters of the book try and explain this muddle. Thargor is really a 14 year old that players VR muds all day. The Bushman is attending VR classes in a university near Durban. The South African has a younger brother that thinks he's an 3l33t cracker, and likes to dice with danger in VR worlds, and she finds herself taken back to her old [cr|h]acker days. And the confused man ? The key to everything.

There is a massive conspiracy (isn't their always) to be investigated. Everyone of the main characters have an axe to grind. In Thargors case, it's a big axe. The only clue they have is that all of them have seen a single gimpse of a city, that's in something called "Otherland".

It turns out that the the main characters are all heavily involved in the internet, or what Tad Williams thinks it could turn out like. This vision is not a William Gibson style "The internet would be like this because it would make a good book", but because it makes sense. So many times I've thought. 'Cool. I want that sort of technology now'. Tad Williams drops so many references to hacker and net lore that you know this man has pissed away months of his life, just like me, playing mud, searching for files, looking at newsgroups, talking on IRC. All the software the characters use are evolutionary improvments on what we have now - and some new stuff. Some really cool new stuff.

Everything from the conceited attitude of people on IRC, to a home for the alpha-hackers that worked on the software, that this VR-internet is based on described. The book seems to be quite slow in starting - like all Tad Williams stuff - it's another epic, but I loved it. The slow start lets you go "Oooh...nice idea" again and again. It's the story I've ever come across that didn't seem dumbed down, over hyped or inaccurate, like things like "The Net" and "Neuromancer" were.

I didn't realise that the book was a "First part of a series", until about 20 pages from the end, where I started to panic, wondering how all the loose ends would be tied up. I was left feeling a need for closure, and a need to get the next book. Very highly recommended for those that don't mind mixing realistic science fiction and a bit of fantasy...

Kate

Buy this book at Amazon.