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Books : Science Fiction & Fantasy : Authors, A-Z : W : Williams, Tad
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Tad Williams made his name in fantasy with the immense "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" trilogy (1988-93). His "Otherland" quartet, opening with City of Golden Shadow (1996), is mid-21st-century SF set in an ultra-sophisticated software universe containing countless worlds. This episode features a deadly nature reserve of giant insects, a poisoned Oz, a madcap cartoon reality, London as in The War of the Worlds, 16th-century Venice, Xanadu, ancient Egypt, the Odyssey's Ithaca and the Drones Club. Otherland is the playground of the monstrously rich and unscrupulous Grail Brotherhood, who hope for on-line immortality and are abducting children's souls into their VR system. Opposing them is the enigmatic "Circle", plus a handful of ordinary folk who've penetrated Otherland and are trapped there, floating from world to world on the digital river of the title. There's a spy in this group, though; Otherland's operating system is becoming unstable; the Nemesis program that hunts down software anomalies seems murderously out of control...Williams writes fluently and evocatively, conjuring up a vivid succession of virtual realities as he manipulates numerous storylines inside and outside Otherland, climaxing with multiple cliffhangers. It's slightly frustrating, though, that halfway through the series we've learned little more--especially about the tantalizing suggestion that Otherland is a metaphysical threat to "real" reality--than emerged in book 1. Next volume: Mountain of Black Glass. --David Langford
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Otherland, the quartet of which Mountain of Black Glass is the powerful third part, combines some terrifying speculation on the future of virtual reality with adventures none the less terrifying because they are technologised dreaming--these are dreams from which the adventurers cannot awaken and in which, if they die, they are dead...An epidemic of comatose children has led Rennie and her San friend !Xabbu into the net and to a series of dream worlds created as palaces by the corrupt aspiring immortals, the Grail Brotherhood; two of those children, Orlando and Fredericks, have become adventurers in their own right, while their parents' lawyer Ramsey follows real world money, and lesbian cop Calliope tracks a serial killer with serious ambitions to become an angry god. In this volume we have adventures in a mythic Ancient Egypt and a rambling Gormenghast-like house before all the virtual adventurers meet where they were always destined to, before the walls of Troy...All around, death. It was not a quiet presence during the long day--not a pale-faced maiden bringing surceasse from pain, not a skillful reaper with a scalpel-sharp blade... Death on the Trojan plain was a crazed beast that roared and clawed and smashed, which was everywhere at once, and which in its unending fury showed that even armoured men were terribly frail things.
Tad Williams takes the gameworld and turns it on its head, passionately; how do we know that what bleeds does not feel pain? He is writing a classic of cyberspace adventure which has a sorrowful heart. --Roz Kaveney
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Tad Williams made his name in fantasy with the immense "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" trilogy (1988-93). His "Otherland" quartet, opening with City of Golden Shadow (1996), is mid-21st-century SF set in an ultra-sophisticated software universe containing countless worlds. This episode features a deadly nature reserve of giant insects, a poisoned Oz, a madcap cartoon reality, London as in The War of the Worlds, 16th-century Venice, Xanadu, ancient Egypt, the Odyssey's Ithaca and the Drones Club. Otherland is the playground of the monstrously rich and unscrupulous Grail Brotherhood, who hope for on-line immortality and are abducting children's souls into their VR system. Opposing them is the enigmatic "Circle", plus a handful of ordinary folk who've penetrated Otherland and are trapped there, floating from world to world on the digital river of the title. There's a spy in this group, though; Otherland's operating system is becoming unstable; the Nemesis program that hunts down software anomalies seems murderously out of control...Williams writes fluently and evocatively, conjuring up a vivid succession of virtual realities as he manipulates numerous storylines inside and outside Otherland, climaxing with multiple cliffhangers. It's slightly frustrating, though, that halfway through the series we've learned little more--especially about the tantalizing suggestion that Otherland is a metaphysical threat to "real" reality--than emerged in book 1. Next volume: Mountain of Black Glass. --David Langford
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Barney Panofsky smokes too many cigars, drinks too much whiskey and is obsessed with two things: the Montreal Canadiens hockey team and his ex-wife Miriam. An acquaintance from his youthful years in Paris, Terry McIver, is about to publish his autobiography. In its pages he accuses Barney of an assortment of sins, including murder. It's time, Barney decides, to present the world with his own version of events. Barney's Version is his memoir, a rambling, digressive rant, full of revisions and factual errors (corrected in footnotes written by his son) and enough insults for everyone, particularly vegetarians and Quebec separatists.But Barney does get around to telling his life story, a desperately funny but sad series of bungled relationships. His first wife, an artist and poet, commits suicide and becomes--à la Sylvia Plath--a feminist icon, and Barney is widely reviled for goading her toward death, if not actually murdering her. He marries the second Mrs Panofsky, whom he calls a "Jewish- Canadian Princess", as an antidote to the first; it turns out to be a horrible mistake. The third, "Miriam, my heart's desire", is quite possibly his soul mate, but Barney botches this one too. It's painful to watch him ruin everything, and even more painful to bear witness to his deteriorating memory. The mystery at the heart of Barney's story--did he or did he not kill his friend Boogie?--provides enough forward momentum to propel the reader through endless digressions, all three wives, and every one of Barney's nearly heartbreaking episodes of forgetfulness. Barney's Version, winner of Canada's 1997 Giller Prize, is Richler's 10th novel, and a dense, energetic and ultimately poignant read. -- R. Ellis
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