Tad williams otherland review plus#
Tad williams otherland review series#

(Even Jeff Noon’s weird dog humans and vegetable people are real. Virtual reality works only so long as it is convincingly real. That Tad Williams can aim to get away with jiving carrots and zoot-suited zukini is both the strength of River of Blue Fire and its weakness. Okay, so they’re actually in a cartoon world that features a pair of vicious sugar tongs as the crocodile from Peter Pan and an Indian Chief called Strike Carefully, his sqaw Dispose Carefully and a missing matchstick baby who’s got a sore head because someone struck it! But still. This is the fantasy epic with the dancing carrots. Although there’s a nice little twist in that Orlando now knows that outside of VR Fredericks in really a girl. Though maybe that just comes from City being brilliant and my already knowing the characters from !Xabbu, the bushman/baboon to RPG-freaks Fredericks and Orlando. somehow Blue Fire isn’t quite as gripping as the opening volume, City of Golden Shadow. River of Blue Fire is a good solid SF epic and if someone doesn’t send me the next volume of the Otherland saga to review when it comes out then I’ll go and buy the book as soon as it hits the shops. Otherland Volume Two: River of Blue Fire by Tad Williams (Orbit, £16.99, 634 pages, hardback.

Tad williams otherland review plus#

Also I'd give my right arm to play Middle Country it sounds bloody marvellous.Tad Williams: River of Blue Fire - an infinity plus review If you can look past the sheer length of City of Golden Shadow you'll find great story with some fantastically memorable characters that you can't help but care about. The perk of the length is that the diverse cast has time to develop and you will truly care about all of them. The villains are suitably villainous, the kind you love to hate while the protagonists are diverse, deep and fantastically rendered. What really shines, as in all the Tad Williams books I've read, is the characters. The protagonists must then delve into that virtual world in order to thwart the bad guys (as yet undefined) plans and save the people they love. This idea that VR is ubiquitous forms the main conceit of the book with the rich villains setting up a ridiculously complex virtual playground for themselves and trampling everyone in the process.

Tad williams otherland review series#

I did eventually get to the end of this but I can legitimately say that it is one of the very worst novels I have ever actually read in its entirety and I certainly won't be reading the remainder of this series - the very thought of another 3000 pages of this tripe makes me gag.Ĭity of Golden Shadow is a sci-fi epic set in some undefined future where the Internet has gone all VR a bit like Ready Player One but written years before. A novel about VR and conspiracies provides rich material for dramatic storytelling but here this promising concept has been squandered utterly.ĭo everything you can to avoid reading this and make sure you warn others who might be tempted by the tantalising cover blurb. What makes this whole desperate endeavour even more disappointing is that there is actually the germ of a good idea buried (very deeply) somewhere in this mess.

In its place are endless, wordy, barely literate paragraphs of what ultimately, when all is said and done, amounts to textual diarrhoea. Completely absent is any concept of story, plot, pacing, characterisation or anything else that would vaguely resemble an actual novel.

Tad Williams is a man who clearly loves the sound of his own voice but evidently is so boring that he can only get himself heard by writing devastatingly tedious tomes such as this one. Badly written, dull and horrifically long to an extent that is actually beyond belief (in the sense that I'm forced to ask: how did this utter rubbish ever get published?).