Rating: 
Summary: Really Long Virtual Trip
Review: Tad Williams writes in the introduction that this book was not an easy effort. It's not easy to read either! I bought it because the storyline intrigued me: Virtual Reality threating Real Life, Conspiracy, etc. Unfortunately reading it was less intriguing: The story is broken down into little pieces, jumping between a confusingly large number of narratives, often seemingly unconnected. At times the story stalled, meandering around, without discernable direction, indulging in (admittedly colourful) descriptions. Two positive points about the book were characterization and vision. Orlando, !Xabbu and Renie are unique and beautifully realized. The descriptions of future VR technology is captivating, I was espcecially fascinated by the Beezle character, the Gel-Vaults and the concept of VR alternative world-building. Will I read the second installment? If only I knew.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book (but PLEASE don't leave us hanging like this)
Review: Tad Williams represents both the best and the worst of modern fantasy writers. Mr. Williams is one of my favorite authors, in any genre. His stories are wonderful and compelling, but what I like best about him is the rich detail of his fantasy worlds. And he writes such BIG books--more time to spend in his world."City of Golden Shadow" fulfills the promise of his earlier series ("Memory, Sorrow and Thorn"). This time, the fantasy is frightening close to reality: the near future of our own world, in which today's World Wide Web has evolved into a fastinating world of virtual reality. Williams takes seemingly unconnected characters--!Xabbu and Renie, Orlando Gardiner and Sam Fredericks, Paul Jonas, Dread, Mr. Sellars--and weaves them into a seamless whole. But..."City of Golden Shadow" is only the first volume in a four-volume series. The story ends in "Perils of Pauline" fashion: the characters are trapped in another world, with no apparent way to get out. So the reader is left with a horrid sense of literary coitus interruptus--we want to know what's going to happen, but it may be years before we find out. Williams wrote the first volume of "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" in 1988; the final volume wasn't published until 1993. That's an average of 20 months between books. At this rate, it will be 2001 before the series is complete! My advice to prospective readers: DEFINITELY read this book. But wait a few years until all the volumes have been published.
Rating:
Summary: unbelievable
Review: This is the first review I have ever written. I felt I must do this because I like this book so much. Every paragraph is a masterpiece of writing: suspence, excitement, on the pulse of whats coming and the awe and nostalgia of what has been. I was sure there could not be another writer on the level of Neil Gaiman or Daniel Quinn, but Tad Williams is. His fusion of the spiritual/mystical and the coming technological/virtual has to be experienced to be believed. And by the way, I am only up to page 220 of the first book. My only caveate is that these books are complex on many levels and will not be to the taste of someone who likes to keep it simple.
Rating: 
Summary: A Nice Surprise
Review: I did something in buying this book I almost never do: I picked it based on the cover art (which was not the art displayed above, though that's nice, too). Well, the cover art and the fact that it seemed to have done all right - there were two more in the series sitting next to it on the shelves. But I needed something new and interesting to read, so I took a chance and took it home. I tried to set my expectations low. I was *very* pleasantly surprised. This book is terrific. It's a slow starter; I had to work to get into the thick of it - but once I settled in, I was well and truly hooked. I went straight on to read the second and third and plan to get the fourth right quick. At first blush, it's not all that obvious the series could be so interesting. The plot is plenty original, but it could easily have been a waste of dead trees. Williams has a fine line to walk here - the nature of the Grail Network in which our protagonists find themselves is such that he could easily stretch this baby out forever just moving them from one sim world to another. Sometimes I can't help but wonder if that's not just what he's done, but the reality is, he's balanced well - give us too few worlds and one of the better features of his idea will go to waste, too many and he's padding. Four novels is not too many to tell this story (yes, it could probably have been told in three) nor is it too few to take advantage of the central idea. He's certainly a good enough author to have held my rather fickle interest and I can't wait to get the last installment and find out how it ends. However, he falls short of getting five stars from me for uneven characterization. The most rivetting, interesting character in the book, by far, is Dread. That's to be expected, since Dread is one of the more malignantly evil - yet compelling - characters I have recently experienced (he's no Hannibal Lector, but you'll have a hard time not being repulsed and attracted at the same time). But the protagonists, despite a lot more "screen time", aren't nearly so interesting. !Xabbu takes second in interestingness - throwing a Bushman into this post-cyberpunk mix was a daring and provocative choice and he's certainly the best of the "good guys" and the one with the most depth. But repeated attempts to juxtapose his "primitive" viewpoint against the hyper-technogical menace the main characters face is not yeilding the kind of insight I had hoped it would. There's a real opportunity here to explore our own technological dependence I feel is underdeveloped to make room for more descriptions of the settings (not that I mind hashing these thoughts out on my own, but I'd like Williams to do a little more to show what he thinks about it than just point in the general direction of it). Jonas is next; the nature of his involvement is such that we can only find out who and what he is as he himself does - and project forward what we think he will discover and see if we're right. That's working only too well. The rest of the main characters range from downright uninteresting to wooden to under-realized. Orlando, Sayers, and Jongleur come out all right, though I've got farther into the heads of other writers' characters in far less time. Rene should be the character we relate to best - if anyone is in this novel to represent "us" it's her. Yet I find her limited and fairly dull. That said, most of these people have their own voices and (three books in) it's generally possible to predict how they will think and act and what they will say when confronted with a new situation. That's proof Williams is doing his work in transmitting these people's natures to us better than the vast majority of writers ever do even with fewer charcters to work with. All told, I am very pleased with this "accidental" discovery and would not hesitate to recommend it to fans of both SF and fantasy, two genres it blends nicely to create a unique and fascinating reading experience.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: The vision this book projected nearly blinded me. The book opens spectacularly and keeps hitting you with a brilliantly protrayed world and facenating characters. This is the best sci-fi fatasy blend that I have ever read. Williams weaves in and out of sub-plots, building up suspence with remakable effectiveness(I bought the sequal the day I finshed it). Children are collasing into unexplianable comas after trips on the net. People are finding mysterious keys, and visions of a golden city. A dreaded serial killer is attacking a secret society, to protect his employers. All these events lead to the golden city where some answers are held. This story is a fun ride through a world that is a remarakable feat of imagination. Anyone can think up of a story like this, but it takes real talent to make it work. This book is really the first part of four, of what is one book. Williams comments on this, saying he wrote the outline as just one story, but he obviously cannot publish one 3,000 + page book.
Rating:
Summary: Epic Series
Review: This is the first in a series of books blending virtual reality with real life. Many different kinds of people head to Otherland and it's accompanying worlds including a teacher and the computer novice she tutors, her brother and his friends who play games in VR but can't get out, and a fourteen year old computer genius who gets in over his head when he tries finding out what Otherland really is. There is also a person who may be real but then agan may not be.
The books are told in third person but feel like each person is talking about the same experience each from a different point of view. Every chapter has a different personal viewpoint so in order to keep track of all five stories readers may want to tackle each viewpoint as it's own book or one chapter a day if they are reading from cover to cover.
Rating:
Summary: great long, involved novel
Review: if you can't keep track of multiple characters, multiple being an understatement, than don't bother to read it. There are soooo many main (?) characters to keep track of, all with their own plots. That being said, however, if you have the abiltity of keeping confusing and complex stories straight, this is definately a novel you should read, followed by reading the other three. All three are extremely complex, but i found the
characters, plot, and settings to be extremely interesting. This sci-fi/fantasy book is interesting because of the basis for the whole novel: a network of computer systems that seem like they could be the future development of the internet where people jack into the computer network instead of just computers. Parts of the novel, like the role-playing done by the teenagers, happen right now, just not to the same extent. Overall, i really enjoyed this book, but would not recommend it for those people who have difficulty with remembering many many characters and plots.
Rating:
Summary: An epic science fiction classic!
Review: This series is long, but astoundingly good. Four books, each about 800 pages long. Took me a while to read, but I could NOT put it down, it was so good! It's eerie, suspenseful, and downright disturbing in some places, and that makes it all the more fun. A science fiction series written like a fantasy, it combines elements of mythology, legend, and modern literature. There are scenes in this series that show the disturbing worlds the super-rich of the future make for themselves, with those worlds often based on works like Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of Oz.
The ending is an especially good twist, it takes you completely by surprise, and I found it especially touching.
All in all, this is a highly entertaining, if a tad long, science fiction epic. At once on a grand scale and a more personal one, full of social commentary and disturbing predictions. Compared to science fiction classics like the Foundation series by Iassic Asimov, I'd have to say that this equals, if not surpasses, them in many ways. You would do yourself a grand disservice if you did not read this series. It truly is a modern classic.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best...
Review: I was a little disappointed with Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. By the end of the two-tome ending I felt Williams had blown a chance to write one of the best fantasies ever. So I approached his next project with some trepidation. Boy was I surprised. This may be the best series of books I've ever read. All 4 books. I couldn't put them down. Ever. All four. Can't wait til enough time goes by that I can read them again. I could write a book just expounding upon everything I loved about these books. Truly awesome...
Rating:
Summary: Amazing and intellectual
Review: This is a surprizingly wonderfull book. First of all the main character is an angry south african black woman. This is something that sets this book apart from many popular sci-fi books of our age, because every other book seems drawn to adult white males. Each character has a real and believable personality, that has many layers.
If you have read any of the other reviews, you should have found out that Renie, the afor mentioned character, is searching for the cause of her brothers comatose state. With the help of her bushman, !Xabbu, friend they venture to the seediest places on the net, a virtual reality version of our internet, to find the cause of her younger brother's sicness, which seems caused by the net. As she continues on her "quest" she finds the inklings of a huge conspiracy by all of the worlds most powerful people.
Renie's story is one of four major plot lines that eventually converge at the end of this monster book. All of the characters are likable people with their own problems, but seem driven towards a single goal, to find the golden city.
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