![]() To those with good enough equipment, the net has supplanted the physical world as their place to shop, to sight see, and to seek pleasures undreamed of in real life (or, RL as it is known to the citizenry of the day). What we think of as today's world-wide web has grown beyond all bounds and has practically taken on a visceral presence. And what SF it is! For a half-baked synopsis, we are thrust into the middle of the 21st century, where the entire planet Earth has become an electronic global village for those of enough means to afford it. Williams in that small group of writers (Jules Verne, Stephen Donaldson, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe, and a few others) that have been able to produce masterworks in both the fantasy and SF genres. Although I have only read the first book of "Otherworld" so far, I have to place Mr. Williams' next series strayed from the realm of fantasy, I feared that he might be over-reaching himself. They were Everyman thrust into extraordinary circumstances.So, when I saw that Mr. That is to say, they were living, breathing people who would have fit in with the masses of humanity in any era. The heroes were not morally squeaky-clean and were a little rough around the edges. Even though that series fit the stock formula fairly well, it did it with panache. But what Williams gives us instead is a vast, far-ranging, multi-character, multi-multi-themed tapestry that is enormous in scope and which has to be walked over a section at a time.Īfter reading the series "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" several years ago, I mentally noted Tad Williams as fantasy-writing force to remember. And the characters are moving and effective, few stick in your head weeks after you've finished the work. And where other authors follow a narrative thread only so far and then say, "Well, yeah, there's another story over there, but we don't have time for it, so come on back here," Williams shows us all of everything, and shows us some combinations of plot elements that we might never have imagined.If you like reading these multivolume works for the enormous drama and a payoff whose operatic grandeur is proportional to the page count, you may nod off around book three here. ![]() But ordinarily these works get fuzzy around the edges, and the writer asks us to accept that some things just ARE so he can get on with the main story.What Williams does is shuffle these several different novels together and set them up to lean on each other. ![]() Plenty of government conspiracies, plenty of power-mad scary guys. ![]() What he has done is to combine them all.Sure, we saw (for just one example) human minds wired into vast virtual reality in the Matrix, but we have no idea how they got there. He really hasn't created any new plot devices or directions you'll see few things here that you've never ever seen before. There's a continuously unfolding series of events, building out from the center, but not necessarily toward ever increasingly dramatic climaxes.What Williams has done here is ingenious. It is one big honking book published in four chunks.In pacing and plotting, it reminds me of a 100-issue run of a comic book. In many ways, this is an unconventional work.
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