#Tad williams otherland cliffnotes full
#Tad williams otherland cliffnotes series

#Tad williams otherland cliffnotes series

Now you may be asking yourself, if he thought so poorly of this series why in hell’s name did you read the whole thing? Simple really, I’m an optimist and I kept hoping it would get better.

They all have specific purposes to play that fit into their cliché, and there are only so many times that you can here the bushman talk about the interconnectedness of Cat’s Cradle, the operating system and the universe without wanting to gag. There is the noble savage in the form of a bushman, the strong black woman, the old white businessman intent on ruling the world, the sociopath killer and so on. It seems that he was content with providing us with types rather than characters. He has four volumes with which to develop his characters as they go through a long journey, but they are all pretty much the same at the end as they were in the beginning. If they are people we care about or can identify with, what they do is of less importance. In cases where the plot isn’t effective, an author can save him or herself through the characters. Perhaps it is his fascination with the technical details that alienated me, but there were too many times when it felt like reading a manual.

#Tad williams otherland cliffnotes full

In each situation the Net was taken for granted as a place where you could have full body access, and was considered an everyday sort of thing, but I just didn’t sense the same enthusiasm for the subject from Mr. Farmer’s work (which I have not read in about twenty years) during his descriptions of the different worlds that his characters passed through.Īlthough his virtual world was more elaborate than Ms Piercy’s, it lacked the earlier work’s ability to convey something of the excitement this sort of experience should generate. Williams was unsuccessful, as I was continually reminded of Mr. The whole idea of travelling a river through multiple worlds smacked of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series, while the live net concept has been done by many an author prior to this, with, to my mind anyway, the best one being He, She, and It by Marge Piercy.ĭoing something that has been done before is not a crime, but it places the author under the obligation to come up with something marginally original enough that you don’t find yourself automatically thinking of the previous works. One major problem for me was the fact that basic elements of this book had been done before and better by other authors. The four books deal with their attempts to get into the system, their adventures while there, and finding a resolution to the problems created by the simulated world. They are somehow utilizing the brains of the children to make the operating system function.Ī small group of people from the outside the cabal find out about the plot and get hacked into the special system in order to try to find a cure for the people who have fallen into a coma. A sinister cabal of corporate leaders throughout the world are creating for themselves the means to live forever in artificial reality by recreating themselves as living parts of an organic operating system that controls a massive artificial reality. Children around the world are falling prey to a mysterious coma-inducing disease, somehow contracted while surfing the net. In Otherland, I missed the point entirely. But there’s usually a point to the whole exercise. The author sets out to create a character study, or an exploration of style if he or she are exceptionally post modern.

Sometimes after reading a book, I’m left feeling what was the point in writing the damn thing? Okay, sure, there is a story and characters and they do stuff, but for what purpose? Is there a reason for it all? True, works of fiction don’t have to have a point, they can just be riveting stories, intense character studies, or thrilling plot lines, but those in turn become the point of writing the book. The first why is sort of two parts why was thing written in the first place, and why did it have to be so long? The second why has more to do with me than the quality of the books: why did I keep reading the things? I even spent money on them that could have been put to far better use. But now that I’ve read the quartet, City Of Golden Shadow, River Of Blue Fire, Mountain Of Black Glass and Sea Of Silver Light, I’m left with a couple of unanswered whys. Tracking down the second and third volumes took most of the effort, as they weren’t in my local library and not on the shelves of first-hand bookstores, so it meant checking back with secondhand stores on a regular basis in the hopes that a copy would show up. It took me a while, but I finally managed to wade through the four volumes of Tad Williams’ Otherland series.