The Edge Online - Reviews: Tad Williams - Otherland: City of Golden Shadow

Otherland: City of Golden Shadow
Tad Williams
Legend hardback, 770 pages, £16.99
Published December 1996
ISBN 0099683016
Orbit paperback, 943 pages, £6.99
Published March 1998
ISBN 1857236041
Review by Steve Jeffery (1996)

A virtual reality wonderland, time travel, ancient civilisations, gods, global conspiracies, assassins, a mysterious epidemic striking down thousands of children, and a half dozen subplots that run right across genre boundaries from Neuromancer to Alice in Wonderland; if Otherland, or perhaps more properly Volume One: City of Golden Shadow, doesn’t have everything going for a blockbuster SF fantasy, then it surely comes close. It’s an incredible feat of control that keeps everything from spinning wildly out of control into dozens of loose ends in a travelogue of wonders. But wonders there certainly are. The technology of virtual reality, as the immersive 3D interface to a global network of business and entertainment, opens worlds within worlds, some more open than others. And at its very heart, glimpsed only by the very persistent as a vision of a mysterious golden city, is the most secret, most dangerous, world of all. A world rendered in such intricate and realistic detail that it took generations of the most powerful computing resources to deliver, a world from which the unwary and unlucky might never return at all.

That glimpse has been given to Renie Sulawayo and her student !Xabbu, and it cost her her brother, lost in a deep coma, her home, her job, and the assassination of her former tutor in virtual engineering. That glimpse has also been given to Paul Jonas, a man without a past, adrift and hunted between strange worlds; and to Thargor the barbarian, the virtual roleplay persona of Orlando Gardner, a fourteen year old suffering from a rare crippling disease. Around the borders of the golden city is a world where the architects of Otherland meet in conference as the Egyptian pantheon of gods, a world that seems based on the chess moves of Alice Through The Looking Glass, and the freeform anarchy of Treehouse, a hackers’ paradise. A motif of lost children recurs through both the ‘real’ and virtual worlds: the thousands in the real world lost in comas that seem related to net use; the feral children Jonas encounters; and the precocious pre-teen hackers of Wicked Tribe, who run riot throughout Treehouse.

City of Golden Shadow might be read as a metaphor for the dangerous consequences of increasing separation and alienation from the real world – from escape into virtual roleplay fantasies by corporate leaders and children alike, for the coma victims, and in !Xabbu’s inner struggle to combine the wonders of technology with the stories and traditions of his own people, the Bushmen. !Xabbu’s is the voice and spirit of the real world throughout the book, and it remains to be seen if he will be the agent that will eventually transform the nightmare playground of Otherland into something more human, or whether he will be engulfed by it. At the end of City of Golden Shadow there are still only hints of what Otherland might be, or of why some of the most powerful men on earth should have devoted so much time and resources to its creation. That answer, and how it relates to the growing epidemic of net-induced coma, will have to wait for Book Two, which on this evidence will be worth that wait.