Audiobook from Penguin AudioNarrated by George NewbernLength: 37.75 hoursThe finale to the Otherland series, Sea of Silver Light wraps up the multitude of story lines that began in City of Golden Shadow. While the book dragged in places, and some may find that the book (and the series, especially in the middle books) wanders a bit too much, it is hard not to appreciate Tad Williams' amazingly prescient series, especially if you're a fan of a) the internet and b) classic literature. It's probably safe to say that the wandering will not be for everybody, but for those that enjoy the mystery and the references to other works, the series could be a lot of fun.A series written in the mid-late 90's, the books cover amazing breadth of topics with a wide cast of characters in this world and in a parallel online world. What started as a cyberpunk story quickly unfolded into a much larger world with many players with significantly different motivations--on all sides of the story. With unlikely/atypical heroes (a South African woman, an African "bushman", a blind woman, two teenagers, a mom, and a guy who doesn't know his own past, not to mention a 5 or 6-year old girl, an ancient man...the cast is huge!) and a sprawling world, it's easy to see why some people are overwhelmed. The more intriguing part, though, is trying to piece together the entire story, trying to figure out who's involved in the world and for what purpose...and what the online world really is. I will admit that when the world was pieced together, it seemed pretty out there...but I was so engrossed that I didn't really mind. The only part I really did mind was the end; the book felt maybe a little too neat, and a little too drawn out at the end. That said, it does leave an opening for Williams to return to the world (and looking on Goodreads, it seems as if he may have done just that with a short story in Legends II.It's hard to describe the book and what happened in the series without venturing into spoiler territory. Basically, Renie, a young South African woman who is a sort of professor or teacher of computer engineering-type classes at a local university, finds one day that her brother is in a coma of sorts, a result of playing an online game. Games in the future world that Williams created are played online in a virtual reality simulation type schema, where users have different levels of gear that immerse them (fully or to varying degrees) into a virtual world. Some users go so far as to get neural cannulas, so that they can "jack in" and have the VR system provide a direct link to their brain, become fully immersed. Renie, wanting to try to find out more about how her brother came to be in the coma, went online to try to learn what she could of what he got into. Unsurprisingly, she found herself sucked into and literally stuck in a virtual world, unable to disconnect (sort of like Sword Art Online). While there, she meets others who have family members with the same affliction as her brother, and still others who have been recruited by an unknown agent to help Renie and those who are trying to help their children/family members. In parallel, there is the story of the Grail Brotherhood, a private group of the world's most powerful and wealthiest elite, who wish to achieve immortality, and invest heavily in a system to do so. In a third story line, there is additional intrigue about a psychopath who calls himself "Dread" and seems to seek out ways to torture and kill others, online and in reality. His story ends up weaving and in some ways connecting the Grail Brotherhood and those of the people trying to help the children. Throughout, there are a multitude of worlds created by various users of the online system, many with literary references (such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The War of the Worlds) or other evolving schema (such as a virtual rainforest that actually begins to evolve in the simulation world, similar to how it might have on earth). Williams uses cyberpunk, the idea of virtual/simulation worlds, and some more fantastical elements (some characters have special abilities, particularly abnormal/special mental powers) to weave a tale that leaves the reader picking up puzzle pieces and slowly piecing things together, just as the heroes do in the story.I'm most amazed at how prescient Williams was. The book was written in the mid-90's, yet there are references to things in the world today, innovations that were barest ideas of science fiction in the 90's. The first and most obvious observation is that the VR world, while more immersive than anything we really have today, is very much akin to the internet of today, with people spending entire lives and making entire livelihoods on the internet. People use tablet-like devices to connect to the networks, to make calls, to shop, to go into their simulation worlds--much like an iPad or other tablet of today. People watch movies on the internet, so-called "Net Flicks" (I really wonder if that's how Netflix's name came to be), and an automated robotic floor-sweeping robot (Roomba, anyone) makes an appearance or two. Kids have "storybook sunglasses" which sound a bit like more immersive (and frankly more fun) versions of Google Glass. Just today, I read an article on Slashdot about body hacking through the vagal nerve, a topic that's actually brought up in the book (as a therapy that is abused, oddly enough). There are other examples, which reading in 2015, are fun nuggets to pick up along the way. It's crazy how forward-thinking this book was, how much it got "right" even for 2015 (I think the book is supposed to take place closer to 2050).I liked this book and really enjoyed the series. I think that listening was a fantastic way to experience the book, to be able to lay back and shut my eyes and become immersed in the book as the characters are immersed in their world. The narration was (as I've said in my other reviews) great, if a little slow. But that meant that I could speed the book up slightly in the playback, cutting down some of the listening time.The book (and series) may not be for everyone. I think it's fair to criticize this book for going on a little "too long" or for being a little "too neat," and it's equally fair to think that Book 1 started slow or that books 2 and 3 wandered a bit (they absolutely were "middle books" in a series, which not everybody enjoys). But I still really liked the series. I look forward to reading it again in the future, maybe in a few years, to see how much I can pick up in advance, knowing as I do now, how the book ends.
At last we have come to the end of our journey, when all will be explained and all will be resolved.As the book opens, the Other - the operating system for the Grail Brotherhood's mysterious plan for immortality - has been defeated, overcome and overpowered by the truly evil assassin Dread. With his mutant ability to manipulate electronics, Dread has taught the Other how to feel true pain, and now has nearly complete control over the Otherland network. With a nearly limitless number of worlds to choose from, Dread allows his sadistic madness to run wild. But no matter how many worlds he rapes and plunders, there are still those he truly wants to destroy - the Otherland explorers sent by the mysterious half-human Sellars.But those explorers themselves face greater dangers than Dread. Half of them have been thrust back into the twisted realms of Otherland, where the horrors and dangers that had been built into it have mutated into unrecognizable terrors. The other half... they ended up in the heart of the Other's secret dreams. There they must face the eventual death of the network and survive it, if they can.Offline, Sellars has brought all of his players into position. Lawyers, children and old women are his army, and together they will uncover the horrible and heartbreaking truth about the nature of the Other and the evil that has been done to it.I really love this series. As it moves towards its ending, which does involve a lot more explaining than most other books do, it's easy to get swept up in the sheer scale of the narrative. There's a lot to take in by the end of the series, a lot of loose ends to tie up, but it all wraps up rather nicely. More or less. There is a rather major revelation that comes near the end that just kind of... gets written off. I have a sneaking suspicion that Williams might have been able to stretch this series into a fifth book, but it probably would have suffered from Rowling Syndrome - a lot of unnecessary padding in between the important bits.The important thing is that, by the end of the book you really do feel invested in the world that Williams has created. You care about the characters, and you want everything to turn out all right for them. For the good ones, at least. For the bad ones, you want them to get their just desserts, to see them suffer as they have made others suffer. You even find yourself feeling for the Other, which we - and the protagonists - have always believed to be the main villain of the story. It is not, as we find out, and the scope of the villainy that has been done to it is truly astonishing.In his forward to the second book, Williams apologized to his readers about the cliffhanger ending to the first. This isn't really four books, he said - it's one giant book that had to, for various reason, be split into four. The main reason, of course, being that no one would print or buy a 3,500 page hardcover, even if the fine folks at DAW Books were willing to try it. He is right, though - it is one very long story, and thus you can extract a great many things from it, if you want to.There's no one thing that I can say this book is about. In one sense, it is an exploration of the future of the digital world and what it might mean to people. The virtual net of this story would be as alien to us as the internet would be to our grandparents. It has become the sea in which our characters swim, and their main way of interacting with the world. It is only when their ability to go offline is taken away from them that they truly begin to value the world and the identity they've left behind. What's more, it explores how we connect with each other - looking at both the relationships we build in virtual space and the ones we build in the real world, and finding complete validity in them both.There are issues of identity, best shown by Orlando, whose towering Thargor the Barbarian character hides a young teenager with a crippling illness that will kill him long before he's old enough to vote. His best friend has a slightly less unfortunate secret to share - that behind those big, muscular sim bodies, Sam Fredericks is actually a girl.The story explores issues of family - how Renie deals with her father, Long Joseph Sulaweyo, or how little Christabel Sorenson's family react when they find out that their young daughter has been drawn deep into Sellars' conspiracy. And the bonds between mother and child that can never truly be broken.And there are even issues of the very definition of the word "life." If your mind is perfectly copied into a computer, with all its memories and personality intact, is it still you? Are you still human? Are you even alive, in any real sense? The Grail Brotherhood certainly believed so, or they would never have started this project in the first place. But in a system as broad and complicated as the Otherland network, who knows what else might arise to test our definition?The story is about heroism and history, about love and hate, about the unshakable bonds of friendship and the tenuous reliance on people you despise. It's about the lengths to which fear will drive you and the extremes you will encounter when you test that fear. It's about science and faith and looking at the world in ways you never imagined. It's about good, it's about evil.It's about life, really, and what it is about life that makes us want more of it.Now I'm just waxing philosophical. To sum up: this is probably one of my favorite stories in my library. I highly recommend you pick it up, set some time aside, and enjoy it.
What do You think about Sea Of Silver Light (2001)?
The last 15 pages of this book ruined Otherland for me as a series. It was set up so well, and Williams could've done so much, and then he ends it by having a Big Brain in the Sky crashing down on Daddy? For the love of... I still haven't been able to read another Tad Williams book for it, and I'm sure I'm missing out, but I just don't feel like committing to 4000 more pages if the last 15 are going to be truly, abysmally bad.
—Evilynn
I read this book years ago, and now just reread it. It can be very slow moving at times and hard to motivate yourself to pick it back up.It really only gets exciting in the second half, when FINALLY you start to get answers to all the questions that have been building up over the last 3 and a half books. I feel like the books were too long. Too much time focused and wasted on different and unneccesary simulation worlds. It was so long, that i got the impression that the author even forgot what he originally had designed for the characters. Obviously, after so much had happened, the characters would've changed and evolved from how they were in the beginning. However, many of the "transformations" didnt fit or make sense, and were so sudden that it was noticable instead of blended well over the timeline. The build up from the first 3 and a half required a much larger explaination than the hurried answers given in the last 200 or so pages. The epilogue as well could've used more space, and detail.All in all the end seemed very rushed. Its not particularly disappointing, but is lacking in something hard to define.
—Sarah
Otherland is the first fantasy series that I've finished this year (I've read a few other book #1s with no intention of continuing, including Tad William's own slogfest MS&T). I started a topic that got pretty long many years back about fantasy series that ended somewhere between well and spectacular. It didn't turn out to be a very long list. Otherland isn't going on it. It wasn't terrible, it just wore out its welcome. The least interesting character ended up being the hinge point of the entire plot (which really went off the rails). The main character of the first book that pulled me into the story ended up not actually having much to do, plot-wise. As happens with long series, I kept reading out of curiosity for what happens with book 1 characters while not caring about characters introduced later and finding time spent with a few of the later characters to be an annoying distraction.If you want to read Otherland, I recommend stopping when the settings and characters start losing their magic.The start of the story depended heavily on a "sense of wonder" advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, with success, but became repetitive and brought in too many convenient or out of nowhere powers and coincidences too many times by the end.
—Molly Ison
