Otherland, the quarter of which Mountain of Black Glass is the powerful
third part, combines some terrifying speculation on the future of
virtual reality with adventures no less terrifying because they are
technologized dreaming. These are dreams the adventurers cannot awaken
from, and in which, if they die, they are really dead.
An epidemic of comatose children has led Renie and her San friend Xabbu
into the net and to a series of dream worlds created as palaces by the
corrupt aspiring immortals, the Grail Brotherhood. Two of those
children, Orlando and Fredericks, have become adventurers in their own
right, while their parents' lawyer Ramsey follows real-world money and
lesbian cop Calliope tracks a serial killer with serious ambitions to
become an angry god. In this volume, adventures take place in a mythic
ancient Egypt and a rambling Gormenghastlike house before all the
virtual adventurers meet where they were always destined to, before the
walls of Troy.
"All around, death. It was not a quiet presence during the long day--not
a pale-faced maiden bringing surcease from pain, not a skillful reaper
with a scalpel-sharp blade ... Death on the Trojan plain was a crazed
beast that roared and clawed and smashed, which was everywhere at once,
and which in its unending fury showed that even armored men were
terribly frail things." Tad Williams takes the game world and turns it on
its head, passionately; how do we know that what bleeds does not feel
pain? He writes a classic of cyberspace adventure that has a sorrowful
heart.
