With Sea of Silver Light, Tad Williams completes his massive Otherland
quartet, one of SF's more intriguing explorations of the eroding
boundaries of the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead.
Otherland is a sequence that contains many secrets, and Williams plays
fair by unpacking all of them in the final book. A group of adventurers
searching for a cure for comatose children find themselves trapped in a
sequence of virtual worlds, the only opponents of a conspiracy of the rich
to live forever in a dream. Now, they are forced to make an uneasy
alliance with their only surviving former enemy against his treacherous
sidekick Johnny Wulgaru, a serial killer with a chance to play God
forever.
Williams manages a vast cast of emotionally involving characters with
considerable panache, but the real strength of the book is its endlessly
questing intelligence; it is, among other things, an enquiry into the
nature of storytelling as a way for human beings to give structure to
their perceptions of the universe around them. It is as story that Sea of
Silver Light ultimately works so well--involving us in the grueling
descent of a vast mountain, the siege of an underground fortress, gun
battles in a nightmare Wild West. Williams never neglects to tell us how
things feel. He efficiently ties up every plot strand and convincingly
reveals every secret in this large, complex plot.
