I'm sad to say I agree with your assessment of these books.a 4-volume mess that would have made a single kick-ass novel, though always with the danger of it getting dated fast. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator. The fourth book is comparatively more focused and it even ends with a semi-reasonable conclusion, although there is still plenty of irrelevant virtual worlds here as well. The third book of Otherland is much the same as the second - lots of random virtual worlds, not too much plot, although some things do start to happen towards the end of the book. All I'll be missing is a load of explanatory waffle and some bad dialogue, and life's too short to sit through two more books of that. Luckily there's a summary chapter at the start of volumes 3 and 4, so I think I'll just read those instead and skip to the end for the conclusion.
Tad williams otherland cliffnotes free#
A good editor with a big pair of shears might have saved this by trimming it down to a fraction of its length, but unfortunately Williams has been given free rein to cram in as many worlds and characters as he can think of. So far there's not been enough story to fill one book, let alone two, and there are still two more to go. Overall, the book is just suffocating under its own weight. It all seems faintly stale and derivative - even the central motif of the river connecting all the lands has been used before, in the Riverland saga as well as Endymion and probably other places too. Most are either real-life or historical scenarios with a twist, or warped versions of literary settings - a War of the Worlds where the Martians are victorious a Land of Oz where Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion enact some bizarre post-apocalyptic wargame the chessboard of Through the Looking Glass where the Red Queen has won and spreads tyranny throughout the land. The settings are what Otherland is really about, but even those are not all that exciting. What are they all doing there? Why do they need their own chapters? Is their contribution really necessary, and wasn't there a better way of getting that information across? No, they weren't all finished off in book 1, they are still going, and this time they've multiplied! Now we have not just the cackling cartoon psychopath, but also his colleague, and a cop who's picked up his trail Renie's dad gets a couple of chapters, as does their friend Jeremiah the lawyer of Orlando's parents gets some screen-time and so does a woman he contacts in relation to Orlando's illness, and the little girl Christabel still pops in occasionally even though she does pretty much nothing. The sub-plots don't do much for it, either.
It's sort of played for laughs, but comes across like a custard-pie sequence in an Alien film. Likewise with some of the worlds - in one instance, two of the characters get caught up in a battle between giant animated vegetables and some pirates made of gravy. "It must be all in the programming! And how strange it is that I can vomit, despite it not being real!" It sounds rather like some cringing apology from the author, who knows it's all a bit stupid but wants to pre-empt the outraged criticism. "Surely a giant praying mantis wouldn't behave like that!" they say. The task of suspending disbelief is made even harder this time round by the characters' insistence on questioning everything they see - quite apart from the oft-repeated "if we die here, do we die in real life as well?" which gets tedious very quickly.
The nearest we get to plot development is Paul finally realising he's in a simulation (duh), and the characters figuring out that the place was created by very old rich men who want eternal life (duh, again) - that's half a sentence, not an 800-page novel. He may well have enjoyed himself, creating all those crazy net-worlds, but it's no substitute for writing an actual story. somewhere, but no-one really knows where or what, so they just wander around, keeping themselves busy while Williams plays at world-building.
Instead, the characters potter about and meander through the virtual worlds, getting into scrapes and getting out of them again, with no particular direction or purpose. Our heroes are trapped in the net, the evil billionaires' evil plan is about to come to fruition, and most of the minor sub-plots seemed just about wrapped up. the entire first book), I was hoping the plot would start to take shape in part 2.
Tad williams otherland cliffnotes full#
Up the corridor you have a room full of friends.After all the build-up (i.e. A fan subreddit for the stories and fantasy worlds imagined and written by Tad Williams - Memory, Sorrow and Thorn & Last King of Osten Ard trilogies, Otherland, Shadowmarch, Bobby Dollar, War of the Flowers, Tailchaser's Song etc.
0 kommentar(er)
