There exists a warped version of Oz, a grotesquely corrupted wild west, an ancient Egypt ruled by the god Osiris, and even a bizarre cartoon world. Anything seems to be possible here, from recreated fictional worlds such as Carroll’s Wonderland to Coleridge’s dream world Kubla Khan. This network consists of a huge number of virtual worlds. Once there, however, they are trapped online and must move forward to find answers in order to make it out again.

Until an encounter brings her, along with several others into contact with someone who can get them into the network. But this super secret network is impossible to break into.

Her path leads her to this new network, known as The Grail Network. Something sinister is going on and she intends to find out what. She learns her brother isn’t the only child to be affected in this way. Her search leads her to a new form of virtual reality technology that has been secretly developed over the past decade or so. Trying to help her brother, Renie sets off to figure out what put him into the coma in the first place. Something happens to her brother while he is playing online with friends that puts him into a coma. The story opens with Renie Sulaweyo – an African professor working with virtual reality technology – and her widowed father and younger, dependent brother. Even the “villain” is not so straight forward as all that, but there is layer upon layer of opposition that confronts the main characters. It follows multiple main characters – a young, professional woman from Africa, an African bushman, a teenage boy with progeria, an aged former test pilot, and many more. There is a lot going on in this massive series (four books totaling over three thousand pages!) which is really one long story. Book one, City of Golden Shadow, I read for Popsugar’s prompt #8, a book about a hobby (online gaming) book two, River of Blue Fire, for ATY’s prompt #17, a speculative fiction book three, Mountain of Black Glass, for ATY #19, a book by an author with more than one book on my TBR (I have eleven of his books on my list for this year!) and book four, Sea of Silver Light, for ATY #22, a book from the ATY polarizing/close call list – a book where the protagonist enters another world. It was a huge bonus then, when I was able to fit each of them into prompts for the 2019 Reading Challenge, both the Popsugar and ATY challenges. I have finally managed to collect copies of all of these books and decided this was the year I would finally reread them. I read his Otherland series many years ago when I was still on a student-borrow-books-from-the-library sort of budget.

I first fell in love with his books with his Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series, and then moved on to others. Tad Williams has long been a favorite author of mine.

Otherland williams