City of Golden Shadow

DNF: 360. Tad is an amazing fantasy writer but his sci-fi writing just isn't for me. There's too much “techno-jargon” for me to understand fully what's going on and I just find myself zoning out. I could see why someone would enjoy it but not for me

No, no, no. This is waaay too wordy for me, just an endless flood of words.
I love epic stories but I love a lot of story (of facts) not of words and I never enjoyed this kind of “wide writing” so frequent in old-school fantasy.
Judging by the blurb I expected to read Neuromancer and got Shannara instead...

Overly long and drawn out; mostly boring. Way too much time was spent on the world building. The premise is interesting, maybe now that the story has gotten to the point, book two will be better.

edit: reviews of book two say no.

Executive Summary: Slow in places, but this story really works for me. Interesting world building and decent characters has me looking forward to the continuing on this series.Audio book: George Newbern does an excellent job with this book. Good inflections and emotion, as well as a variety of accents. He is definitely a narrator that adds extra enjoyment to the book.Full ReviewMy only experiance with Tad Williams prior to this book was his urban fantasy book [b:The Dirty Streets of Heaven 13542846 The Dirty Streets of Heaven (Bobby Dollar, #1) Tad Williams https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1340238037s/13542846.jpg 19079481]. I was not much of a fan. The writing was excellent, but the characters and the plot didn't do much for me.I'm not sure how to categorize this. Is it sci-fi? Is it fantasy? It is cyberpunk? It has elements of all three, but doesn't exactly fit into any one of them neatly.This isn't a dystopian story. It's a near future one where computers have enabled in depth virtual reality. It has a very cyberpunk feel at times. Maybe it's post cyberpunk? Then within the virtual reality, we experience many traditional fantasy settings and characters. So it's really a blending of the three.Regardless of the exact genre, the world hits all of my buttons. I'm a sucker for VR stories. If you mix in fantasy like this does, all the better.The story took me a bit to get into at first. It's very well written, but there are several subplots, and it took a long time for it to become clear just how they related to each other. This book is very largely a setup book. Much of it seems involve moving characters into the right place and setting up the world.The characters are pretty well developed and diverse. We have a VR specialist from South Africa named Irene “Renie” Sulaweyo and her student a Kalahari Bushman named !Xabbu. There are also the more traditional protagonists in Paul Jonas and Orlando Gardiner. I found Renie and !Xabbu refreshing as characters, but for me the large draw was the world building and the mystery of the Golden City. Once I was up to speed on what was going on, and the storylines began to converge, I was hooked. I'm definitely looking forward to continuing on and seeing where things will go next.

Otherland, is the story of several key players based in different parts of the world, who race to understand the virtual reality system–and the people who rule it–that has incorporated itself into the world at large, including the third-world: a woman consumed in finding a cure for her brother within the VR, a man trapped within a separate version of the realm seeking a way out, an aboriginal man on a quest, a wheel-chair confined man under house arrest, and others. The VR world is a vast, unlimited, golden realm of play and fun, it is also a dark and horrible world as possibly envisioned in the mind of Clive Barker; will the secrets hidden within be worth the sacrifices the protagonists have to make?

Tad Williams is a sharp writer of wit and thought. Richly written, this book will keep you enthralled for hours on end, which is saying a lot, considering the thickness of the book, and the volumes the complete story covers. Highly recommended.