Sea of Silver Light (2001)

The Otherland series by Tad Williams consists of four books: City of Golden Shadow, River of Blue Fire, Mountain of Black Glass and Sea Of Silver Light. I'm not going to review each one separately, just talk about my general impressions of the whole. Sci-fi isn't really my genre, though I do love it, so I can't speak for accuracy of the technology described or anything -- just my reactions to the plot and characters. The series isn't one you get into lightly. The books average about 1000 pages each, and -- for me at least -- it's not easy going.

I loved the characters. There were very few I didn't like much -- the psychopath, Dread, for one, and of course the big baddie, and Del Ray Chiume because he was just an ass. But the main characters -- mostly Renie, !Xabbu, Martine, Jonas, Orlando and Fredericks -- really captured me. I was rooting for them all along. I thought there were maybe too many characters, and that the books could have been seriously slimmed down by cutting down on a few subplots. Or simplifying some of them a bit. A lot of things only came together at the end, so it was hard to see why some of them were relevant.

The love stories, I thought, were handled well. Much better than Miriamele and Simon, from his fantasy series, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. They actually had me rooting for them, in fact, rather than getting annoyed at them, and one in particular was so carefully built up, from book one right through to the last book, that I cheered when I read the bit where they got together.

There were a lot of different ethnicities involved in the book. I thought that was handled quite well, too. A bit of resentment between different races, a bit of tolerance -- a range of reactions that felt realistic and not at all like the author was subscribing to them.

I did love the way everything came together in the end. When I read Williams' fantasy series, I was about ten steps ahead of the characters at all times. This time, I was discovering everything pretty much along with the characters, which was... interesting. It made it a more difficult read, I think, but then, I'm much more versed in the clichés of fantasy plots than I am in the clichés of sci-fi.

Anyway, I loved the ending -- the more or less happy, but also kind of bittersweet, ending. Everything was resolved nicely, while still leaving room for the future.

I'm not sure I'll reread the books, though I enjoyed them a lot. It felt like such a mammoth undertaking! Still, they were interesting and absorbing, and much less predictable than Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. ( )

Great end to this series ( )

Sea of Silver Light is the concluding chapter in the Otherland saga and I have to say it wasn't as good as the first three books in the series. I still enjoyed it but something about the way it ended just seemed kind of hollow and lacking to me. I don't want to spoil the storyline so I won't say anything more about that. What I will say though is that the Otherland series is great as a whole. The story is cool and shows a very believable not too distant vision of our world, the net's place in it, and how our lives will be permeated by the incredible levels of access to information we may all have someday. ( )

an interesting book of more than 1000 pgs but fast paced-it can be read on its own because of the synopses on the previous 3 books but it is best to read them all in sequence

In "Sea of Silver Light," book four in the "Otherland" tetrology, Tad Williams wraps up his massive sci-fi saga.

Four big books in eight medium-sized sentences:
In a not so distant future children across the globe are being lost to unexplainable comas. For South African college professor Renie Sulaweyo, whose baby brother Stephen is among those affected, the horror of this epidemic is all too real. Researching Stephen's condition leads Renie to the Otherland, a massively complex virtual reality network that is powered by a nearly sentient operating system known as the Other. Its architects? A secretive group of affluent and aged elites who refer to themselves as the Grail Brotherhood. In an attempt to save Stephen, Renie and her friend, !Xabbu, find a way into this exclusive network. Once in Otherland the pair discover others on similar quests... and one whose ambitions are the stuff of nightmares. Our adventurers soon learn that they are trapped in the Otherland and, although the environments are simulated, the dangers are all too real.

My take:
I had a great time following the characters as they progressed through their adventures in this series. They were an interesting and diverse collection of protagonists and their various relationships (both romantic and not) tugged at my heartstrings. My favorite character was Orlando, a teenager suffering from the late stages of Progeria. Orlando uses the virtual reality environment of the Net to experience a freedom that he was denied in his dying body. I don't want to give too much away, but I feel that Orlando was the true hero of this series.

The virtual world where most of this story takes place allowed Williams to stretch the boundaries of science fiction. Purely fantastical worlds existed in an entirely science fiction based virtual reality environment, making for a fun mix of the genres. The best of both worlds in my humble opinion. The plot is delightfully intricate and the page count just goes on and on. Loved it. ( )