The Hobbit
The gateway to modern fantasy — perhaps a hundred million copies — whose unexpected demand for a sequel produced The Lord of the Rings; Peter Jackson's trilogy stretched it to cinematic breaking point, the book remains unstretched.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
City of Golden Shadow
by Tad Williams · 1996 · Otherland, book 1
What is City of Golden Shadow about?
Children are falling into comas across the world, their minds trapped online; in South Africa, virtual-reality instructor Renie Sulaweyo loses her brother to the phenomenon and follows the trail — with the Bushman student !Xabbu — to Otherland: a private multiverse of impossible simulations (a Troy that bleeds, an endless kitchen, a cartoon world with teeth) built at unimaginable cost by the Grail Brotherhood, the world's oldest and richest men, for a purpose involving immortality and the children's stolen minds. Williams runs epic-fantasy architecture on SF rails: the quest is a login, the dungeons are server farms, and death may or may not be configurable.
Why it matters
The genre's great pre-broadband metaverse epic — VR worldbuilding at a scale not attempted again until the streaming era, and a visible influence on everything from the Matrix sequels' discourse to Ready Player One's premise (done with far more ambition here).
Where does it sit in the series?
A four-volume odyssey through a privately owned virtual multiverse built by the world's richest men for a purpose worth dying — and killing — to hide.
In the Guide from Otherland:
- City of Golden Shadow (1996)
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