skygiants | (no subject)

You know that embarrassing moment when you're like "I'll reread some cheesy thousand-page sci-fi books I loved when I was a teenager! I will enjoy laughing at the naivete of youth and feeling smug and wise about how my tastes have matured!" and then you start reading and you're like "OH NO ... MY TASTES HAVE NOT MATURED AT ALL."

This is to say that I just zoomed through all of Tad Williams' Otherland books over the past two weeks and I'm still really, really into them. I'm sorry, everyone.

So the Otherland books are soft cyberpunk from the nineties, set in a near-future where everyone has really fancy VR equipment, about a SUPER SPECIAL SUPER COMPLEX VIRTUAL REALITY NETWORK that has been developed by a SINISTER CABAL for SINISTER PURPOSES and might have accidentally or on purpose sent a bunch of kids into comas. Various protagonists end up trapped in the network, and then spend the next 3000 pages flailing in confusion through exciting virtual worlds like "Dystopic Alice in Wonderland!" "Dystopic Oz!" "Land of GIANT BUGS!" This is because the evil billionaires who created the network apparently have the same sensibilities as whoever makes programming decisions for the SyFy network.

Protagonists include:

RENIE SULAWEYO, a South African computer engineer whose brother is one of the coma kids. I love Renie! I love that the most protagonist-y protagonist of the book is a South African black female engineer. I wish we got to see her do ... any actual engineering ... I mean, Tad Williams is way more invested in Renie Sulaweyo, ACTION HERO, than he is in Renie Sulaweyo, COMPUTER ENGINEER. A group of kindergarteners disguised as yellow monkeys do more computer programming in the series than Renie does. But WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING.

!XABBU, Renie's friend/love interest, a Bushman who is learning computer science for reasons related to preservation of cultural heritage. Tad Williams is really trying with !Xabbu, he's REALLY trying, but he cannot quite stop himself from having him constantly channel Disney's Pocahontas. !Xabbu has infinite patience and natural earthly wisdom that help him to understand the network! CAN YOU PAINT WITH ALL THE PIXELS OF THE WIND? Also it is regrettably important to note that !Xabbu spends two whole books wearing the virtual sim of a baboon.

PAUL JONAS, an amnesiac British dude who is trapped in the network for reasons he can't remember and who is ... pretty boring. Does anyone really care that much about Paul Jonas? OK, I cared about Paul Jonas for ten minutes when he was a traumatized and confused WWI vet, but after that I stopped caring about him pretty fast.

ORLANDO GARDINER, a kid with progeria who understandably spends all his time playing the equivalent of World of Warcraft online and stumbles over the Otherland stuff by accident and decides it's his last chance to become a Tolkienish hero. Everyone loves Orlando's plotline best, it's about all about INNER HEROISM and INTERNET FRIENDSHIP. See also:

SAM FREDERICKS, Orlando's internet BFF, MY FAVORITE, whose full name is Salome. And, like, of course I love Sam Fredericks, Sam Fredericks is everything I love about grumpy sidekicks AND everything I love about cross-dressing/genderqueer characters rolled into one, and I have so many feelings about -- so, like, OK, after the big reveal, Sam's like 'dude, we're been dude friends for like five years, I prefer being a dude online, just treat me like a dude, OK? Don't make it weird, man!' And for the next few books, the novel continues to use male pronouns for Sam, and Orlando valiantly attempts not to make it weird and the gender stuff is really completely unimportant in the grand scheme of things because Sam's chosen identity as 'grumpy sidekick' is so much more important ... UNTIL. UNTIL the first major time Sam gets damseled and requires rescue. AND THEN IT'S FEMALE PRONOUNS ALL THE WAY. And, like, Sam does a TON of heroic stuff in the early part of the books and saves Orlando's life repeatedly, but Orlando's mostly passed out for this so he doesn't pay much attention, and after the pronoun switch basically everything heroic that Sam tries goes wrong, and Sam TALKS ABOUT feeling less confident and different and uncomfortable as a girl, and UGH. ARGH. And the novel barely even touches on the fact that Sam's offline identity is not just a girl, but a black girl, whose online avatar is a white boy. I WISH TAD WILLIAMS WAS SO MUCH BETTER AT WRITING ABOUT THIS STUFF.

MARTINE DESROUBINS, a researcher/programmer whose physical blindness gives her superpowers in the virtual network because that's how blindness always works in epic fantasy, and for all that it's technically cyberpunk Otherland is basically an epic fantasy.

SELLARS, a mysterious prisoner on a mysterious military base who has developed a seret friendship with a seven-year-old girl for mysterious but, we are assured, TOTALLY BENEVOLENT purposes, but NO WONDER HER PARENTS FREAK OUT, is all I'm saying

OLGA PIROFSKY, an elderly ex-circus performer who has started to hear voices and who is super important to the fate of the universe. Also: Jewish!

CALLIOPE SKOUROS, a lesbian Australian cop who is living out her own small crime procedural while everyone else is engaged in a sci-fi epic, pursuing

DREAD, a serial killer that we spent WAY too much time with. Why do spec fic novelists always think it's interesting to bop away from the main plot and spend hundreds of pages inside a serial killer's head? IT'S NOT INTERESTING. I'm talking to you, Mercedes Lackey.

FELIX JONGLEUR, Dread's boss, an Ancient Egypt-obsessed evil billionaire. There are also a bunch more evil billionaires as well as a few chaotic neutral evil billionaires but it's not really important to list them out here.

THE WICKED TRIBE: A crowd of kindergarteners disguised as yellow monkeys who do more computer programming than any of the actual computer programmers in the book.

THE OTHER, a sad superpowered telepathic fetus brain in a satellite in outer space. Also Jewish, by the way!

There are many, many more characters. SO MANY. The cast is very diverse! Pretty much everyone except for Paul is of color and/or disabled and/or LGBTQ and/or an evil billionaire. As you can see from the list above, sometimes Tad Williams does ... a better job actually handling his diverse characters than he does at other times. But it would be an AMAZING TV series, because the plot is basically designed as a 'wacky SyFy movie of the week' anyway. Cast Rutina Wesley as Renie to lead the cast and you're good to go.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/377892.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ambyr

The cast is very diverse! Pretty much everyone except for Paul is of color and/or disabled and/or LGBTQ and/or an evil billionaire.

Hee. Yes, can't leave out of the evil billionaires.

I had forgotten Sam Fredericks. No wonder a certain plotline in Ready Player One felt so played out to me, even as other people I talked to were admiring its originality.

From:

skygiants

Hah, Sam Fredericks was the one thing I NEVER forgot about these books. <3<3<3SAM FREDERICKS<3<3<3. I haven't read Ready Player One, but I'm assuming something similar occurs?

From:

ambyr

Yes indeed. I don't particularly recommend it, but I think you would probably enjoy it more than I did.

From:

skygiants

I mean, I do have a well-noted weakness for that one particular plot element.

From:

lnhammer

Check out Sword Art Online -- just saying. (Official translation of the first novel is just out, too).

---L.

From:

skygiants

I feel like I've heard that elsewhere, too. Duly noted!

From:

lnhammer

(And having found it at yer local B&N, I can report the trans official translation is pretty good.)

From:

jinian

I enjoyed this description more than I enjoyed the books, so thank you. Pixels of the wind!

From:

skygiants

Every rock and tree and creature in this network has a life, has a spirit, has a name! Man, I could go on and on.

From:

shati

>:(

but at least no tentacles? yes?

Edited Date: 2014-05-02 03:28 pm (UTC)

From:

skygiants

I was about to say proudly "yes!" and then I remembered a sequence with Scylla and Charybdis and a really distressing tentacle attack so ... um ....

From:

shati

OF COURSE THERE IS.

From:

sovay

THE OTHER, a sad superpowered telepathic fetus brain in a satellite in outer space. Also Jewish, by the way!

Whaaa.

From:

skygiants

I mean, it's not really stated explicitly in the text, but law of matrilineal descent CLEARLY shows that Daniel the sad superpowered telepathic fetus brain in a box should have been a Bar Mitzvah.

From:

rachelmanija

I think Tad Williams should get a medal for this. Or an introduction to Kaori Yuki.

From:

skygiants

At the end the fetus-box even falls from the sky and rains down upon a city!

From:

troisroyaumes

Ooh, I started reading this series but got stuck around the second volume. I have a soft spot for Tad Williams because his Sorrow, Memory, Thorn trilogy was one of my favorites back in middle school. (That one has...a much less diverse cast, with some obvious problems with having obvious Japanese and Inuit-analogues as non-human cultures...)

From:

skygiants

Heh, I actually tried to get through Tad Williams' fantasy series a couple of times as a teenager and bounced off them repeatedly -- something about Otherland super clicked for me in a way nothing else he has ever written ever has, and I have no idea why. (Well, OK, I do know why, probably, and probably it's Sam Fredericks. Also, endless cheesy SyFy pastiches of classic literature, which for me is like catnip.)

From:

lizbee

Wasn't Dread a man of colour? Or did I just cast him as an Aboriginal serial killer for problematic internalised reasons?

From:

skygiants

No, you're right, he's Aboriginal! (But neither disabled, nor LGBTQ, nor an evil billionaire.) There's a whole sequence where Calliope goes to visit an Aboriginal professor to follow up on a Dread-related lead, and the professor is like "seriously, Aboriginal myth-based ritual murder, ARE WE REALLY GOING TO GO THERE, COME ON," and Calliope's like "sorry! I can't help it! The narrative says we have to go there! I'M SO SORRY. We're all very sorry about this whole plotline."

From:

caramarie

sad superpowered telepathic fetus brain in a satellite in outer space

Ever since I read Otherland I have been disappointed when the answer to the Big Mystery in a story *isn't* telepathic fetus brains.

From:

skygiants

This comment made me laugh so hard. IT'S MORE COMMON THAN YOU THINK.

From:

alias_sqbr

Ahh Otherland! I found the START of the story really interesting but couldn't bring myself to slog through the rest so waited til the final volume came out and read the end. But I remember liking that he tried to be diverse. Glad I didn't get to the Aboriginal myth-based ritual murder, oh god why does EVERYONE write Aboriginal Australians so terribly.

From:

skygiants

Haha, I mean, it's not like you particularly missed out, pretty much ALL that happens in the middle two books is repeated flailing through various virtual worlds. NO PLOT HAPPENS until literally the very end of the third book, and then plot is put on hold again for more flailing until halfway through the fourth book. Pacing is ... not really Tad Williams' strong point here.

From:

oyceter

Oh Otherland! Now I am tempted to drag it out and reread it because I loved Orlando and Sam so much! Except now I vaguely remember Paul Jonas, who really was the most boring.

... on the other hand, I don't remember telepathic space fetus at all, which clearly should be rememdied!

From:

skygiants

I want to say YES REREAD IT but I'm not sure I can in conscience tell anyone to reread it, it's literally 3000 pages long and many of those pages are endlessly repetitive. But Orlando and Sam! I mean, you could probably quite happily reread just the Orlando and Sam chapters and skip the rest ... um ....

Poor telepathic space fetus. :( I make light of his plight, it really was very sad and touching. It's hard being a telepathic space fetus brain in a box!