skygiants

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, ( small spoiler for the first book, LARGE BLOCK OF TEXT ABOUT MY FEELINGS )

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 ( spoiler relevant to Shati's interests )

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.