The metaverse is all over the news these days, thanks to the fact that Mark Zuckerberg decided it was a better name than "virtual reality," and this has prompted folks to recommend books by Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and other stars of VR science fiction.
And that's fine. Those guys write great stuff. But I'm a little bit surprised that I haven't seen any recommendations for Tad Williams' Otherland epic. It was written back in 1998 (!) but nonetheless captures the possibilities of the metaverse as well as any book I've read.
Now, it also has a plot and characters and all the usual accoutrements of fiction, and in the end the bad guys all get their comeuppance. The story may or may not be to your taste. And it is 3,000 pages long. But if you want to read a pretty good fictional treatment of the metaverse and all its possibilities, you might want to give it a try.
The first book of the series was available at my local library. eBook, no less. So I've got it and will be giving it a fair chance over the next couple of days. Let's see where he takes it compared to Stephenson et al.
I thought of Williams as a fantasy writer and since I've been wanting to read more SF, I never looked into this series. Sounds interesting. I'll put it on my list.
Audible says the 4 books add up to just under 118 hours long. (An average book is around 12 hours). That is one long story.
Back when they were released, Book 3 took me 18 hours. Book 4 took me 8. The books got longer but I just got more into the story.
I consider myself a pretty hardcore sci-fi reader and have never heard of Tad Williams or Otherland, so I'm kind of excited to check it out based on this recommendation.
Tad Williams is usually a fantasy author he has strong unique chatacters (that is they all have unique voices) likes to use dreams a recurring motif, and is famous for putting in a gigantic number of plot threads that weave together into mind blowing finales.
He also wrote a fantasy book about a house cats.
I'd also offer a book from 1998, albeit much shorter. Wyrm by Mark Fabi tackles the idea of the metaverse and how it might work. It also contains some gloriously geeky jokes (if you grok a company called Gerdel Hesher Bock, you'll probably like this.)
Sure, it's horrendously dated in terms of technology (apart from the extreme VR stuff) but it's a wild ride.
The Otherland books are awesome! It has been a decade since I read them last, and they are still very vivid in my memory. (I didn't find the ending very satisfactory, but the vividly imagined world made it well worth reading.)
Been a while since I read, but was a fun journey. A long journey, as compared to Snow Crash, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Apropos of nothing, the "Daily Howler" with Bob Somerby is all over Mr. Drum's recent posts on Faux News viewers. But surprise! He uses it as a basis for attacking ... Rachel Maddow?! (sigh) A decade ago, I'd read The Daily Howler regularly. But it's deteriorated into a raging screed against Ms Maddow, and incidentally, all things liberal.
My apologies -- I just had to say that.
A blast from the past! Although I was once a regular reader, I haven't read Somerby in at least fifteen years when I concluded that his writing was utterly tedious, boring and humorless. (Which I only later found was ironic since Somerby works as a comedian!) IIRC, he was even less fun to read than the Glenn Greenwald of the '00s. And while that Glenn Greenwald was not quite as bad as contemporary Glenn Greenwald, that's still quite a feat.
I was also a regular reader for a while. I liked his take on the press and shared his obsession with the 2000 election. But yeah, long winded, repetitive, tedious, and the tone of an old man tilting at windmills all day long. After a while it really got old.
Same here. The repetition finally wore me down. And his obsession with Maddow is bananas.
Interesting. I read one book by Tad Williams years ago, the Dragon Bone Chair, and I did not care for it. But I'll check these out.
That book was the first of a trilogy and Williams is now two books in to a four book sequel series. I like them overall. It's not LOTR but pretty close to GOT in quality.
I definitely did not feel that way about Dragonbone Chair at the time. I read tons of fantasy and am used to putting up with a lot. For me to decide against completing a series after the first book, well I'm sure I had a reason. I mean I made it through all of The Assassin's trilogy (I guess it's called Farseer Trilogy) by Robin Hobb and I thought that was dull, unnecessarily long winded, and poorly plotted. TBH I don't remember my specific beef with Dragonbone so maybe I can give Williams another chance.
Well, we must have different tastes since I really loved Hobbs' Farseer books (there are two trilogies; I think there is a related trilogy in the same universe, but I haven't read that one). Better than Williams.
Me, I knew him for Tailchaser's Song, a fantasy written about cats. I enjoyed it.
I can only consider any of these books predictive if they portray the limitless possibilities of VR being confined to virtual board room business meetings, virtual shopping malls, a virtual real estate market, and a few virtual "raves" where a bunch of avatars idly stand around surrounded by corporate logos. Aah, the boundless imagination of tech bros and VC capitalists.
Hmm. I don't believe that I've ever read Otherland, though I've read plenty of Stephenson and Gibson. I have read Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn fantasy trilogy and the first two of his sequel series to that (two more to come according to Amazon). It's pretty good, fairly close in quality to Martin's Game of Thrones in quality (minus, of course, the utterly ruthless dispatching of major beloved characters and it appears that he is probably concluding it in my lifetime--I'm 68). It's superior to some better known fantasy works like Robert Jordan's overstuffed and endlessly repetitious Wheel of Time (which I don't think I ever quite finished) which is currently getting a mediocre, and much altered, adaptation on Prime Video. And it's far, far better than Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth, which I considered third or fourth rate Tolkien even before he turned it into a (very) thinly veiled Ayn Rand screed.
Just an update to a snarky remark I made above. After writing that post, I did one of my occasional searches for the status of Martin's Winds of Winter, the penultimate volume of Game of Thrones that is already many years past it's initial expected publication date. Late last year, Martin announced the book would be published on 11/13/23. We'll see. Any video game fans remember the vaporware called Duke Nukem Forever? (It finally, and anticlimactically, released fifteen years late to bad reviews.)
Thanks for the update on "Winds of Winter"!! Of course, I'll believe it when I'm able to order it on Amazon (or whatever book vendor exists in that too-distant future.)
I checked it out, too, and one of the news stories observed that "A Song of Ice & Fire" would stop being a "feel-good story" and become "dark." Really. Having read that previously-released Greyjoy chapter, I'm not sure how much worse that can be.
I can't even with the Amazon WOT series. The book series really devolved after the first few volumes but those first few--I really did enjoy them. The creative license taken with the Amazon series just does not work for me. Why not just invent something new if you are going to utterly alter a book that is familiar and loved by so many? Do the characters even say "by the Light" or "blood an ashes"? I don't think I heard those expressions in the one ep I watched and if you are not even going to do that, I mean what's the point? Though maybe some of them did say that and I just couldn't understand because everyone was talking in the same London street urchin accent. Oh I have so many beefs. Why did you bring that up?
It's been years since I read the Wheel of Time books and I don't recall them all that clearly, but IIRC, I liked the early books also before they devolved and became ridiculously longwinded (Jordan would take pages to describe a meal or clothing), repetitious, and glacially paced. (A couple of characters might set out for a particular city and arrive there two books later. Jordan would have written a trilogy getting Frodo from Bree to Rivendell.) I'm not a fanboy and my memory of the books are hazy, but I knew some of the show was off immediately--by definition, a woman could not be the Dragon Reborn, it was clear from the start, at least to the reader, that it was Rand, Min was a teenager that they met in a completely different way.
Paradoxically, since I really love LOTR (and have reread it almost annually since the late '60s) but not the WOT, I was indifferent to the changes the mediocre TV version made though I still get angry at the changes Peter Jackson made in the generally far more faithful film version of LOTR. I watch the films pretty much annually as well (and boy, do the new 4K Dolby Vision versions on disc look gorgeous on my OLED TV) because they got so many things stunningly right (I cry every time when the Rohirrim charge at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields). But it still gets me mad (and this is a very short list) that Merry and Pippin are the Shire village idiots who only came on the quest accidentally, Elves at Helm's Deep, Denethor refusing to light the beacons he lit before Gandalf got to Minas Tirith, Theoden refusing to go to war, the Entmoot refusing to go to war (and the plan by Pippin to trick them into it that was risible both geographically and logically). And, most notoriously, when I first saw The Two Towers in a theater, I nearly fell out of my seat when Faramir claimed the Ring for Gondor. oops, this is getting way too long, LOL.
I have no philosophical problem with the Dragon being a female soul. Lews Therin's soul has been Dragon for long time. Another Soul might replace him eventually or might have been replaced by him.
But Rand is the reincarnation of Lews Therin--a specific male reincarnated according to prophecy--and that is unheard of otherwise. So it really does have to be a dude and Moraine looks like a moron for not knowing that if she's actually studied the prophecy.
Would Tron be considered metaverse?
How about a nice game of chess?
Facebook has it's own WOPR?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/meta-has-a-giant-new-ai-supercomputer-to-shape-the-metaverse/
😉
My favorite fantasy author. I read Memory Sorrow and Thorn in middle school and Otherland in highschool. I actually am doing an Otherland reread where I am about to start book 4. War of the Flowers is also an excellent stand alone boom by him. The only series I've been meh on by him was Shadowmarch.
Notably while writing MST he was accosted by GRRM who demanded to know why he was NOT WRITING THE FINAL BOOM YET. I shit you not.
In fact, the quality of MST is what convinved GRRM that ASoIaF could be successful as a fantasy seriea.
Well obviously book not boom. Yeesh.