City Of Golden Shadow (1996) (edit title/settings)

• Rated 0 stars

“test”

• Rated 5 stars

“A clever, exciting, breathtaking, heart warming book. Sheer genious!”

• Rated 5 stars

“SF meets Fantasy meets NOW - this is all highly feasable, we are nearly living in the world created in the Otherland series! Brilliant!”

• Rated 2 stars

“This book (and series) is all the more tragic for the fact that it could have been great. There's so much potential in there, and Tad Williams is and has proved himself a very capable author in other works. A cyberpunk world without the over-the-top despondency, a multi-cultural tale from an author that should be able to pull it off, and a richly imaginative treatment of a world where, literally, imagination was the only limitation.

What he lacked in this series was a competent editor. Someone needed to sit down with Williams and take this series from four extremely long, horribly drawn out, arduous books, into one tight, fast-paced novel. You just know he had years of collected notes on all these great environments and settings into which he could thrust the characters, and he spared not a word in describing every... single... one.

Unfortunately, the plot doesn't have enough going on to support chapter after chapter of painstaking (and painful) descriptive narrative for each and every new cyberworld that the protaganists come across. The story moves at a glacial pace while treating us to one themed cyberworld after another, on an endless chase that I soon stopped caring about.

By the third novel, I was begging for an ending. When I discovered that it wasn't a trilogy but a quadrology, I almost couldn't bear to suffer through yet another endless description of random cyberworld theme number 42. If only it had been condensed into one or two shorter works, this story could have been great. As it is, almost all of its redeeming qualities are sucked dry and lifeless from the hulk of its endless prose. Unless you're planning on a cross-country drive or an around-the-world flight and have nothing better to do, I wouldn't bother with this monstrosity.”

• Rated 1 stars

“I wish I could like this author and series. I like the premise of the story and the matrix-like ideas - but it just drug on and bored me to death. I wasn't able to finish it. It is a shame, because had I liked it, I would have been blessed with many sequels. No soup for me on this one.”