Just Finished Rereading Otherland: River of Blue Fire by Tad Williams

One of the problems with reading drawn-out series is that many times, the novelty that characterizes the first book has long disappeared with subsequent volumes and the reader has to go on faith that the author will eventually get around to explaining everything by the time it's all over.  In the meantime, there is a danger of readers having to "slug it out" book by tedious book...this was a major problem with Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time and Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth fantasy series.  Although Tad Williams, normally a fantasy writer as well, wrote his four-volume Otherland as a provocative science fiction series about the possibilities and perils of virtual reality...a subject that greatly interests me...the same problem exists here.  I know, I've read it before...

In River of Blue Fire, the second volume in the Otherland series, we see the same list of characters struggling through the virtual reality multiverse: they are trapped there and unable to return to the real world.  Renie Sulaweyo, a young South African IT expert living a hundred years in the future, is searching to find what happened to her little brother Stephen, who is in a coma after visiting a virtual reality site.  There are others with her, each with his or her own quest/agenda...not all of them benevolent: one of Renie's group is an imposter, working for the sinister Grail Brotherhood of ultra-wealthy elites who seem to by trying to achieve a sort of digitally-based immortality through their virtual reality creations.  The protagonists go from one exotic location to another, each of which Williams describes in intricate detail and which presents its own unique challenges.  Yet, after I finished this rather long book, I didn't feel that the story had progressed that much...something of a disappointment.  I know that some very interesting things happen in the next book, but as I said before, it won't be until the very end of book number four that it all begins to come together.  Oh well, I started it and I'm gonna finish it...

There's a rumor that the Otherland series might be adapted to movie or television...I think that would be fantastic.  What would be much better, though, would be for virtual reality to finally take off and become the established, dominant next stage in the evolution of the Internet.  They'd better hurry, though: I'm not getting any younger...