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    City of Golden Shadow: Otherland Book 1
    Unavailable
    City of Golden Shadow: Otherland Book 1
    Unavailable
    City of Golden Shadow: Otherland Book 1
    Audiobook28 hours

    City of Golden Shadow: Otherland Book 1

    Written by Tad Williams

    Narrated by George Newbern

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    ANYONE CAN GO THERE... COMING BACK IS ANOTHER STORY.

    The first in a four-audiobook series, Otherland: City of Golden Shadow is a complex suspense novel of the near future, where virtual reality has expanded to encompass all aspects of society -- and national, physical, and mental boundaries are limited only by the virtue or darkness of the imagination, offering an entirely new level of freedom to people in all walks of life. But a blood-chilling conspiracy involving the world's most powerful individuals now threatens to shatter this world to its very core....

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 30, 2014
    ISBN9780756410322
    Unavailable
    City of Golden Shadow: Otherland Book 1
    Author

    Tad Williams

    Tad Williams is a New York Times and London Sunday Times bestselling author of fantasy and science fiction, with novels translated into more than twenty languages and a global readership. He hosted a syndicated radio show for over a decade, co-created the first completely interactive television program, and is currently involved in film, television, comic books, computer games and other multimedia projects. He and his family live in California.

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    Reviews for City of Golden Shadow

    4/5

    43 ratings36 reviews

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    • 4/5
      City of Golden Shadow is the first in the four book series Otherland and is followed by River of Blue Fire, Mountain of Black Glass, and Sea of Silver Light.The story takes place in the near future where the internet has expanded to the point it has literally become Virtual Reality. But even with the major advances in technology, humanity still has to deal with Real Life poverty, disease, food shortages, war, and now more than ever, corporate domination. When children all over the world begin fall into comas for no reason that can be determined, a small group of people start to investigate any and all possibilities that may help their loved ones. But, when it is discovered the children's illnesses are connected to Net usage, things become even more complicated as it is slowly revealed that a society called The Grail Brotherhood may be behind it all. And they are willing to do anything, to kill or even worse, to keep their plans secret.The book follows several different people and story lines throughout that are more or less brought together by the end. Of course, since it is the first of four books, the reader is still left hanging with more questions than answers. It is quite lengthy, but I think ultimately worth it for the great story and concepts that allow the author to really let his imagination loose and bring the reader along for the ride.Experiments in Reading
    • 5/5
      I love the virtual reality imagined in these books. They all have bits that I had to push through, but this is a story that will stick with me forever!
    • 5/5
      The Otherland books are the best series ever! I own them all and always recommend them. Amazing concept. You MUST read this series!
    • 4/5
      I bought this one about a decade ago, tried reading it, enjoyed it, but then stopped somewhere halfway through, and when I got back to it, I knew I had to start from the beginning, because it had been too long, and then I just never did.I'm so happy I finally sat down with this book. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Yes, it's slow, there's a lot of set-up and Tad Williams could probably cut a few hundred pages from (all?) his books and not lose much plot, but I loved every page.This came more than a decade before Ready Player One, and it is even older than The Matrix films. Today, some of the tech and science is outdated, but the concept of virtual reality and what Tad Williams did with it, is amazing.The Otherland series mixes science fiction, South African folklore, fairy tales, and fantasy into a wild tale and that mix is what I loved most about it. I can't wait to see where this series takes me!
    • 2/5
      I kept praying for this book to end...and then when it did, I found out that it was just the beginning. I really didn't want to stick around for the rest, so my experience with this series ended with book 1. Flat characters, not enough explanation of terms and scenarios, and stiff sequencing made this book a real trial to get through. Not what I want when I sit down to read.
    • 5/5
      Awesome science fiction from a fantasy writer. Really well-developed world and characters throughout the series. I loved it.
    • 2/5
      Interesting world, characters less so.
    • 4/5
      A very complex fantasy begins here, in a computer game. Ot that was there I thought it started. At any rate, a long quest begins, and we have a number of well developed characters, and several good plot twists. This series is very well worth reading.
    • 5/5
      The first of a series of four books I guess you can call this one a scene setter.....if that is possible for something 943 pages long!It is a hard story to explain without giving too much away. It starts in South Africa where Rene is contacted by her brother not by phone or personally but via a message from Virtual Reality. Him and his friends were "attacked" in a bar and were now being chased by the owners...on of their friends fell down a well and they now need help to escape. A simple sounding start but one that leads to Stephen falling into a coma. All of which does not seems suspicous until Rene trys to find answers and sees other mysterious cases of comas in Children linked to high Internet access areas in the world.As well as following Rene there are other groups followed as well during this book. Orlando who is ill in real life is known as a Warrior of great bravery in VR....until he is killed on-line while staring at the Golden City. He wants to know what it is and who designed it and does not give up till he finds it. And who is the mysterious Mr. Sellars and why do the Army want to keep him on the base.The book ends with the group of Real Lifers jumping into a Virtual Reality World due to their curiousity and own needs. They want to know what is going on but then while they are in the Golden City to find out it is attacked and they are now stuck in this Virtual Reality world. With the only message being that they need to find Paul Jonas - he has something that can help them. But will it be enough to get them out, save their family and also answer what is the Grail Project.
    • 5/5
      This is a re-read/listen (read before, listening now). It's a great book to listen to while falling asleep, since I already know the story - except for the truly disturbing stuff that happens mostly with the one truly "evil" character. That's not so fun to fall asleep to.
    • 4/5
      Moest echt wennen aan de schrijfstijl in dit boek. Anders dan ik gewend ben.

      Pas bij de laatste hoofdstukken begon het verhaal me te poelen te krijgen en wil ik verder lezen.
    • 2/5
      This book is so boring! It was my first Tad Williams novel, and it will be my last. I ended up finishing this book seven years after I started it. Every year, I went back to it and was starkly reminded how utterly uninteresting this book is. Williams stretches unimportant moment ad nauseum, adds too many characters only to abandon and forget about them, then adds even more characters whose narratives have absolutely nothing to do with the main thread, except for a coincidence at the final 10th of the book where they all meet — for no reason.

      Let me use the first character we meet, Paul Jonas, as an example. He is a person trapped in a virtual reality world made by the villains of the story (a bunch of very rich people, which is the only positive I can see in this novel: the rich are monsters and the heroes are ordinary, even poor people from Africa). Paul starts in a simulation of the trenches of World War I, then he jumps to a fantasy world with giants, then to a Victorian imagining of Venus... then nothing. His narrative disappears from the book to never return again.

      We spend so little time with Renie, the actual protagonist of this book, that at times I forgot she was the main plot point.

      So boring. And there's three more books in this series! I won't read them. I quit.
    • 5/5
      I loved this series. Perfect if you enjoy cerebral sci-fi like the Matrix or Inception.
    • 5/5
      Love it. Fantastic journey.
    • 4/5
      My full review of the series will be on Sea of Silver Light, but I loved this book as a start. It could have been shorter, if some subplots were left out or shortened or seen through different eyes, and it's not apparent how everything will come together at the end. One of my major literary things is family relationships, and I love the complexity of the relationships in Renie's family.
    • 4/5
      The books were massive and would take me a year to get through. But I was enthralled.
    • 3/5
      This is a hard book to rate. I really enjoyed many of the concepts in the book, the characters were believeable and easy to empathize with. It just took forever to get to the point. I felt like the first 750 pages were background for the last 30. I may read the second book, just to see if the story finally picks up.
    • 5/5
      In the first installment of Tad Williams "Otherworld" series the reader is introduced to a future where the net and virtual reality are readily available to anyone with enough credits. A virtual reality professor at a South African University, Renie Sulaweyo, becomes good friends with her student, !Xabbu, one of the last remaining African Bushmen. Renie and !Xabbu become entangled in a conspiracy involving the most powerful and dangerous men in the world. The scope of what needs to be done is more than Renie can really comprehend, but she can't give up while her young brother, Stephen, is somehow entangled in these powerful men's dark machinations.I continue to be surprised by how prophetic Science Fiction can seem. "City of Golden Shadow" was completed in 1996, but in it Williams imagines people watching "netflicks" instead of movies. His young characters spend hours battling monsters with their online friends, a nod to the popularity and evolution of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs). (After some cursory checking it seems the company Netflix didn't begin operations until a year later, in 1997, the same year that the acronym MMORPG came into use.) Suffice it to say that this novel gave me everything that I love about Tad Williams -- an intricate plot, detailed world building and enough details to choke a horse. Williams weaves the sci-fi elements of networked computing and virtual reality with traditional South African folklore, to beautiful effect. A strong female lead character was just icing on this yummy sci-fi cake.
    • 4/5
      A very interesting book, unlike pretty much anything I've read. I enjoyed the way Williams mixes scifi and fantasy through the use of virtual reality online. It was incredibly dense and I had to slog through it sometimes, but I think I'll read the rest of the series. After a break first, though.
    • 5/5
      I love this story, and will read all the rest of the books in this series.
    • 3/5
      What a rip! 780 pages, multiple converging story lines, and then, nothing. The End. You want to find out what happens? You have to read the next book in the series, which probably does the same thing, which means you have to read all three (or is it four?) volumes to find out what's going on. Geez what crock. On another note, for most of the book I thought the protagonist (Irene) was of moderate stature, 5'4" or so. At the end, she is tall, like 6 feet. Admittedly that was in a simulation, but still it bothered me. I supposed I could have missed a clue somewhere along the way. There is also a lot of pointless argument going on, especially in her story line. And how do you pronounce Renie? ree-nee? reny? Since her given name is Irene, I suppose it's Ree-nee, and I guess the spelling is acceptable, but I don't like Ree-nee, it sounds too harsh. Ren-ee sounds easier on the ears, but can you get there from Irene?Best part about the book is that characters were introduced slowly and completely so that I was able to keep them all in mind. I think I can still name most of them. There's Irene, Stephen, !Xaboo, Jeremiah & Long John. Then Orlando & Fredericks, Vivien & Conrad. Dread & the Egyptian gods. Atasco & his wife.
    • 2/5
      I have a feeling that bad reviews need to be longer than good ones... why did I not like this one...?For starters, there are about 20 stories in this book, which probably have something to do with each other, but as it's the first in a series of 4, they don't really cross paths. It gets even more confusing, because each story with the characters plays in a different "dimension" with different rules, sort of like Through the looking glass on crack.You don't get to spend enough time with the characters to start to care or to understand why they do what they do and then the book is over.I had to wait years for the next one and by then I had forgotten what it was about. Honestly, I like complicated stories and I have enjoyed works of Tad Williams, but this one aimed to high. It didn't draw me in and I stopped reading the series in the middle of Book 3 (of 4).
    • 4/5
      This book is the hardest of the series too get into, as Williams spends a lot of time introducing the characters and setting the stage for this epic story (as he puts, its one huge novel split artificially into 4 parts simply because it can't be bound any larger) The first time through this book I could barely get through it. However, I do remember that I found the payoff at the end of the 4th book to be quite satisfying, so in re-reading it again, I was able to enjoy the time spent getting to know the characters and their situation much better than the first time around. If you can get through the first book, you will likely find this series to be a wonderful mix of sci-fi & fantasy (with the emphasis on sci-fi in the first volume), and a diverse host of interesting characters who have all become part of a vast conspiracy called "Otherland".
    • 3/5
      Compelling story, but Williams has a nasty tendency to drag things out and randomly break the story up with new characters. I found that I got really irritated when the story would suddenly shift to new characters.Overall, the story and the concepts were enough to convince me to stick through it and buy the next book in the series.
    • 1/5
      I have picked up this book three times, I'm about 150 pages from the end, and I just don't care to finish it. I'd read Williams before, and I knew I was in for a slow start. This one just never got good!
    • 3/5
      Williams really liked main characters Renie and !Xabbu, and much of the text was devoted to them. Unfortunately, these were the most one-dimensional and uninteresting characters in the book, and the plot tended to slow whenever they were the main subjects. In general, Williams doesn't seem to understand how to create a compelling interest curve, so even though I wanted to know what was going to happen, I was constantly frustrated at the manner in which information was doled out. In terms of VR, Williams seems to have gotten most of the big issues right, but there are several telling examples of impossible or nonsensical uses of technology.
    • 4/5
      Excellent Sci-fi series - multi-genre tie in with characters being original - main protagonists are: a Bushman, a Nigerian professor (female) and a 14 dying boy. Antagonists are the wealthiest members of the world looking for immortality via technology at the cost of innocents.
    • 2/5
      I'm sorry. I really wanted to like this series. It sounded great. I like long, involved, epics, but it just didn't live up to any of my expectations. In fact, it was miserable to read. After a couple thousand pages and nearly two months living with these characters I never really cared what happened to anyone expect maybe Orlando, Fredericks, and Sellers. There's way too much description of minor characters, plot elements, stories, and settings that never pays off. Much of the stories seem simply repetitive. They're just doing the same thing in a new setting. Then towards the end of the last volume Williams suddenly backfills the story with a couple hundred pages of new things that have never been addressed so far just to bring the story to some kind of conclusion.
    • 5/5
      Amazing series makes up for this earlier fantasy series. Cyber w/o the punk. Well crafted characters and a riveting story
    • 5/5
      This is one of the best 'cyber' novels around. Not as hardcore as typical cyberpunk, and with some fantasy overtones, its an excellent blend of technology and fantasy. Tad Williams always writes well and his characters are interesting, and there's enough mystery in this book to keep you coming back for the rest of the series.