Not sure what to say about this one.
Probably my usual "enjoyable enough" comment.
Very long. I just hope the whole 4 book series is worth it. ( )

I had such high hopes for this book. I adored Tad Williams' WAR OF THE FLOWERS, and I really wanted to like this. Unfortunately, while Tad has some interesting ideas and explores a world that has the potential to be highly interesting, the book itself is dull, dull, dull. Uneven pacing and entire chapters that go nowhere made it difficult for me to plod through 800 pages just to get to an end that... well, isn't. Sorry, Tad, but I won't be continuing with this series. Life's too short to waste on horribly tedious books, no matter how good the writing. (C ) ( )

I originally came across the book cover on the 'net; I follow a Mastodon account that just posts old scifi novel cover art and the image of this city was so entrancing I confidently added it to my "to read" list. That weekend, while at a wedding, I was browsing the shelves in the common room of my hostel and came across it in paperback. Reading it in the mornings before festivities began, I was both compelled and disturbed. Themes of conspiratorial violence and child endangerment ultimately put me off, even as the setting intrigued.

A year later, however, I found myself looking for a setting from which to crib my own for a prospective cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying campaign, and returned to see if I couldn't borrow some network components to repurpose for my friends.

Thoroughly diverting, "City of Golden Shadow" seems to be a direct ancestor of both "Ready Player One" and "Sword Art Online", but it's a mature work for adult readers and it takes itself much more seriously in both themes, depth of pathos, and writing. Published in 1996, many of the books references to "the 'net" are awkwardly, if endearingly, off-the-mark, which is to say that they carried forward some assumptions about computing that haven't held up, such as the ubiquity of on-premise servers (whereas what we got was "the cloud"). It also fails to predict "graceful degradation," eg nowadays we never encounter white noise because our network errors are filtered through many comfortable abstraction layers.

Ultimately, the imagery is vivid, and the author is enjoying himself. As he put it in an interview, the various virtual worlds of the 'net are an excuse to write micro fictions in a trillion genres. He certainly exhibits a tireless imagination.

Also, it turns out that the author and I share a hometown—the location of the wedding and the hostel—so it's not such a huge coincidence that I came across the book, only that I happened to be looking for its cover in the first place. That being said, it shares that privilege with a dozen other book covers I've spotted just this way on the 'net.

There's probably no sentience and/or conspiracy inhabiting the internet and luring me toward the golden city to save the world. That's probably not happening IRL. ( )

This is an overstimulating narrative mess, but I loved every minute of it. After children begin falling into a mysterious coma in the near future, a disparate group is drawn together to investigate Otherland, a virtual reality universe which feels disturbingly real. Williams throws in everything but the kitchen sink -- government conspiracies, Alice in Wonderland, African Bushmen, serial killers -- but the splattering results are arresting ( )

No, no, no. This is waaay too wordy for me, just an endless flood of words.
I love epic stories but I love a lot of story (of facts) not of words and I never enjoyed this kind of "wide writing" so frequent in old-school fantasy.
Judging by the blurb I expected to read Neuromancer and got Shannara instead... ( )