#TAD WILLIAMS OTHERLAND APPROPRIATE KIDS OFFLINE#
#TAD WILLIAMS OTHERLAND APPROPRIATE KIDS SERIES#

#TAD WILLIAMS OTHERLAND APPROPRIATE KIDS OFFLINE#

It is only when their ability to go offline is taken away from them that they truly begin to value the world and the identity they’ve left behind. It has become the sea in which our characters swim, and their main way of interacting with the world. The virtual net of this story would be as alien to us as the internet would be to our grandparents. In one sense, it is an exploration of the future of the digital world and what it might mean to people. There’s no one thing that I can say this book is about. He is right, though – it is one very long story, and thus you can extract a great many things from it, if you want to. The main reason, of course, being that no one would print or buy a 3,500 page hardcover, even if the fine folks at DAW Books were willing to try it. This isn’t really four books, he said – it’s one giant book that had to, for various reason, be split into four. In his forward to the second book, Williams apologized to his readers about the cliffhanger ending to the first. Good news, honey! The new Tad Williams book is out! It is not, as we find out, and the scope of the villainy that has been done to it is truly astonishing. You even find yourself feeling for the Other, which we – and the protagonists – have always believed to be the main villain of the story. For the bad ones, you want them to get their just desserts, to see them suffer as they have made others suffer.

You care about the characters, and you want everything to turn out all right for them. The important thing is that, by the end of the book you really do feel invested in the world that Williams has created.

#TAD WILLIAMS OTHERLAND APPROPRIATE KIDS SERIES#

I have a sneaking suspicion that Williams might have been able to stretch this series into a fifth book, but it probably would have suffered from Rowling Syndrome – a lot of unnecessary padding in between the important bits. There is a rather major revelation that comes near the end that just kind of… gets written off. There’s a lot to take in by the end of the series, a lot of loose ends to tie up, but it all wraps up rather nicely. As it moves towards its ending, which does involve a lot more explaining than most other books do, it’s easy to get swept up in the sheer scale of the narrative. Lawyers, children and old women are his army, and together they will uncover the horrible and heartbreaking truth about the nature of the Other and the evil that has been done to it. Offline, Sellars has brought all of his players into position.

There they must face the eventual death of the network and survive it, if they can. The other half… they ended up in the heart of the Other’s secret dreams. Half of them have been thrust back into the twisted realms of Otherland, where the horrors and dangers that had been built into it have mutated into unrecognizable terrors. While they are successful, none of them look this cool.īut those explorers themselves face greater dangers than Dread.

Tad williams otherland appropriate kids