Otherland
4 primary works • 5 total works
Book 1
“Tad Williams is the brightest and best of the fantasists.” ―Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods
Otherland. Surrounded by secrecy, it is home to the wildest dreams and darkest nightmares. Incredible amounts of money have been lavished on it. The best minds of two generations have labored to build it. And somehow, bit by bit, it is claiming the Earth's most valuable resource—its children.
Only a few have become aware of the danger. Fewer still are willing or able to take up the challenge of this perilous and seductive realm. But every age has its heroes, and unusual times call for unusual champions:
Renie Sulaweyo, a teacher and the backbone of her family, proud of her African heritage, has fought all her life simply to get by. She has never wanted to be a hero. But when her young brother is struck down by a bizarre and mysterious illness, Renie swears to save him. When people around her begin to die, she realizes she has stumbled onto something she is not meant to know, a terrifying secret from which there is no turning back.
!Xabbu is a Bushman, come to the city to learn skills which may save the spirit of his tribe. With the heart of a poet and the soul of a shaman, he will journey with Renie on this quest into the very heart of darkness.
Paul Jonas is lost, seemingly adrift in space and time. As he flees from the bloody battlefields of World War I to a castle in the sky, and onward to lands beyond imagining, he must not only evade his terrifying pursuers, but solve the terrible riddle of his own identity.
Fourteen-year-old Orlando is also the invincible barbarian Thargorm, but only in his imagination. However, youth and frailty are not enough to get you excused from saving the world.
And Mister Sellars, a strange old man on a military base, a prisoner of both the government and his own body, may be the greatest mystery of all. Is he part of The Grail Brotherhood? Does he oppose them? Or, as he sits like a spider at the center of a vast web, does he have ambitions of his own?
The answers will only be found in Otherland.
Book 2
Otherland. In many ways it is humankind's most stunning achievement: a private, multidimensional universe built over two generations by the greatest minds of the twenty-first century. But this most exclusive of places is also one of the world's best kept secrets, created and controlled by an organization made up of the world's most powerful and ruthless individuals, a private cartel known—to those who know of their existence at all—as The Grail Brotherhood.
Though their purpose in creating Otherland is still a mystery, it may not remain so for long. For they have exacted a terrible price from humanity in the process, and even their highly organized global conspiracy cannot hide the nature of their crimes forever.
And now a small band of adventurers has penetrated the veil of secrecy that prevents the uninitiated from entering Otherland. But having broken into the amazing worlds within worlds that make up this universe, they are trapped, unable to escape back to their own flesh-and-blood bodies in the real world.
And as dangers and circumstances split their party into small, widely scattered groups, their only hope of reuniting lies in returning again and again to the River that flows—in one form or another—through all the worlds.
But the odds seem to be completely against them as they—and the one outsider with whom they might join forces—become hopelessly lost in realms where an Ice Age tribe's fears can only be quenched in blood...where insects are as large and deadly as dinosaurs...where they are caught in the war between a man made of straw and one made of tin...where cartoon ads take on a life of their own...where humans strive to survive in the aftermath of an alien invasion...and where one among their party is actually The Grail Brotherhood's most terrifying weapon—a sociopathic killer who has never failed and whose current mission is to make certain that not even one member of this little invasion force lives long enough to reveal the truth about Otherland to the people of Earth...
Book 3
Book 4
Few science fiction sagas have achieved the level of critical acclaim-and best-selling popularity-as Tad Williams's Otherland novels. A brilliant blend of science fiction, fantasy, and technothriller, it is a rich, multilayered epic of future possibilities.
An incredible Novella set in the Otherland Universe by New York Times bestselling author Tad Williams.
When Orlando Gardiner's physical body died, his mind was lost to the massive simworld known as Otherland. Today he has come to the Great Wall of China in the Ming Dynasty. This part of the sim was closed years before when it was revealed it was attached to the real world. Today, cleared of its past troubles, Orlando opens it again, but the moment he does so he is challenged with a near impossible quest: to rescue a Peach Maiden who has been abducted to the demon-ruled Metal Isle. Orlando cannot refuse, little knowing that the deadly interface between truth and reality remains dangerously open.
PRAISE FOR THE MEMORY, SORROW & THORN SERIES
'One of my favourite fantasy series' George R. R. Martin, international bestselling author of A Game of Thrones
'One of the main reasons I started writing fantasy . . . Tad Williams' work is an essential part of any science fiction and fantasy library' Christopher Paolini, author of the Inheritance Cycle series
'Ground-breaking . . . changed how people thought of the genre and paved the way for so much modern fantasy, including mine' Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Kingkiller Chronicle