hildren are collapsing into deep comas after spending time online, and doctors can't seem to find a cause or cure for the death-like malady. In an effort to help her comatose little brother, virtual engineering teacher Renie Sulaweyo and her newest student !Xabbu begin investigating network abnormalities. In the process, they discover Otherland, an ultra-sophisticated network developed by a powerful and corrupt organization known as the Grail Brotherhood. After encountering a terrifying security system, Renie and !Xabbu enter Otherland and join a small band of hackers trying to unravel the secrets of the incredible electronic creation.
Unable to go offline, the uninvited guests avoid capture by escaping on a river that flows through the many "simworlds" of Otherland. Serving as a gateway from one imaginary kingdom to another, the river provides passage for a harrowing journey whose first stop is a land where insects are the size of skyscrapers and where humans must adapt to bodies as small as grains of sand. In addition to dangers from their virtual surroundings, the group is also threatened by one of their own number, who is actually a hired assassin from the Grail Brotherhood.
Back in the real world, parents of the comatose teenagers Orlando Gardiner and Salome Fredericks hire an attorney to investigate the electronic trail their children left behind in hopes of uncovering the cause of their malady. Unknown to their parents, the two teens are members of the group stranded in Otherland, struggling to survive the machinations of the network's malevolent power source, referred to only as the "Other."
A river runs through Otherland
In this second volume of a four-part series, Tad Williams takes readers on a grand tour of the virtual landscape that was visited only intermittently in the first book, Otherland: City of Golden Shadow. Otherland is indeed as incredible as promised, and Williams' narrative shines with imagination as he shows off the many nooks and crannies of his universe. Because Otherland is composed of individual simworlds built to the specifications of their wealthy owners, there is ample opportunity to go exploring.
In addition to the land of monstrous insects, vagabond travelers in the network experience a prehistoric ice age, a violently funny world of cartoon ads come to life, a ravaged England facing the aftermath of a successful Martian invasion, and a Land of Oz divided into kingdoms ruled by a tin man, a lion, and a scarecrow. These and other scenarios give the author a chance to demonstrate his uncanny way with words and talent in describing far-flung places and events. Williams also has a great sense of humor, and it's apparent in depictions of characters like the hapless ruler of New Emerald City, who is a poorly stitched scarecrow who must be re-stuffed on a continual basis.
So much effort is spent visiting exotic places that there is little time left for significant character development. Fortunately, the main characters remain interesting throughout the book, while tension mounts as evil forces within the network become more desperate in their attempts to purge the system of its unwanted trespassers.
nce, SF anthologies were a staple of the genre, complementing the monthly or bimonthly magazines that most fans bought eagerly at the newsstand or by subscription. Many were thematic collections focused on tales of psi powers, or cities of the future, or strange children, or faster-than-light travel, frequently with Isaac Asimov's name pasted on the cover. Others were annual round-ups of the field's best, classic gatherings by Bleiler and Dikty, Judith Merril, Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr, and more recently by Gardner Dozois and David Hartwell. Now, like those sorely-missed early connoisseurs, they are almost all dead. Readers prefer new novels, often trilogies or share-crops from media megaliths like Star Trek.
Yet SF was for a long time a literature that found its best work in the short story and medium-length novella. Peter Crowther's gathering--strictly, he's a compiler rather than an editor, since none of the pieces is new--hints at why theme anthologies once thrived, and perhaps shows why they don't any longer.
Earliest of these pieces is Ray Bradbury's "Kaleidoscope," from 1949, in which a spaceship is torn open between Earth and the moon, its crew scattered fatally into emptiness. Their voices speak a threnody of loss, spite, despair and hope; at last, burning as a meteor, one is seen by a hopeful kid who wishes on its star. Most recent is Paul J. McAuley's far-future tale "Recording Angel," a kind of prologue to his new Convergence trilogy.
The rest form an intriguing pattern: one each from the '50s and '60s, five from the '70s--three from 1974 alone--three from the '80s and four from this decade. Remaining authors are Brian W. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Ben Bova, Alan Dean Foster, Robert Holdstock, Ursula K. Le Guin, Katherine Maclean, Ian McDonald, Robert Silverberg, Allen Steele, Lisa Tuttle, John Varley and Ian Watson.
In bibliographical space, nobody can hear you scream
Impossible expectations are aroused by such a collection. Are these the best stories ever told about space travel? No, because the best are already too widely known. Are these the best authors who've cast their rich imaginations into the depths of space? Some are, patently--Varley's "Picnic on Nearside" dates from his early joyous and buoyantly transgressive arrival on the SF scene in the early 1970s. Robert Silverberg's mournful allegory of an impending era of social uniformity and blandness, "Schwartz Between the Galaxies," and the role of imagination as a soporific, has its admirers. But it's hard to avoid asking, where are the true giants, old and new? Cordwainer Smith, Arthur C. Clarke, Algis Budrys, Poul Anderson, Iain Banks, Damon Knight, Michael Swanwick, Greg Egan, Alice Sheldon a.k.a. James Tiptree Jr., A.E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, mighty Heinlein himself?
Foster's wry tale is a kind of pale imitation Cordwainer Smith, perhaps an explicit homage. Bova's carnies on the Moon is a parable that falls flat, slowly. Steele's expertly wrought nostalgic lament for the abandoned space program is a Saturday Evening Post frippery, moving in its way but not in the same league as almost anything from the 1950s by Budrys.
Well, then, are they the best by these authors? That's doubtful. Ballard's glacial mockery in "The Message from Mars" does not touch his luminous, eerie early enigmas. Aldiss's Jungian psychodrama of a man lost inside himself after he has escaped a ruinous fate on a bleak world (unless it's all just a prosaic dream) lacks his usual esprit. Ian McDonald's quite fine blend of Calvino, Borges and Joyce marches around Dublin as if the city were an elephant and he five blind men, but it has no place in this collection.
Perhaps all these objections are churlish, easy shots at an editor who has worked hard to assemble his own favorites. A merit of Crowther's British taste is the Trans-Atlantic panache of Tales in Space; he knows about splendid writers often ignored in the United States, people like Ian Watson, McDonald, Ballard and McAuley. Still, less than half these tales are genuinely memorable--unlike the three admirable novels in White Wolf's companion volume to this collection, Three in Space.
