OTHERLAND

Second chunk of Williams’s vast four-part doorstopper about Otherland (City of Golden Shadow, 1996), an exclusive and impregnable virtual reality created by the evil Grail Brotherhood. Various good guys—amnesiac WWI soldier Paul Jonas, teacher Renie Sulawayo, blind researcher Martine Desroubins, the strange, crippled, mysterious old Mr. Sellars, etc.—have banded together to try to prevent the Brotherhood from doing, well, whatever it is that they’re planning to do, with the control of everything (both real-world reality and the anything-goes cyberspace of Otherland) at stake. Patience, patience. The author apologizes for not providing proper endings for each individual entry, but he’s actually writing one single book, thousands of pages long, that’s broken up into chunks for practicality’s sake. Now you know. For the rest, even with Williams’s helpful synopsis, it’s a dreadful struggle to remember who, what, where, when, and especially why.