| Return to Tad Williams' Otherland
posted: 04:38 pm ET
08 September 1999
|
Tad
Williams' Otherland books put a fresh millennial spin on the idea that
the worlds we explore (and build) in the near future will bring our story
back around to its origins. As such, space.com is proud to share an exclusive
excerpt from the new installment in the series.
Mountain of Black Glass,
hitting the shelves in September, continues the adventures of Renie, !Xabbu,
Paul and the rest as they skip between the high-tech world of the near
now and the Otherland Network, a limitless virtual-reality environment
occupied by Barsoom and other realms created by the imagination.
Fans have been waiting for
Mountain for more than a year since the last volume, River of
Blue Fire, left Renie and the rest stranded in the Place of the Lost,
a seemingly unfinished world without light or native inhabitants.
Now, in Mountain,
Williams picks up the best-selling series where he left off, gathering
his diverse band of characters from the border countries between archaic
myth and the cybernetic future, the dawn of human consciousness and its
twilight.
This is the story of our
struggle to hold onto the worlds of our futuristic imagining -- whether
they are found in inner space or outer space -- while keeping the memory
of our past safe for our children.
Read the foreword
to Mountains of Black Glass or our exclusive
online excerpt of a complete chapter taken from later in the book.
Our interview
with Tad Williams also contains more information about the series and how
it relates to the science fiction tradition and humanity's drive to populate
new worlds.
Excerpt
One: Foreword
Excerpt
Two: House of the Beast (chapter three)
Interview
with Tad Williams
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