Product Description

New York Times bestselling author Tad Williams presents...

The hardcover edition of Volume Three...

First time in print!

"A powerful, near-future cyberthriller."--Booklist

"Williams proves himself as adept at writing science fiction as he is writing fantasy....Fascinating." --Publishers Weekly

"An exciting addition to the growing virtual reality literature."--Library Journal

* A bestselling author--New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, London Times, Publishers Weekly

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #265515 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 689 pages

Amazon.com Review
Otherland, the quartet of which Mountain of Black Glass is the powerful third part, combines some terrifying speculation on the future of virtual reality with adventures no less terrifying because they are technologized dreaming. These are dreams the adventurers cannot awaken from and in which, if they die, they are really dead.

An epidemic of comatose children has led Renie and her San friend !Xabbu into the net and to a series of dream worlds created as palaces by the corrupt aspiring immortals, the Grail Brotherhood. Two of those children, Orlando and Fredericks, have become adventurers in their own right, while their parents' lawyer Ramsey follows real-world money and lesbian cop Calliope tracks a serial killer with serious ambitions to become an angry god. In this volume, adventures take place in a mythic ancient Egypt and a rambling Gormenghastlike house before all the virtual adventurers meet where they were always destined to, before the walls of Troy.

"All around, death. It was not a quiet presence during the long day--not a pale-faced maiden bringing surcease from pain, not a skillful reaper with a scalpel-sharp blade.... Death on the Trojan plain was a crazed beast that roared and clawed and smashed, which was everywhere at once, and which in its unending fury showed that even armored men were terribly frail things."

Tad Williams takes the gameworld and turns it on its head, passionately; how do we know that what bleeds does not feel pain? He writes a classic of cyberspace adventure that has a sorrowful heart. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk

From Library Journal
Trapped in the exotic virtual simulation known as Otherland, Paul Jonas, Orlando Gardner, and Renie Sulaweyo continue their separate explorations into the heart of the reality that surrounds them. As they confront puzzles and obstacles in re-creations of ancient Egypt and Homeric Greece, they come closer to the black glass mountain that may offer them the key to the mysterious Grail Brotherhood that controls the passages to and from Otherland. Synopses of the previous volumes (City of Golden Shadow; River of Blue Fire) of Williams's ambitious epic provide enough information for newcomers to the series, but the entire story is best read in sequence. Filled with complex plot threads, a wide variety of virtual and "real" characters and vivid descriptions of numerous worlds, this series belongs in most sf collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The third volume of the massive Otherland saga focuses (insofar as a book this size can be said to focus at all) on the young, ailing Orlando Gardiner and the World War I soldier Paul Jonas. Jonas has another encounter with the winged woman named Vaala, in which she summons him to seek the legendary mountain of black glass, which is said to reach to the stars and hold all the answers he seeks. At the same time Gardiner, enmeshed in the virtual Egypt of Felix Jongleur, wealthy leader of the Grail Brotherhood that created the colossal virtual simulation known as Otherland, is summoned to adopt the persona of a warrior in the Trojan War. He will find his answers "before Priam's Walls," or so he is told. In addition to these two personal quests, readers will learn a good deal more about the Circle, the Brotherhood's opponents, and their increasingly deadly duel in the real world, as well as encounter many of the surviving characters they have come to know from the previous volumes. The sheer breadth of Williams' knowledge and the richness of his imagination make this book, like its predecessors, a complex and slow-paced feast. Otherland still remains the state of the art in integrating virtual reality and folklore into a single comprehensive narrative, and with a fourth volume in the works, one hopes that the mysteries will be resolved and that a number of the characters one has come to either love or loathe will receive their just deserts. Roland Green

Customer Reviews

Solid Writing And Powerful Imagery Make For Good Story
MoBG is the third volume in the Otherland saga, and I actually enjoyed it even more than the first two books in this series. Williams combines his usual terrific writing skills with some fabulous visual images of different worlds taken from ancient folklore, such as Egypt and ancient Greece. I especially liked the fact that, while there are many more secrets to be revealed in the final volume of Otherland, some information is finally disclosed to the reader and there is a climax of sorts at the end of the volume. I actually enjoyed the ending immensely, though I can understand if others were mystified by it. Of course, Williams has a Herculean task with the fourth novel, Sea of Silver Light. I counted at least twelve developing subplots without answers yet, and so I'm hoping that Williams doesn't fail to provide a great finish to this powerful and exciting series, as so many other fantasy writers have failed to do in the past. Of course, it goes without mention that you must read the first two volumes in this series to understand this book. Ignore the Kirkus review above, unless you really have a problem with reading books over 400 pages. However, if you like detail, well-developed characters, and powerful visual images, then you must read this book. It's the best fantasy novel I've read in the last two years. Here's hoping that Williams finishes Otherland on the same roll!

The third continues to build
City of Golden Shadow, the first book in the series, set the stage and introduced us to the Otherland world, set sometime in our near future. In the second installment, River of Blue Fire, our various heroes found themselves spread out across the virtual realm of the Otherland virtual network. Now, in the third book, Williams has managed to up the ante, and things actually happen. I felt the first book was excellent as an introduction, but the second fell off as nothing of any real import seemed to occur. Now, in Mountain of Black Glass, Williams has paid off on the promise he made in Golden Shadow. The first two books are must-reads to understand this masterpiece, but the payoff is worth it. Williams' ability to create another world is unmatched, and his capacity to weave an ever-increasing number of storylines into a compelling and coherent narrative is startling. Well worth the read, though this lengthy series is not for the faint of heart or short of attention span.

Good... but it should have been ended in this volume.
Well, I have been greatly enjoying this series and I don't mind the character development that people have mentioned as being a problem. I feel that the stories of the people themselves are as interesting as the main plot (though some might very well see this as a problem). The prose is good and the plot complex. In many ways it reminds me of Donaldson's 'Gap' series in the interweaving of characters with groups of power and attempting not to be crushed by them. However... Just as in the second book, Williams managed to irritate me somewhat. In the second, I was not pleased with the jarring attempt to keep people from guessing the identity of Dread when he controlled one of their party. In this novel, it seemed _very_ obvious to me that he extended the series by changing the previous ending (there were originally only going to be three novels) in one key element, therefore being able to continue. I do admit that it's preferable to the Robert Jordan method of continuing a series by adding more and more words and descriptions in less and less 'book time', but it was still jarring and seemed to cheapen some of the sacrifices made by characters. Still, I look forward to the final book in the series.