#TAD WILLIAMS OTHERLAND CLIFF NOTES SERIES#

Squidlarkin, the point I've gathered is that there *aren't* huge swathes of character development in the 2nd and 3rd books.Īgain, if anyone of you who've read the series feel like offering a fairly detailed synopsis of the plot of the middle two books, it would be appreciated.BookID,title,authors,average_rating,isbn,isbn13,language_code,num_pages,ratings_count,text_reviews_countġ,Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter #6),J.K. I also didn't see any interesting satire or get much added to my understanding of the genre's history. I get it, it's cute, but the sections are way too long with almost nothing happening in terms of character development *or* story. Part of it is Williams' very detail-oriented writing style, but the extended descriptions of Jonas traveling through various landscapes - a Burroughs-esque Mars adventure here, a Wonderland-like chess board there - quickly got tedious for me. I saw Williams' larger project surveying the history of fantasy, but watching characters get blown around through worlds without any control over what happens to them gets old quickly. Prospero, thanks for the interesting thoughts it's the 'many clever ideas' scattered through book one that make me want to read the resolution, if not slog through the rest of the stuff.

Posted by Prospero at 6:30 AM on February 20, 2005 I could go on and on about this, but I'll stop here.

In my opinion, the middle books in the series have gotten a bum rap from critics who work exclusively within the genre, who judged it by the standards of a plot-driven but conventional multi-volume fantasy epic (which is what it initially appears to be), rather than the more ambitious and experimental project that it is. Otherland has more in common with more 'high-culture' encyclopedic narratives like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow than it does with works like The Lord of the Rings, I'd say (even though Williams expresses a hostility toward the storytelling conventions of the literary postmodern novel-if I remember correctly, it's Paul Jonas that delivers a short speech criticizing the postmodernist aesthetic at the beginning of volume 3). (The narrative structure of Otherland is a direct descendant of the American voyage narrative as well as the traditional quest narrative of modern fantasy, which is why both Huckleberry Finn and The Lord of the Rings are repeatedly alluded to in volume 1, and why the means of travel between one world and the next often takes the form of a river.) The nature of that ambitious project doesn't really make itself evident until the second book, but for me that ambition takes precedence over a plot that doesn't obey the usual conventions of multiple-volume fantasy epics.

The parent poster says that the virtual landscapes are 'detailed-but-not-plot-relevant.' I'd argue that Williams's purpose in these landscapes is to provide a kind of history of the modern fantasy novel, to illustrate its origins (the imagined worlds of Coleridge, Baum, and Borges all make appearances) and satirize its dominant themes. (Also, Renie becomes much less shrill and annoying in book 2.) I also remember the cliffhanger than ends volume 3 as being particularly intense. I found that the book was about the journey, rather than the destination, and there are so many clever ideas in volumes 2 and 3 that it'll be a shame if you fly by them. This doesn't directly answer your question, but allow me to suggest that you might be making a mistake by skipping volumes 2 and 3 of Otherland.

Tad williams otherland cliff notes