SEA OF SILVER LIGHT by Tad Williams 
Otherland Volume IV
Orbit (Little Brown) - 2001
ISBN 1857239911 – Hardback
Science Fiction

Reviewed by Rachel Hyde, MyShelf.com
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Otherland is a virtual realm that can only be accessed via computers and is the brainchild of a group of wealthy, powerful and evil people, headed by the ancient Felix Jongleur.  In the fourth and final part of this exhaustive epic the remaining adventurers are close to cracking the code that is holding so many children in comas.  Johnny Dread is on their tails as well as the mysterious Other, hunting the companions through the now disintegrating system.  Who exactly is Mr Sellars, what is the true identity of The Other and why does the entire Grail Project seem doomed from the start?

Despite the awesome imagination behind this series of books there isn’t enough to fill almost four thousand pages.  Because the whole thing has been spun out for so long makes what ought to be breathlessly exciting a lot less so but even with this considerable fault this is still a work of some genius.  For me the glimpses of life in about sixty years’ time have far more power to shock by their sheer believability than any of the Otherland shenanigans.  This is a frightening and all too conceivable future where power is in the hands of a few corrupt leaders, children spend all their time watching TV programmes designed only to sell merchandise and the media reports on increasingly outrageous and violent happenings.  The space program has run out of money and the Third World is poorer than ever.   It is this that makes this series so readable despite the length and has the added effect of making the Grail Project all the more plausible.  A vast fable about man’s inhumanity to man and how power turns those who have it in abundance into monsters, this is unmissable stuff for any SF fan.

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