Product Description

Mountain of Black Glass is the third volume of Tad Williams' highly acclaimed four-book series, Otherland. A truly unique reading experience combining elements of science fiction, fantasy, and techno-thriller, it is a rich epic tale in which virtual reality could prove the key to a whole new universe of possibilities for the entire human race-or become the exclusive domain of the rich and the ruthless as they seek a technological pathway to immortality....

Praise for Otherland:

"On an epic scale and most impressive of all is Otherland, a big colorful novel full of real-world conspiracy and virtual reality wonders, with characters worth caring about."- Locus

"This is the best thing Williams has ever done, and it deserves attention, time, praise. More, it deserves to be read."-The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

"Exciting...intricately plotted international adventure and suspense thriller set in the near future."-Library Journal

"Williams fills his pages with the sort of stories and characters that readers of epic fantasy are sure to love."-Publishers Weekly

"...Williams' knowledge and the richness of his imagination make this book, like its predecessors, a complex and slow-paced feast."-Booklist

"Tad Williams is a master of description. Scenes seem to leap off the page, grab you by the collar...."-<

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #143098 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-28
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.74" h x 4.19" w x 6.74" l, .80 pounds
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 784 pages

From Amazon.com
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