Because little Johnny has a magic power and isn't actually a hacker. The cops investigating John Wulgaru are astonished that he managed to go far beyond what a normal hacker could do in erasing his computer records while somehow remaining ignorant of basic programs that wipe out everything automatically.Achievements in Ignorance: This shows up a few times, in ways that seem incidental to the plot only to have huge significance later.Abusive Parents: The Freudian Excuse of John Dread, whose mother used her string of pimps and boyfriends to try and shape him into a walking nightmare.There is a (work in progress) Character Sheet.Ī now-defunct based on the world of the novels was released in 2015. The story could also be read as a Fantastic Aesop about the dangers of seeking Immortality. It's notable for having a fantastically diverse cast and treating them all with respect. This despite the fairly standard Cyberpunk setting and rather more pages than necessary spent on the way to each plot point. Tad Williams prides himself on the interweaving of multiple plot threads and enormous casts of characters, and even more on having the reader actually care about what happens to them. If this sounds like a long synopsis, wait until you read the books themselves. It becomes a race against time to solve the mystery of the Other before they are killed by the network or by Dread himself. Even worse, their party has been infiltrated by a sociopathic killer, named Johnny Dread, with a hidden agenda of his own, one that ultimately disrupts the Grail Brotherhood's ceremony and threatens the stability of the entire system. Back in the physical world, forces are at work hunting down and destroying the enemies of the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood itself seems to be building its project up to an ultimate conclusion. People who die in Otherland are dying in real life. Stumbling from one hostile virtual reality environment to another, chased by agents of the Brotherhood, they discover that the system is becoming distorted in a way that no normal computer ought to be, and that these distortions are centered around a dark entity known as the "Other" that serves as the operating system of the network. With Sellars' help, they break into this system looking for clues, only to be trapped within the network, unable to "disconnect" and return to their bodies. Their apparent goal is to create a computer simulation more powerful than anything that has ever been seen before, called the Grail Network by its creators but Otherland by the few outsiders who know of it. As they delve further into these mysteries, they encounter a secretive figure named Sellars who tells them that the comas are connected to a conspiracy of the world's elite known as the Grail Brotherhood. It follows a disparate group of ordinary people whose lives become entwined in the discovery that thousands of children around the world are falling into comas that are seemingly related to their use of the 'Net. The story is set 20 Minutes into the Future, where corporate entities are as or more powerful than governments and the Internet has become a Metaverse with its own private virtual reality environments. Otherland is an epic Post-Cyberpunk novel series written by Tad Williams, comprising four volumes:
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