City of Golden Shadows

City of Golden Shadow (Engl. City of Golden Shadow ) is the first volume of the four-volume Otherland cycle of the American author Tad Williams . It was first published in 1996. The world of books is set in the near future, around the middle of the 21st century. A massively further developed Internet has become a kind of virtual parallel world in which business is done, leisure time is spent and a large part of interpersonal interaction takes place in general.

action

The book alternates between several parallel narrative strands, some of which are linked in the course of the plot. There are around 20 important characters in total.

Opening and recurring in the following is the figure of Paul Jonas , who descends from the battlefields of the First World War into more or less surreal worlds. In the course of the book it turns out that these are virtual scenarios of the "Otherland" that were created by members of the so-called "Grail Brotherhood". Paul Jonas was smuggled into the extremely powerful computer network for test purposes by the leader of the brotherhood. However, due to an act of sabotage not explained in the book, he was decoupled from the monitoring routines and now wanders through the different worlds, untraceable for his creators.

Various other protagonists also notice the Grail Brotherhood, above all the South African university professor Irene ("Renie") Sulaweyo and her student, the San ǃXabbu . Renie's younger brother Stephen is after extensive wanderings in "Network" in a persistent vegetative state like. Renie is given a virtual artifact that shows a kind of Aztec city, the "city of golden shadows". Renie finds out that her brother's fate is not an isolated incident. When she begins to investigate, she and her family are first attacked and, finally, Susan van Bleeck , her most important assistant, is brutally murdered.

Shortly before her death, Susan was able to leave a reference to Martine Desroubins , who is now Renie's most important helper, even if she, living in France, can only be with her virtually. Together with Martine, Renie and ǃXabbu go to “TreeHouse”, a kind of hacker district in virtual space . There you meet the hacker Singh , who worked on a project called “Otherland” many years ago and had to discover that in the last few months all those involved in the project except himself have died under strange circumstances.

After further attempted attacks, Renie fled to an abandoned military base together with her father Joseph , Susan van Bleeck's domestic servant Jeremiah and ǃXabbu . There they find enough powerful hardware to accompany Singh in his attempt to penetrate "Otherland".

In an independent storyline, the American teenager Orlando Gardiner moves in "Mittland", an online role-playing game . His character Thargor is killed in a fight because he or Orlando is also distracted by an image of the golden city that suddenly appears in the simulation. Together with Fredericks , who roams with him as a pithlit through the Midlands, Orlando sets out to find the origin of the picture. Orlando and Fredericks also end up in "TreeHouse", but initially cannot find out anything there. Orlando later re-established contact with the evil gang , the “residents” of TreeHouse, who brought him and Fredericks into contact with Singh just as he was breaking into “Otherland”. Orlando suffers from progeria in real life and has only a very short life expectancy, Fredericks is really called Salome (called Sam) and is a girl.

A third storyline describes the life of the ten-year-old girl Christabel Sorensen , who grew up in a sheltered parental home in a military settlement. Old Mr. Sellars , who has been under house arrest there for many years , also lives there. He wins Christabel's trust and with her help disappears from his house.

Finally, there is the psychopathic killer Dread , who kills other people on behalf of various people and also "hunts" and kills women. The leader of the Grail Brotherhood also uses him, whereby he only communicates with Dread in a simulation world in which he represents himself as the Egyptian god Osiris .

After about three quarters of the book, the virtual plot changes to "Otherland". Singh was able to infiltrate the surveillance mechanisms, but is killed himself in the process. Renie, ǃXabbu , Martine, Orlando, Fredericks and other protagonists actually find themselves in an extremely realistic simulation of a high Aztec culture, the center of which is the said golden city. There you will be brought to the “God-King” behind whom the rich industrialist Bolivar Atasco is hiding . He used to be a member of the Grail Brotherhood himself and set up this simulation for personal distraction. He has since resigned from the brotherhood due to differences of opinion, but continues to use the “Otherland” simulation system.

It turns out that the actual actor behind the various visions of the golden city that Renie and the others followed is Mr. Sellars. At a kind of conference in the meeting room of the god-king Atasco , he has observed peculiarities in data and financial transactions on the Internet, the focus of which is the said Grail Brotherhood. Since these peculiarities in the real world could not be investigated, u. a. because all of the informants he put on the Grail Brothers suddenly died, he decided to get to the bottom of the problem with the help of fellow campaigners in Otherland. According to Sellars, these comrades-in-arms are selected in such a way that they have a personal interest in clearing up the events, for example Renie because of her catatonic brother.

Sellars and Atasco cannot explain why the safety barriers around Otherland are as aggressive as their fellow campaigners report, nor why none of these fellow campaigners can leave the simulation again. In particular, Renie and the others cannot influence their own parameters either, so that, for example, ǃXabbu is trapped in the shape of a baboon or Orlando and Fredericks are stuck in their Thargor and Pithlit characters.

During the conference with Sellars and Atasco in the Aztec temple, Dread launched an attack on Atasco's property in the real world, on behalf of the head of the Grail Brotherhood. Dread kills Atasco and his wife and at the same time gets a look at the meeting with Sellars. Dread decides to keep the information about it to himself for the time being, so that the Grail Brotherhood does not hear about it for the time being.

After the gathering was suddenly blown up, Sellars directs the rest of them to escape. The different fantasy worlds in Otherland are each connected by a river, over whose outer edge you can switch to another simulation. On the one hand, this explains the experiences of Paul Jonas (who does not meet the other protagonists until the end of the book), who has already traveled several worlds in this way in the course of the story. On the other hand, the colorful group around Renie is fleeing the Aztec world because they are now also being persecuted. The book ends with the group ending up in a world the size of an insect.

style

Williams creates a vision of the future based on the continuation of various current developments. The most important part is the technical advancement of today's Internet, but also social tendencies such as “ ghettoization ”, increasing differences between rich and poor as well as technological progress in general. Political developments such as the increasing power of multinational corporations also play a role.

The book is written in the third person in the past tense and is divided into four sections with a total of 39 chapters and the opening credits. Each chapter begins with a short quote from a news story that is supposed to reflect the conditions of the world in the book and usually has nothing to do with the actual chapter text that follows. The narrative thread is almost always retained within a chapter. Williams writes clearly and refrains from excessive use of newly created words to describe new and further technological developments. The perspective is that of an omniscient narrator who describes both “public” actions and knows the inner state of each protagonist at all times.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Note: This article contains characters from the alphabet of the Khoisan languages spoken in southern Africa . The display contains characters of the click letters ǀ , ǁ , ǂ and ǃ . For more information on the pronunciation of long or nasal vowels or certain clicks , see e.g. B. under Khoekhoegowab .