| Re: Otherland
I am a big fan of TW. One of the things I really enjoy about his work is that it actually does span different genre's.
Since he writes different kinds of stories, with separate tones and styles as well as across genre's, not everyone will like everything he does. Otherland is very different from WarOfFlowers which itself is far from MS&T.
I personally enjoyed the Otherland books tremendously. I was a big cyberpunk fan in the early days, but felt it quickly became stale. So much of it was locked into a specific tech-noir style and everything felt the same. With Tad's Otherland I feel he quickly demistifies the technology and lets you live in the varied worlds he creates. He created this near future, cyber-vr world that is vibrant and colorful and creative in ways all the dark, dirty noir cities of day's past never could be.
Plus on just an overall thought, Tad's entire on-line Shadowmarch experiment was refreshingly ambitious. He really tried to do something new and hopefully those books will benefit from it.
Not every experiment will succeed, but I always thought Tad as pretty cool simply because he tries to do new things ... some are better than others, but at least he is always trying to improve and branch out. |