This is a really interesting concept, almost like Ready Player One without all the numerous references to the 80s. I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the science fiction aspects of the story, but good grief this is a long book that moves way too slow and by the end of it you really aren't any closer to solving what I perceived as the main storyline (aka Reni's brother). That was really frustrating in a book of this size and I think it was a mistake to not have some closure there, but alas.

Overall, I did enjoy this. Not sure if I'll continue reading the series right away, but I wouldn't mind revisiting in the future when I have knocked out a few other books I'm looking forward to. ( )

Auch beim zweiten Lesen ein grandioses Buch! ( )

Not sure what to say about this one.
Probably my usual "enjoyable enough" comment.
Very long. I just hope the whole 4 book series is worth it. ( )

I had such high hopes for this book. I adored Tad Williams' WAR OF THE FLOWERS, and I really wanted to like this. Unfortunately, while Tad has some interesting ideas and explores a world that has the potential to be highly interesting, the book itself is dull, dull, dull. Uneven pacing and entire chapters that go nowhere made it difficult for me to plod through 800 pages just to get to an end that... well, isn't. Sorry, Tad, but I won't be continuing with this series. Life's too short to waste on horribly tedious books, no matter how good the writing. (C ) ( )

I originally came across the book cover on the 'net; I follow a Mastodon account that just posts old scifi novel cover art and the image of this city was so entrancing I confidently added it to my "to read" list. That weekend, while at a wedding, I was browsing the shelves in the common room of my hostel and came across it in paperback. Reading it in the mornings before festivities began, I was both compelled and disturbed. Themes of conspiratorial violence and child endangerment ultimately put me off, even as the setting intrigued.

A year later, however, I found myself looking for a setting from which to crib my own for a prospective cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying campaign, and returned to see if I couldn't borrow some network components to repurpose for my friends.

Thoroughly diverting, "City of Golden Shadow" seems to be a direct ancestor of both "Ready Player One" and "Sword Art Online", but it's a mature work for adult readers and it takes itself much more seriously in both themes, depth of pathos, and writing. Published in 1996, many of the books references to "the 'net" are awkwardly, if endearingly, off-the-mark, which is to say that they carried forward some assumptions about computing that haven't held up, such as the ubiquity of on-premise servers (whereas what we got was "the cloud"). It also fails to predict "graceful degradation," eg nowadays we never encounter white noise because our network errors are filtered through many comfortable abstraction layers.

Ultimately, the imagery is vivid, and the author is enjoying himself. As he put it in an interview, the various virtual worlds of the 'net are an excuse to write micro fictions in a trillion genres. He certainly exhibits a tireless imagination.

Also, it turns out that the author and I share a hometown—the location of the wedding and the hostel—so it's not such a huge coincidence that I came across the book, only that I happened to be looking for its cover in the first place. That being said, it shares that privilege with a dozen other book covers I've spotted just this way on the 'net.

There's probably no sentience and/or conspiracy inhabiting the internet and luring me toward the golden city to save the world. That's probably not happening IRL. ( )