speculative fictshun

every 1nce in a whyle u gotta r33d a book fer tha luv uv it sos i often gits a fantasy or sci-f nov3l butt usuly just 1 that cumz hylee recomendead. Tad Williams' 'Otherland' series iz purty good writing butt u gotta b carefull b/c he's liek ponderously paced n shizzle. thick. a highly lawdatory revue, n yes i m biassed:

VR has given us back the fantastic, cutting out the need for those massive suspensions of disbelief that fantasy once demanded, before cybertech kindly took us back to being able to believe the impossible.

A thousand years ago, if a large guy with a big sword sat in the shelter of an upturned longboat and talked about battling monsters, no one would have thought, 'Hey, hang on, Grendal doesn't really exist...'

Monsters did exist, so did trolls and dragons, water spirits and elves. You might not have seen them, but you probably knew a mate who knew a mate who had. The supernatural was a fact of life, like God, kings and taxes. Monsters waltzed in and out of sagas - the real sagas - as often as the heroes and were just as real.

It wasn't really science that killed such superstition, it was snobbery. Educated people stopped believing in the fantastic. They still read about it but knew it was unreal. Well, now believing the impossible is possible again, courtesy of VR. And Tad Williams has embraced the concept of VR-based fantasy wholesale with a sequence of four novels, whose plotline reads as if the Illuminati read William Gibson and decided they could do it better.