Best of all, however, are Williams's well-drawn, sympathetic characters, including Renie and her family, her student !Xabbu, the mysterious invalid Mister Sellars and a host of other folk, all of whom hope to solve the mystery of the terrifying VR environment called Otherland.

His version of the Net, although obviously indebted to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and other novels, is detailed and fascinating. His 21st-century South Africa, where blacks run the government and pursue careers but where whites control most economic power, rings true. In the first book in what is projected to be, in effect, a single, enormous four-volume novel, Williams (Memory, Sorrow and Thorn) proves himself as adept at writing science fiction as he is at writing fantasy. It's clear that Renie has angered someone with almost unlimited power, but she remains determined to save her brother.

Then her apartment is fire-bombed, she loses her job and another professor whom she has recruited to help her decipher the mystery is murdered. After her adventure, she discovers that someone has downloaded into her computer the impossibly complex image of a fantastic golden city. A professor of computer science and an adept user of the Net, Renie retraces Stephen's trail and enters Mister J's but barely escapes with her own mind intact. Soon she discovers evidence that other children have lapsed into comas under similar circumstances. When his next Net trip leaves him in a coma, Renie is terrified and angry. Even if the technology for this kind of thing doesn’t exist today, there’s no reason why it couldn’t exist in the future. The fantasy as you might call it is extremely grounded in reality. When Renie Sulaweyo's younger brother, Stephen, returns from the Net after visiting Mister J's, a virtual reality equivalent of the Hellfire Club, she's worried about him. Tad Williams takes the virtual reality bull by the horns and pushes it as far as it will go.

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