Christopher's Reviews > Mountain of Black Glass

The Matrix after it was cool. Bloated and directionless.

The premise of the Otherland books is decent (if familiar). A massive, world-spanning, online network run by corrupt oligarchs and is surreptitiously being used to harvest children in a bid to grant digital immortality to those corrupt oligarchs. It sounds a lot like the Matrix except instead of machines, it's the corpocracy.

What, in theory, could be an engaging, fast paced trek through lively and varied worlds while the mystery of the network is revealed instead descends into an interminable slog. The characters are frighteningly dull and their extended time in LOTR/Ancient Egypt/Trojan War pastiches had the potential to be interesting if something actually happened. But it doesn't. I can accept that elements in the online world serve as allegories or stand-ins for real-world elements (ex: this physical item is actually a piece of code or something). But that is never satisfactorily established here and instead we just get directionless dialogue ending in a strange Godzilla/Lord of the Rings type cyber battle? Whatever.

Other than the two cop characters conducting an investigation in the real world, there's never a sense of "purpose" for any of the characters in the digital world. Oh sure, they say they have to go from A to B (get to the walls of Troy being one noteworthy example) but it's significance to the plot is utterly opaque.

The most interesting thing about the book are the quick little "media excerpts" that start each chapter and suggest a real-world quasi-cyberpunk media landscape that is as decadent and amoral as it is grotesque. My favorite was where one performance artist challenged another to a "suicide-off" where the one with the most interesting death would "win." I wanted more of this than generic walkabout, alas.

I'm 3 books in. I will finish the series. I don't expect the next review to get any better.