A fresh attempt is being mounted to bring Tad Williams' cyberpunk-fantasy epic Otherland to the screen.
Platige Image, the production company behind Netflix's Witcher adaptation and anthology series Love, Death and Robots, and producer Mike Weber (who helped usher Wheel of Time onto Amazon), have teamed up to develop an adaptation of the series, which comprises four novels: City of Golden Shadow (1996), River of Blue Fire (1998), Mountain of Black Glass (1999) and Sea of Silver Light (2001).
The series is set in the near-future and depicts a world where virtual reality has become a reality, and an increasing source of entertainment and escape. The main character, Renie, is an instructor in virtual engineering in South Africa when her brother falls victim to a spreading illness which leaves its victims insensible. Wondering if there could be a connection between the illness and a new form of VR tech, Renie embarks on a dangerous investigation alongside her student !Xabbu (of the San bushmen), which leads them to the discovery of incredibly advanced VR worlds, hidden from the rest of the network. Eventually they discover a complex and unfolding plot spanning both the globe and decades of time.
Otherland's key appeal is the numerous virtual worlds located within its setting, including a version of World War I, a single house the size of a city and an alternate history in which the Aztec Empire crossed the Atlantic Ocean and successfully conquered Europe, allowing for a blend of history, fantasy and science fiction.
Otherland is Williams' second-biggest-selling series, after his epic fantasy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. The series was a solid seller in most countries, but it was a huge success in Germany, attracting wide acclaim and even an MMORPG video game adaptation from a German studio. It was previously optioned for adaptation in 2012 by Warner Brothers.
So far no showrunner or network/studio/streamer is attached, so this is the beginning of an attempt to bring the project to the screen. Given the creators' ties to both Netflix and Amazon, they have to be contenders to pick up the project.
2 comments:
I really dislike that series. It consists of numerous disconnected stories that have nothing to do with eachother and do very very little on a per volume basis to advance the overall narrative. The author also comes up with completely contrived plot developments to make sure that all the main characters remain separated and never interacting with eachother ion the slightest. The ending of the entire series
with the psychic baby in a satellite is one of the stupidest things I have ever read.
If it had been structured as a series of novellas about random characters having random adventures in random cyber worlds, it could have been an above average sci fi/ fantasy series. Instead, Tad William wrote exactly that and then presents it to us in a series of gigantic novels where roughly six novellas are spliced together one chapter at a time, with a chapter of one novella being followed by a random chapter of some other novella that has exactly nothing to do with the one you were just reading. It's incredibly frustrating to read, and by the time I got to the end of it I bitterly regretted every moment I had spent with the books. I am frankly baffled that they are so popular.
I re-read this series earlier this year. It's not as bad as I remember it being contemporaneously; the issues over the rinse & repeat repetitiveness of going to a new "world" and learning about it, being put in peril and then escaping are still pretty bad but it does rattle along at a reasonable pace.
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