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Strangely no one has posted http://www.tadwilliams.com/ which has its front page turned over to news on this new game including a huge amount of artwork and many of Tad's thoughts on the project.

They are going to build Otherland and live forever!

I've never heard of otherworld, but If you meant Otherland , then I fully agree with you. I'd prefer the VR worlds inside of it to actually be a VR game though. That LOTR MMOVRPG portrayed inside the books sounded sweet, and that library world would be pretty cool too. Damn, how I crave a MMOVR game, it'd be a much better substitute for real life than everquest.

Well, I just got back in town and have arrived on this topic a bit late, so forgive me for not reading all four pages of posts. I got .25 of the way down the first page and got tired of reading about NEAL Stephenson (whose books I have enjoyed enough to read more than once). Somone mentioned Marion Zimmer Bradley, but I did not see The Mists Of Avalon, but I'm sure you have already read this (based on your original post claiming to have read just about every Arthuran tale :P).

A couple of my favorite authors are Tad Williams (his books) and Mickey Zucker Reichert, check her chronological bio (complete with books) here and a nice book listing here (has book covers).

Tad Williams has a tendency to be quite wordy, especially in the Otherland series, but if you are a fan of detailed worlds, be sure to check him out. I would suggest starting with the Memory, Sorrow And Thorn series. As for Reichert, I can only attest to the Renshai books (pretty good IMO) and the first of the Bifrost Guardians (having never finished the series due to some distraction which I can not remember).

Should you feel the need for something different and wish to try some straight fiction, try Richard Russo of which, Straight Man is my favorite. Very witty and a great read.

To wrap things up, you may want to check out Gnod. Just search for an author and you'll get a kind of cool mapping of suggested reads based on your search. I haven't examined this site to see how accurate the suggestions are, but it looks like it may have potential.

Regardless of which authors you choose out of all these posts, I hope you find some fresh content that can keep you going. I always find myself in the same situation you described where I tend to just cycle through all of my books. Good luck on your search!

Tad Williams "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn" trilogy is probalby the best fantasy I've read, period (apologies to J.R.R.). Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, To Green Angel Tower are the book titles.

He also is writing an epic sci-fi cycle called "Otherland." A cross between the Matrix, classic cyberpunk, and Alice in Wonderland. High, High quality.

more info on his website

I think the book you're thinking of is the first book in the Otherland series by Tad Williams, "City of Golden Shadow." The second and third are "River of Blue Fire" and "Mountain of Black Glass." The fourth hasn't been published yet. You can check http://www.tadwilliams.com for more information and excerpts from the books.

I recommend the Otherland series highly if you're interested in the future of information technology. It develops the basic 3d technology and internet capabilities that we have now into something which is much more pervasive to our everyday life, as well as developing the realistic technology to go along with it. There are also elements of artificial intelligence involved which is quite fascinating if you are interested in that sort of stuff. Tad Williams, currently up to book 3. I would say the only current rival to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.

www.tadwilliams.com

This review is a bit late, as this book came out over a year ago and Mountain of Black Glass came out in September. Some other excellent Tad Williams books are Tailchaser's Song (an adventure story from the point of view of a cat), the Dragonbone Chair series, Caliban's Hour, and Child of an Ancient City. I am eagerly awaiting Sea of Silver Light to finish the Otherland series.

Tad Williams' web site is located at http://www.tadwilliams.com/tadwilliams/ .

And who said that those two were mutually exclusive? My computer is a resource, and it's also quite the speed demon when it comes to parsing information. Are you suggesting we use any resource *but* our computer to parse information? That seems kind of backwards to me.

I don't know which Jon meant, but, while I would fear a version of Clotho that would be an all-encompassing Ministry deciding what was double-plus-ungood and hiding that from all persons' eyes, I would welcome a *personal* version of "clotho", but it would have to be something that I trained. Just as you have to use your voice recognition software for a little while before it can accurately type as you spead, you would have to teach your filtering agent what's good and what's bad.

I agree with you, and most others in this forum, that having some entity out there filter through all of the information available, mark some of it as "good" and send that block of info to each and every person would be pretty worthless. But if each person had his or her own personalized information agent, *that* would be useful.

• A few examples:
• I'm listening to a song on the radio and like it. I ask my agent to find me more music off of the same album so that I can decide if i want to buy it. My agent queries the radio station to find the group and song name, checks All Music (or something similar) to find out what other songs are on the album, and then goes searching for mp3's of those songs. When it finds more music, it sends the songs to me so I can decide if I like it enough to have my agent search for the lowest price on the album and buy it for me. That way, I can spend more time listening to music and less time looking for it.

• I'm talking to my girlfriend, and she mentions a movie preview that she saw that sounded interesting. I give the name to my agent and send it out, and it comes back in a little while with a quicktime preview and, if I think it looks interesting, my agent will have ready for me a list of when and where it will be playing, and will go buy two tickets for me once I choose a date. That way I can spend more time with my girlfriend.

• I need to register for classes for my next semester at university. I tell my agent what classes I want to take and what the optimum schedule would be ("...and nothing before noon", or "...and no class on Fridays"). The agent scurries off to the university's time schedule and comes up with a few sample schedules for me involving those classes. I pick the one that I like best, and the agent registers me for those classes. That way I spend less time struggling with trying to fit a schedule together, with more time left to read Slashdot.

• A physical node of your agent with voice-recognition/recording abilities would be useful for note-taking in casual conversation. It would record the conversation in real-time and save it into short-term memory, where any given chunk would be saved for (for example) 20 seconds. If you press a button on the node, it would transcribe whatever was currently in memory into text. That way, if I'm having a conversation on libertarian and anarchist writers with someone, and he mentions a book that I feel I should read, I simply press the button, and the agent writes out the last 20 seconds of conversation, including the book title and author. That way I don't have to interrupt the conversation to look for a piece of paper and ask my friend to repeat the title.

• I'm on my way to the library, so I have my agent query the card catalog for the locations of a list of books. Some of these were culled from conversation transcripts (see previous item), some I heard about on NPR while driving and told me agent to take down, and some I saw mentioned on Slashdot. By the time I get to the library, I already have a list of locations in my hand, so I can go to each location, find my books, and check out quickly. Note, though, that I wouldn't *have* to only look at the books I had written down. I wouldn't even have to use the agent. I could do all of the browsing myself, and likely stumble across some treasure I hadn't had on my list. But if I'm in a hurry, I don't want to browse. I want to get my books and go. The agent doesn't force you to use it, it's merely a tool that is available for you to use.

• Every once in a while, my "cool personal news flash" beep will sound. My agent has just found out (for example) that the Manic Street Preachers are going to be playing a show nearby next week. While I like MSP, they are so unknown in America that this concert isn't talked about on the radio and isn't even advertised on flyers around town. But, thanks to my never-resting agent, I know about this concert and can go to the show.

Basically, my vision of personal info-filtering is not an image of some vast singular entity out there deciding what news is "good" or "interesting" or "worthwhile", but of a small, slick, personal AI which I can ask to look for certain information so that I don't have to find it myself, and which can keep me updated on the information which I have found interesting in the past. I imagine this is closer to what Jon meant than the common interpretation, which is of singular central mind-control.

Try the Otherland series by Tad Williams. One of the characters has an intelligent agent of this type.