City of Golden Shadow, originally published as Otherland, is a science fiction novel by American writer Tad Williams, the first book in his Otherland series. The "Otherland" refers to a virtual world or worlds and the "City Of Golden Shadow" is a city in the Otherland network to which the main characters are being summoned. The novel tells the story of a frightening virtual network created by a group of rich men known as The Grail Brotherhood. These men include: Felix Jongleur, who was a child at the time of the First World War and is currently the world's oldest man; Jiun Biao, a Chinese economist described as "the terror of Asia"; and Robert Wells, the owner of Telemorphix, the world's largest telecommunications company. The book tells the story of a group of ordinary people who are drawn into the network to stop them. Plot summary The first character introduced is a man called Paul Jonas, apparently an infantryman on the Western Front of the First World War. In what he at first believes to be a dream or hallucination, he meets a woman with wings, who gives him a feather. He wakes from the experience to find himself back in the trenches, but realizes the experience was not a dream when he discovers the feather. Two of his comrades, Finch and Mullet, begin to express doubts about his sanity. Eventually, Paul runs off into no-man's land. There, he finds the bird-woman but Finch and Mullet have pursued him, and they have been transformed into monstrous shapes: Mullet is grossly fat and Finch has no eyes. Paul flees in terror and falls through a hole in space. He discovers himself in a place similar to the chess-land in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, where he is caught in the battle between the red and the white, as well as hunted by Finch and Mullet. He escapes with a young boy he met at an inn, whose name is Gally. They find themselves on Mars, which is inhabited by creatures who demand a sacrifice of a princess from the planet Venus each year. He recognizes the chosen woman as the winged woman he met earlier, but he cannot remember when he met her. His memory does not even extend to his time in the chess-land. With the help of other men from Earth, he rescues the princess, then flees from the