I clicked it, sent a message into the ether, and expected a response from his publishing company or marketing firm. Surely this wasn’t his actual email address. I went to this Tad Williams website, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a link to email the author. Let’s just say not many people knew what a website was, let alone how to access one. Internet Explorer was just catching on, and Chrome wouldn’t exist for more than a decade. Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice in those days. The World Wide Web was in its infancy, but this new Otherland novel had a link to an actual website. I was a college student, and I grabbed one of the first copies available at the University Bookstore. In 1996, Tad released the first book of his Otherland series. Every veterinarian from Seattle to New Jersey to Chicago misspelled the name Miriamele. Everyone knew Princess Leia, but most folks scratched their chins when confronted with a name straight out of Osten Ard. Years later, my ex-wife and I would name our two kittens after fictional princesses. In the early 90s, I found Tolkien and Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan and Tad Williams, and life has never been the same. Most readers can identify a period in life when books began to click, when the magical world of reading welcomed them inside, when they discovered the amazing opportunity to experience lives otherwise unattainable. It was also, I believe, the only use of the word “scullion” I’d ever come across. It was exactly the type of story I desired. He was a lazy castle scullion with few friends, but he was about to be thrust unwillingly into a larger world. I was sixteen years old, only slightly older than the main character. And with it came a sense of history, mystery, and adventure. “On this day of days there was an unfamiliar stirring deep inside the dozing heart of the Hayholt, in the castle’s bewildering warren of quiet passages and overgrown, ivy-choked courtyards, in the monk’s holes and damp shadowed chambers.” Sleepy castles had come to life. And I remember that first sentence, which I plagiarized to start this post: I remember sunlight filtering through the trees in the back yard to make crazy shadows on the wall. With book one eventually in hand, I read the first chapter on my old bunk beds at my parents’ house. It wasn’t until I started reading that I realized I’d snagged book two of a trilogy instead of book one. I forked over my money, drove home, and admired my new paperback copy of Stone of Farewell. I didn’t bother to open it first, which was a mistake. I picked up my first Tad Williams’s book simply because Michael Whelan’s cover art beckoned me. It was a three foot wide by six foot tall portal into other worlds, and I spent hours on the floor in that aisle reading the opening chapters to countless novels. The Fantasy and Sci-Fi section was tucked away in the back of the store, adjacent to Romance, opposite Military History. I lived in a rural community in north central Illinois, and the only place I could easily buy books was the tiny Waldenbooks at the local mall. I first discovered Osten Ard in the summer of 1991. For all of us, it is a day to celebrate, a day to explore, and a day to lose ourselves in the beauty and tragedy and horror and history of one of the most beloved lands in fantastical literature. The realm of Osten Ard comes alive again with the release of Tad Williams’ The Heart of What Was Lost.įor some of us, it’s a day we never expected. On this day of days there is a familiar stirring deep inside the dozing heart of the fantasy world.
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