City of Golden Shadow

Executive Summary: Slow in places, but this story really works for me. Interesting world building and decent characters has me looking forward to the continuing on this series.Audio book: George Newbern does an excellent job with this book. Good inflections and emotion, as well as a variety of accents. He is definitely a narrator that adds extra enjoyment to the book.Full ReviewMy only experiance with Tad Williams prior to this book was his urban fantasy book [b:The Dirty Streets of Heaven 13542846 The Dirty Streets of Heaven (Bobby Dollar, #1) Tad Williams https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1340238037s/13542846.jpg 19079481]. I was not much of a fan. The writing was excellent, but the characters and the plot didn't do much for me.I'm not sure how to categorize this. Is it sci-fi? Is it fantasy? It is cyberpunk? It has elements of all three, but doesn't exactly fit into any one of them neatly.This isn't a dystopian story. It's a near future one where computers have enabled in depth virtual reality. It has a very cyberpunk feel at times. Maybe it's post cyberpunk? Then within the virtual reality, we experience many traditional fantasy settings and characters. So it's really a blending of the three.Regardless of the exact genre, the world hits all of my buttons. I'm a sucker for VR stories. If you mix in fantasy like this does, all the better.The story took me a bit to get into at first. It's very well written, but there are several subplots, and it took a long time for it to become clear just how they related to each other. This book is very largely a setup book. Much of it seems involve moving characters into the right place and setting up the world.The characters are pretty well developed and diverse. We have a VR specialist from South Africa named Irene “Renie” Sulaweyo and her student a Kalahari Bushman named !Xabbu. There are also the more traditional protagonists in Paul Jonas and Orlando Gardiner. I found Renie and !Xabbu refreshing as characters, but for me the large draw was the world building and the mystery of the Golden City. Once I was up to speed on what was going on, and the storylines began to converge, I was hooked. I'm definitely looking forward to continuing on and seeing where things will go next.