Mention Tad Williams’ name in casual conversation with most science fiction fans and you’re likely to hear back, “Isn’t that the guy with the cats?” Tailchaser’s Song has adorned many a bookstore’s shelves for more than two decades. A journey into the mythologies cats and other animals might create for themselves, Tailchaser’s Song could have kicked off an epic series of cat adventures but instead gave Williams the freedom to explore other avenues of the imagination.
Perhaps almost as notable as Tailchaser’s Song for its unusual treatment of a well-known topic, The War of the Flowers delves into fairy politics. Williams’ fairies live in their own world, which can connect with ours, and their various factions’ ambitions threaten both Fairie and Earth. Unlike Tailchaser’s Song, humans play an important role in The War of the Flowers but the majority of characters are non-human.
Since the late 1960s it seems like many once standalone-novels morphed into trilogies or series, especially as each new series piled up success after success. Marion Zimmer Bradley gave us the Darkover books, Anne McCaffrey wrote about Pern, Roger Zelazny took us on mesmerizing journeys through Amber and other parallel worlds — the list goes on and on. Tad Williams, too, has written multi-book tales, but he has carefully sidestepped branding himself for just one imaginary world.
Xenite.Org was recently invited to interview Williams, and we could not help but wonder how he decides whether to create a standalone tale or embark upon a longer stroll through the imagination. Do you envision the series first, we asked him, or do you get into a story and realize that maybe there are other related stories waiting to be told?
“It’s closer to the second [option],” he told us. “What really happens is that ideas start out more or less equal, but some of them metastasize to the point where it becomes clear that it’s a very large story.”
It’s tough to say which (multi-book) story is the largest in Williams’ imagination. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn may seem like a classic epic fantasy (if there is such a thing as “classic” epic fantasy) that strikes Arthurian tones. Otherland is a science fiction arc set in the near future in which people spend part of their lives in an online environment that people use to influence offline politics. Shadowmarch is another fantasy series that combines humans and fairy-folk. The latest book in the Shadowmarch series, Shadowrise, has just been published.
Shadowmarch stands out from other fantasy works because its colorful history has been as experimental as Williams’ fiction. Originally conceived as an idea for a movie or television show, the storyline was adapted to online serial format in 2001 — a bold approach to the Internet even among science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. However, after three years Tad Williams migrated Shadowmarch into the traditional publishing world.
Citing the Shadowmarch experience, we asked Tad if he would tackle such a project again.
“I would guess that within the next decade people will be buying serial fiction for their phones and e-readers,” he replied. “Whether I’m writing any of [that fiction] remains to be seen. I would enjoy another chance to write serial fiction.”
And how would he want to write serial fiction for new technology? Today there are several emerging platforms such as the iPhone, Google’s Android, and Amazon’s Kindle. What would he want to do with the technology to enhance the reader’s experience?
“I would want to play more with the intersection of my creative control and the audience’s ability to interact,” he says. “I think interactive-media are a big part of our future, but I don’t think we have the right technology yet to do what I envision.”
Interactive technologies have been explored in science fiction in several ways. We have the virtual reality world of “The Matrix” (which has been compared to Otherland) and Star Trek’s holodecks. Today, however, we only have Internet-based games where several thousand players interact with each other and virtual characters through their online avatars. The obvious connection between Otherland and Internet gaming has not been ignored. A Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) based on Otherland is in development. Williams could only say that he thinks a release date will be announced “sooner rather than later”.
When immersed in a large world like Otherland, we wondered if Williams finds himself wishing he could include some concept or object that just doesn’t work its way into the tale? For a writer like Tad Williams, are there old chests of Things I Never Found Uses For In Stories somewhere in his thoughts or notes?
“Otherland is full to bursting with just those kinds of things,” Williams notes. “Many of the worlds’ situations and characters come from ideas and projects of mine that already existed but never got used. You’ve heard the joke, ‘They threw in everything but the kitchen sink’, well, I took that one step further and in Otherland: I *did* throw in the kitchen sink, and an entire kitchen world to go with it.”
James Cameron recently took audiences on a virtual reality ride that explored another option: the use of physical avatars grown partially from our own DNA (but mixed with alien DNA). An extension of the age-old science fiction concept of cloning mature bodies, “Avatar” supposes that humanity can interact with alien species by adopting their biology and connecting to it through computer technology.
We asked, how similar to your own ideas did you find the movie’s concept?
“I would say the exuberance of creating a world definitely reminded me of what I enjoy in my own work,” he mused. “Of course, I was envious that Cameron gets to spend $?00 million on the visuals for his story. ”
Cameron’s story assumes that mankind conquers interstellar space in about a century from now. Yet, if you look at space technology today, we still lack the means to travel to the nearest planets in our own star system (except through crude robotic avatars). In a 1999 interview with Space.com, Tad Williams said:
I think that the space program is in need of a major new resell to the generations coming along now because we have not effectively been able to connect most of the people who grew up after the triumphs of the Mercury and the Apollo programs into the possibilities.
Recent developments with the Obama Administration’s decision to scrap NASA’s Manned Mars Mission might seem to have confirmed Williams’ observation. Of course, the decision was controversial. Proponents argue that by turning to private industry the government is actually accelerating the development of space technology; critics suggest that only NASA is capable of developing a Mars exploration program that has a high probability of success.
It seemed reasonable to ask for an update on Williams’ perspective. Does he feel the change in direction will work out well?
“I have no idea,” he confessed. “But I hope that less focus on moving human beings around at this early stage, and more focus on the science, will help to capture imaginations. We need to show people how exciting the universe around us truly is.” Truth be told, as astronomers rack up new discoveries of exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars beyond the Solar System), the news media seems to be investing more stories in astrophysics than in decades gone by. New discoveries about ancient galaxies and the physical behavior of black holes have also found their ways into mainstream news reports.
But just as the news media are falling in love with space science again, they are faced by the most serious financial crisis in their industry’s history. The Internet — which science fiction writers like Tad Williams have adopted with passionate enthusiasm — is cited as a competitive force that may overwhelm traditional publishing. Ultimately, even book publishers have not been able to ignore the Internet, as several initiatives to bring content online and into electronic format have begun to take root.
News industry mogul Rupert Murdoch has declared war on free online news. Despite the fact that surveys show the vast majority of people don’t want to pay for news subscriptions, Murdoch is determined to win the war. But what about the fiction market? Is it facing a similar evolutionary struggle? If anyone should have an opinion on the matter, that would be Tad Williams. So what does he think?
“[ Whistles. ] That’s a big one. Some people on the internet apparently manage to sell pornography despite the abundance of free porn available there. Can this model extend to fiction and news? We may need to study online porn. Do they sell because they specialize? Why would somebody pay for something that seems to be equally available for free? Somehow I don’t think Murdoch’s figured this one out yet. ”
The Internet itself is struggling to find new technologies that can be monetized. Twitter, for example, has elicited much criticism for not revealing a clear revenue strategy while seeking major investment (which is supposedly the wrong path in the post-DotCom era, where thousands of Internet companies went bust in the years 1998-2001 for lack of revenue models).
Deborah Beale (Tad Williams’ wife and business manager) has been using Twitter to promote Shadowrise. We asked him if he has thought about how he might write a story for Twitter? Is a Twitterary novel completely unrealistic?
“Yes, I could see writing something for Twitter,” Williams concedes. “I’m not sure, with my literary elephantiasis, that I would be the best candidate. But it would be fun to try.”
He is too modest. In addition to writing traditional novels and content for the Internet, Tad Williams has also carved a niche for himself in the professional comic book industry as well. Fans of Aquaman may know that Williams scripted issues 50 through 57 of Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis. He has also written a 6-issue mini-series (The Next 6) and a standalone comic (The Helmet of Fate: Ibis the Invincible) for DC Comics and he launched an independent series, Tad Williams’ Mirrorworld 2 (although the publisher went out of business, bringing the series to a premature end).
We had to ask: If you were going to mentor someone who wanted to break into comic book writing, what three pieces of advice would you offer that person? His answer:
- Read and write lots of other things besides the specific thing you’re interested in writing.
- Work to find your own voice, something no one else can bring. Develop what it is that makes you who you are as a writer, whether that be your dialogue, ideas, plotting… whatever.
- Don’t try to be Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman or Grant Morrison, but understand what it is that they do differently that makes them special.
With all this talk of movies and comic books, it seemed natural to find out what Williams thinks of Marvel Comics’ mega-film franchise incorporating “Iron Man”, “Captain America”, “Thor”, “The Avengers”, and “The Hulk”. Where is all that leading to? Are there new vistas for the super hero genre on the horizon?
“I grew up on Marvel, so I’ll be happy when they get the big hitters up and running,” Williams says “… and [they] can start concentrating on putting characters I really care about in films, like the Human Top, the Porcupine, and Paste-Pot Pete, aka The Trapster. That’s when I’ll know comics have truly arrived as a film genre. ”
Comic books introduced many a fan to science fiction and fantasy. Although a large number of comic stories are putatively set in the “our” world in some way, they really invent whole new worlds that look and feel familiar. The visual aspect of comic book worlds is seldom challenged for its completeness, especially when illustrators have decorated panels with realistic settings, cityscapes, and other visual cues that all is mostly as the reader might expect it to be.
However, people often criticize literary (non-comic) fantasy worlds for barely resembling the real world. For example, not many fantasy characters take bathroom breaks (and if one did, the plot might digress into a side adventure). Economies are rarely fleshed out. Hoping to tap into Williams’ creative flow, we asked him how he thinks a fantasy kingdom’s economics should work. Are they going through cycles of growth and recession? Is there a future for Fiscal Fantasy?
Okay, he didn’t take the bait. “I think the more realistic a fantasy world feels, the better,” he told us. “I think we should smell the economics. As readers we don’t necessarily need a seminar, though. ”
To wrap up, we asked for Williams’ take on the future of fantasy literature. Has he noticed any up-and-coming writers?
“I’m reading so little fiction these days that I would be doing a disservice to try to say who the up-and-coming writers are,” he admitted. “I can name two I’ve just blurbed: Blake Charlton and Pat Rothfuss.”
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Future FictionWe asked Tad if he has any other animal-inspired books in the future. “Deb and I have put work into a raccoon fantasy (because they’re so amazingly clever) called ‘Urchin’s Luck’,” he told us. “And I’d like to get back to it. It’s one of our many on-the-back-burner projects, but two of the stories from it, the ‘Only One’ stories, can be read free on our site: http://www.tadwilliams.com/the_vault.aspx.” We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for it. |
Monetizing WebsitesMonetization is one of those snarky Internet marketing terms. In the 1990s hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in Website businesses that had no revenue models. Today it is common to ask how a Website will be monetized (earn money) before investing in it. Most sites earn money by carrying advertising, selling products, referring visitors to merchants, or by selling subscriptions to online content. |
Carrying On…He picked up the reins on Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis. We wondered how Tad feels about the Brandon Sanderson completion of The Wheel of Time, and who would he want to complete his own works if he died suddenly. “I think that if it makes WoT readers happy, it’s a good thing,” Williams muses. “I’m not sure who could complete my work, but I’m a famous control freak, so I probably wouldn’t approve of anyone finishing my work, even better writers. Also, since I won’t be around, I won’t have to worry about it. Therefore, I completely dodge giving a proper answer. Hooray!” |