Sean Williams

The Hugo nomination window is open, and because a couple of people have asked me privately, let me just say this:

Cenotaxis, my standalone novella published by Monkeybrain Books, is eligible for nomination in that category.

That is all.

Andrew Thompson writes an engaging and refreshingly inclusive piece on The Future in the Age, covering everyone from Ray Kurzweil to Cormac McCarthy, with nods to Damien Broderick and little old me:

"If it was just a matter of charting technology, it would be easy. But (unpredictable) people come into the mix. There can be strange and wonderful and terrible results."

Keith Stevenson has posted his review of Magic Dirt to the interweb (I've quoted this before but it'd be nice if Aurealis gets the clicks):

"This is a book no self-respecting lover of Australian speculative fiction can afford to be without."

ETA Keith has also posted reviews of Cenotaxis and Earth Ascendant here!

The novelette I wrote in 1991 that went on to become The Crooked Letter, first published in my collection Light Bodies Falling, is selected for reprint in Angela Challis's Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror Vol 3. In great company:

"Contributors include Garth Nix (New York Times bestseller), Sean Williams (New York Times bestseller), Margo Lanagan (Word Fantasy Award winner), and award winners Terry Dowling (Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear), Richard Harland (The Black Crusade), Jason Nahrung (The Darkness Within), Martin Livings (Carnies)."

Lastly, the title story from Light Bodies Falling featured a giant spider crouching on a city building. Earlier this year, a group of puppeteers enacted that scene in Liverpool, little knowing that they were bringing one of my worst nightmares to life. Yaagh!



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Listening to: Hammock - This Kind of Life Keeps Breaking Your Heart

Saturn Returns and Cenotaxis (billed as "Astropolis 1.5", which I love) are now available unabridged, via the preceding links, from the most excellent Audible.com, which means they're purchasable on the iTunes store here in Australia.

I'm excited by this because they're my first audio releases since my novella "Evermore" and the Star Wars: Force Heretic trilogy (all of which are also still available on iTunes, the latter books in abridged form). I haven't heard them yet, but I'm intending to work my way through both during my afternoon walks.

Each recording comes with an intro from me, recorded in my very own voice. At some point I'll post the full text here for those who have already bought the paper books, but here for now are some samples. ( Imagine me breathing heavily out of your headphones, and trying my best to sound learned... )

Russell Letson reviewed Cenotaxis for Locus's latest issue, and I'm going to use his excellent summary as a way of promoting the book's release.

"Cenotaxis," he says, "is a free-standing novella set, according to Sean Williams's 'Note on Sources,' between Saturn Returns (reviewed in October 2007) and its yet-unreleased sequel in the Astropolis sequence. While it does feature the earlier book's protagonist, Imre Bergamasc, it is not really a sequel--the precise connection to prior events is uncertain, and (more important) the viewpoint is that of one Jasper, Bergamasc's mighty opposite in a war to control old Earth. In fact, events in general float around in time, since Jasper experiences a large part of his life not in linear sequence but as a series of flashbacks. The story begins in medias res, with Jasper already Bergamasc's prisoner and the serial interrogation well established. The first word spoken is 'anachronism,' and the first crucial fact we discover is that Jasper believes himself to be a god. Bergamasc wants information from Jasper, and he is willing to take a long time and go to some trouble to get it--but he is also willing to blow his prisoner's brains out if Jasper cannot or will [not] satisfy him.

"Among the ordinary plot questions posed by this initial situation are how a god (if he is such) came to be a prisoner; how he lost the war; why Bergamasc feels the need to interrogate him over what proves to be a very long imprisonment; why Jasper is unstuck in time; plus familiar science-fictional-background matters such as the nature of Jasper's mentality and of his relationship to the entity he calls the Apparatus (which may be kin to the now-extinct post-human intelligences called Forts). Some of these do get answered, but other thematic threads are more obscure, embedded in a network of allusions and echoes that rattle around in the text."

Russell found the rattling substrate less interesting than the "clear-text" part of the tale, enjoying "the rather Silverbergian combination of exotic far-future landscape and gloomy emotional atmosphere (think Nightwings or even Son of Man)" (comparisons I'm more than happy to accept). He notes that "the space-operatic and revenge-melodrama themes of Saturn Returns are so far in the background here as to be invisible, replaced by contemplation of modes of consciousness and/or of being," but that's okay, because it's a different sort of tale to Saturn Returns. That he thought "the sightseeing was worth the ticket price" is good news for me. I think it contains some of my best writing yet, and anyone who's enjoying Astropolis will find a lot in it for them.

Available soon through bookstores stocking MonkeyBrain!

Satima Flavell Neist contacted me a couple of days ago to discuss Saturn Returns in relation to an article she was working on for the Specusphere ("Write a Review Worth Reading", online here). We discussed some of the themes in the novel and the way I'd encoded them in the name of the main character. These particular details are now revealed for all to see at the link above (just scroll down a bit).

I assume that every writer plays these kind of extracurricular games with their stories. Would that be fair to say?

Anyway, all my books have sneaky details woven into the larger fabric, not all of them so profound, from giving Tripod a walk-on role in a Star Wars novel to slagging off people who've pissed me off in the past--in highly disguised forms, of course.

Saturn Returns is no different. There's "Cat's Arse", which I'm sure most people have guessed has something to do with our beloved catsparx (never ever, however, did I consider calling the series "Arstropolis"). There's Bianca Biancotti, no actual relation to deborahb but inspired by the same. Cat gets another throwaway mention thanks to a projectile rifle called "Sparks", and in fact every named weapon refers either to people and places in my life, or to the various Gothic authors whose work I've nicked for quotes and occasional dialogue.

It goes on. Hyperabad is obviously a typo away from Hyderabad. The ruined liner Deodati is a nod to Mary Shelley. The name of the "Aldobrand Cipher" comes from Robert Maturin's play "The Castle of St Aldobrand".

Maturin, in fact, appears several times in this book and Cenotaxis, the linking novella coming out from MonkeyBrain Books next month. The founder of the First Church of the Return is called "Mother Turin", which can be abbreviated to "Ma Turin". Another play, "Fredolfo", became a place-name, as did his great-uncle, Oscar Wilde. His pseudonym, Dennis Jasper Murphy, gave me the name of the main character of Cenotaxis. "Balzac beamers" are named after Honore de Balzac, who wrote a sequel to Maturin's classic Melmoth the Wanderer in 1835.

Friend and editor Lou Anders also gets two nods, once thanks to his surname (the proto-Fort Ampersand took its name from an anagram of its primary personality, Pam Anders) and his home town, which plays a major role Cenotaxis.

Some of the references are more obvious than others. The next book in the series, Earth Ascendant, moves away from Maturin to another famous Gothic writer, from whom I've lifted such creations as Bostonian sidearms, the Metzengerstein Nebula, Hansfaall base on the dark side of the moon, a colony called Al-A'raaf and another called Ulalune, conspiracy theorist from Tau Ceti called Reynolds and the mythical novel Zaknythos, by Henre Le Rennet and Edgar A. Perry.

I'm sure that most readers don't know that I'm having a whale of time like this behind the pages, and I'm sure that it doesn't add much, really, to the finished work. But to anyone who does go looking, I hope that details like this will surprise and delight them. Such eager readers--not to mention friends with legendary arses--deserve to be rewarded.

I finished the second book of Astropolis, Earth Ascendant, just yesterday, so I figure today's a good time to post some reviews. I'm really excited by the feedback so far. The book will be out here very shortly, in all its Orbity glory. (There's a review buried in that link, too.) Hurrah!

The Guardian: ( In the first book of the Astropolis trilogy, Williams renders the passage of aeons, and the rise and fall of civilisations, with cosmic poignancy. )

The Independent: ( Saturn Returns...is scientifically credible, ambitious, adventurous and thrilling....a wildly original, totally convincing, all-round wonderful novel. )

Hmm. What the hell does that mean?

I found this sentence in the first draft of "Cenotaxis", a novella that will slip between the first books of the Astropolis series (due out in standalone form late next year from MonkeyBrain).

What it's supposed to say is a complete mystery to me. Context doesn't help at all. It's like something reached into my head, scrambled up my neurons just long enough for me to write these words--words that look perfectly correct on their own but together, in that order, make no sense at all--then retreated so subtly I never noticed what happened.

I deleted the sentence rather than try to work out what it meant, then I reconsidered and kept it out of curiosity. Now it's here. Perhaps someone can tell me what I was trying to say.

Personally, I'm hoping it's a coded message from the collective unconscious designed to join with other such coded "errors" in order to reveal some deeply profound truth about the universe (cf. the "garbage" text in modern-day spam). That's much more interesting than the assumption that I'm just wearing out.