Sean Williams

I'm very excited to be in this book, but I might have to keep it spine-out on my brag shelf.
What do you think? Is it just me or is that too freaky for words? (I mean that as a compliment.)

If this doesn't call for a celebratory chocolate (or two) I don't know what does!



(Should be in stores any day now.)

The UK cover of The Grand Conjunction has been out for a while, but for some reason I forgot to post it here. Not for any reason; I'm just forgetful. Here it is in all its glory:



Technically there are three moons in this cover (foreground, background, and creating the eclipse). Could that be any cooler?

( Here's the blurb. )

Meanwhile Mark Chitty Hub reviewed Saturn Returns in its latest issue, concluding: "a great Space Opera novel... Highly recommended."

BBC Focus thought Earth Ascendant "admirably rich and baroque, bringing to mind Iain M. Banks's Culture novels."

And Bookspot Central recommended Saturn Returns to "anyone who likes dark, epic-scale space opera, stories with intense action, or science fiction about subjects such as slower-than-light interstellar societies and the technological transformation of the human mind. ...an excellent combination of atmospheric power, thoughtful speculation, and visceral excitement that I recommend highly."

No need to comment, unless you're moved to by the awesomeness of my lovely Lunatic trio. :-) I post reviews and stuff here for my own record, mainly. Much easier to search LJ than my hard drive.

Here's the final cover and blurb. I am excited! (Also: fans of the Books of the Cataclysm will note the return of a familiar character.)



Ros is heading for the coast with Adi and Know-it-all the camel, hoping to drop the crystal containing the Golem of Omus into the ocean.

Arriving in Samimi, a small town on the outskirts of the Strand, the friends meet Quirk, who tells them outrageous stories about Ros's 'heroic' adventures. Ros doesn't suspect Quirk's treachery until he disappears--along with Varis, Adi's kinsman and bodyguard.

Ros and Adi use the Change to track Varis down, but now they're up against the Scarecrow, a lethal amalgamation of man and material who will do anything to get hold of the power contained in the crystal Ros holds.

Help comes from an unexpected quarter: Pukje, an impish stranger, offers Ros the change to gain the knowledge he's always wanted. But is the deal too good to be true? Ros must decide one final time exactly who to trust.

Due: March 2009.

This is the cover of the French edition of Echoes of Earth, out now from Bragelonne. Beautiful, isn't it? The interior looks just as classy. Our translator, Mikael Cabon, fixed some errors in the Adjusted Planck Units appendix, for which I'll be forever grateful. (That table is one of my proudest achievements. Galling to think it's not been 100% correct until now!)

Meanwhile, work on the German Books of the Cataclysm continues apace at the Otherworld Verlag laboratories, ahead of a January 2009 launch. The Crooked Letter turned out to have no satisfying translation, so the first book has become Die Spiegelzwillinge) ("the mirror twins") and the series "Bücher Des Kataklysmus". Me, I think those titles are totally awesome. Things sound ten times more apocalyptic in German. (Thanks to Michael Krug for such attention to detail.)

Lastly, I reported a while back that my story "The Seventh Letter" will be translated for Czech magazine Pevnost as "The Fourth Letter" ("Čtvrté písmeno"). Here is the last sentence, as rendered by Pavel Bakič:

"A jeho sny, tak jako barevné sny slepců, byly plné prodejů, zasedání představenstva a lenochodů dštících durmanový dým ze dveří nadskakujících dostavníků."

Because it looks cool.

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Listening to: Hammock - City in the Dust on My Window

Below is the cover* of my first kids' novel, The Changeling, which will be published by HarperCollins March 2008.

Below the cut are the covers to the sequels, The Dust Devils and The Scarecrow.

They couldn't be more different to the wonderful cover and illustrations by David Cornish, which I posted here a while back. It doesn't matter. I love them both. What do you think?

Soon I'll post an excerpt for your reading pleasure, and I'll link to that here.

I am quite immodestly proud of these books. They may be the best things I've written, so far.



( The Dust Devils & The Scarecrow )

* Cover design by Natalie Winter. Cover images all courtesy of Shutterstock.

Today I received copies of the French edition of The Resurrected Man, aka Reconstitué. Hurrah!

Here's the cover art by Miguel Coimbra:



(You can see the layout, if you're interested, on the novel's official site at the link above.)

It's published by the most excellent éditions Bragelonne, who have been nothing but wonderful to me, and if you can read French there's an excerpt here.

This calls for champagne!

Here's the UK cover of Saturn Returns:



What do you think?

And here's the first review:

Saturn Returns by Sean Williams, Ace, 5/07, $7.99, ISBN 0-441-01493-3
"When I first started reading science fiction, I was particularly fond of the grand tour novel, stories where the protagonist travels through a series of strange worlds. Andre Norton's Galactic Derelict, Gordon R. Dickson's Mission to Universe, Murray Leinster's Colonial Survey all caught my imagination. Necessarily the visits were brief, tantalizing, leaving ample room for my imagination to fill in the gaps. Nowadays authors are expected to fill in a lot more of the detail, and while that makes their imaginary worlds more believable, it is less likely to stimulate my sense of wonder. Sean Williams threads a path between the two extremes in his latest, the story of a man who is reassembled after his death, and who sets out on a voyage of discovery to learn the truth about his past, and what led to his violent, though temporary, demise. This appears to be the first in a promising new series from one of the few writers still producing consistently excellent space opera.:

From Science Fiction Reviews.

I am excited!

I've never tried to paste a picture into my LJ before, so here goes.



This is the final cover of the US edition of Saturn Returns, slightly redesigned from the first version I posted a few weeks back but still featuring the amazing art of Stephan Martiniere.

What do you think?

(If you want a direct link, here it is.)

The cover of my next novel has just been unveiled to the world, and it's a corker! Stephan Martiniere is a god. I've been extraordinarily lucky with covers throughout my career. Even my foreign covers have been fun.

Saturn Returns also has a draft blurb, if you follow the link.

More news to come.