adelaidesean | Entries tagged with descent

I'm pleased to report that Geodesica: Descent and "The Seventh Letter" (my first short story in six years) were both nominated this week for Aurealis Awards.

I'm cautiously excited. The field is very strong (also nominated are Lee Battersby, K A Bedford, Damien Broderick, David Conyers, Stephen Dedman, and Andrew McGahan) and my fortune in the SF department of the AAs has been pretty poor in recent years. These are my seventh and eighth nominations since The Dark Imbalance won in 2001. (For a complete list of my awards and nominations, see here.)

Mind you, winning is just a bonus, really. Being nominated is the main thing. For that I am very grateful.

Update: Note that, out of the eight authors nominated in the SF category, four are South Australian. I am nothing if not parochial. :-)

And:
“Fans of Book 1 of Sean Williams' ‘Cataclysm' series will have to have Book 2…Williams has a passion for building fantastic landscapes and riveting action, and The Blood Debt is a top pick for prior fans who will enjoy smooth, easy transition into this ongoing adventure.”
- California Bookwatch, Midwest Book Review, December 2006

Current Music: Carbon Based Lifeforms - "World of Sleepers"

"Alas for our beloved genre," says Alexis Gilliland in the Spring 2006 issue of the SFWA Bulletin. "Time travel always was fantasy. Interstellar space travel (with Einstein refuting FTL travel, and now cosmic rays denying even the possibility of a generation ship) has become fantasy."

I think this is an extraordinary statement for a magazine like the Bulletin to publish. Sure, it's one man's opinion and he's entitled to it; I would never begrudge him that. But is this the kind of declaration an organisation such as the SFWA should be broadcasting to its members, who are by definition practitioners of the speculative art? It seems to me that such doom-saying is symptomatic not of scientific rigour (always excellent when applied well) but of failure of the imagination.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the two points Gilliland raises. The unbreakable nature of the speed if light is a big issue for space opera. Normally SF writers wave their hands and invoke space drives with fancy names and even fancier jargon to explain it away. I've done it myself, many times. (My favourite so far is in Geodesica, but I'm proud of all my attempts in this area.) Radiation is also a killer, not just from cosmic rays but as a result of space travel itself. The closer you get to C, the more you'll be fried. It's a cold equation, and an irrefutable one.

In his essay "Science Once Again Nudges Science Fiction Towards Fantasy" Gilliland goes to extraordinary lengths to get around the problem of helping humans survive space: short trips in powerful rockets, habitats with extra shielding, etc. He does address the obvious question: why put humans up there in the first place? But the only alternative he offers is the one we have been using for years: satellites and robots that will do the job for us. There is a much more interesting alternative that he doesn't even mention.

If humans are the weak link in interstellar space exploration, why not change the humans? Slowing down an astronaut's metabolic rate so a year feels like an hour puts interstellar travel well within the boundaries of acceptance. Fancy a day-trip to Alpha Centauri? I know I do. And if everyone at home lives at the same tempo--or lives for thousands of years so a lost decade or two between friends won't even be noticed--what does the missing time matter?

The same with radiation. Ask the biosciences to give us better bodies. Is that so unreasonable? I don't think so. No more unreasonable, anyway, than asking for a drive capable of accelerating us to near C and materials that will survive the journey intact.

This kind of future has been imagined before. It's being imagined right now (by me, among others, I'm sure: Astropolis is set in just such a galaxy, with no ftl at all). Scientists are working in innumerable ways to improve us, on many levels. Why ignore all this wonderful hard work and declare that "the future looks a whole lot less promising than it did a half century back"?

On a related note, Colin Steele recently reviewed Geodesica for the Sunday Canberra Times, name-checking Arthur C Clarke's Rama books and Greg Bear's Eon (two major sources of inspiration for me) and declaring that the duology "falls into the genre of speculative human evolution, as the reader takes an intriguing journey into what we might become."

Seems to me that this is what SF is about, not the inch-thick lead shielding we'll have to wear to get there. :-)

Current Music: Steve Roach - "New Life Dreaming"

Elemental, the Tsunami Relief Anthology, is released any day now. Here is the Barnes & Noble review, which highlights the excerpt from Geodesica: Descent that Shane and I contributed. I am excited to be in an anthology with Sir Arthur C Clarke, Larry Niven, Brian Aldiss and others, but it also feels good in the karma sense. Every little bit helps.

Now, if only someone would do something similar for the disaster area in Kashmir...

In other non-karma related news:

Jonathan Strahan plugs The Books of the Cataclysm on Notes From Coode Street, here.

Merv Binns reviews Geodesica: Descent in Australian Science Fiction News: "if you appreciate this style of SF you will not find many books more exciting."

Current Music: Gas - "zauber berg"

A crook neck kept me from attending Supanova last weekend (alas) but my time up north was still fruitful and fun. Conjure rocked. Thanks to everyone for being so patient with their stiff-necked Oz GOH--particularly to the concom for arranging drugs and massages, the panellists on the one program item I was forced to cancel, and my fellow tie-in writers (and the wonderful Marianne de Pierres) for covering me at various functions. All's well that end's well.

At it did end will. The wonderful Gary Kemble covered Conjure for the ABC. See here for a chronological rundown of the entire event. You can also link straight to my GOH speech and an interview. I spent a fair amount of time talking about romance and sex, so be warned. :-)

To top it all off, Geodesica: Ascent picked up the Ditmar Award for Best Novel. I'm still slightly stunned, given the competition. The trophy was made by Gillian Sandrasegar and looks absolutely stunning on my brag shelf.

One last link before getting back to the new book: the Courier Mail in Brisbane recently ran a piece on Philip Pullman. I was asked to give my opinions on the great man (and other writers) along with Sophie Masson, Richard Harland, and Ian Irvine. You can see the article here.

That's it for now. As much as I love visiting Brisbane, it's great to be home. Autumn is a wonderful time in Adelaide. The neck is feeling better and the new book is coming along great. It's all good. (My motto for 2006.)

I'll post another update in a couple of days.

Current Location: Adelaide
Current Music: Anders Ilar - "Everdom"

...it's off to Conjure and Supanova I go. I'll just post one piece of news and one review before shutting up shop for a couple of weeks (probably).

The review first, from The Age last weekend:

"If you're going to write decent sci-fi, the first thing you need is convincing technobabble. Sean Williams and Shane Dix - two Adelaide based overlords of the genre - have got it down to a fine art. Geodesica: Descent is the second instalment of a two-part space-opera and it doesn't dally around with recapitulations or synopses of what has gone before. Set centuries from now, humanity has colonised space and evolved an exotic array of higher forms: the Palmers, intergalactic pilots who can interface with tech; and Exarchs, system rulers capable of spreading their consciousness over many bodies. The annihilation of two star systems by a rogue AI sees three rebels entering an alien artefact, dubbed Geodesica, in pursuit of vengeance. The novel is a racy, well-written and ornately imagined genre epic."

Nice. :-) A tight summary too, hence my copying of the review in its entirety.

And the news: I've been commissioned to write a story for Steve Savile's Dr Who anthology, Destination: Prague. This is immensely exciting for me, since the first tie-in novels I ever read were Who. In fact one of my first stabs at writing was set in that universe (thankfully that effort is lost forever). But most of all, I'm pleased that the aliens featuring in the story were invented by my pseudo-son Sebastian, who draws a mean mutant warrior-elephant. Three other Australians were also commissioned for the project, so it's going to have a dangerously Antipodean flavour. I am stoked!

'Bye for now.

Current Location: Adelaide, temporarily.
Current Music: Massive Attack - "100th Window" (the good tracks)

Geodesica: Descent is out in the USA, in two forms: there's the mass market paperback from Ace and the hardcover omnibus (with Geodesica: Ascent) from SF Book Club. Feedback from readers has been terrific. I'm really pleased that it seems to be hitting the mark.

Sci-fi Wire ran an interview with Shane and I last week. See here for the full text.

Meanwhile HarperCollins Australia, which will be publishing Geodesica: Descent in April, has posted an excerpt (and a glimpse of the redesigned cover) to their website here.

And lastly, Geodesica: Ascent may have been pipped at the post at last week's Aurealis Awards, but it has picked up a nomination for the Ditmar Awards to be announced in April, giving me my fifteenth nomination for this award. Fingers crossed.

More good news to come on other fronts. Expect an update in the next day or two!

Sean

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: Steve Roach: New Life Dreaming

2006 gets off to a great start with the publication of my 20th novel, Geodesica: Descent, and the reviews are terrific.

Harriet Klausner :
"Sean Williams and Shane Dix...are great world builders, their prose lush, visual and so descriptive that the audience can actually picture it, especially Geodesica. There are many surprise twists so that the audience never becomes bored as they peruse this enthralling space opera."

Paul di Filippo, scifi.com:
"Williams and Dix have a flair for combining slam-bang adventures, intriguing characters and cutting-edge scientific and philosophical speculations, resulting in books that elevate your adrenaline and your intellect. This latest series is no exception to their reign."

Russell Letson, Locus:
"These are not writers who are content to let us curl up with a cozy tale of exploding suns or galactic empire-busters. They know that the winds between the stars probably blow cold and that the significant half of "post-human" comes in front of the hyphen. It makes for an astringent kind of entertainment, but one that sticks in the head after the bubbles of lesser brands have evaporated."

This edition was published by Ace in the US. The Australian edition will be released by HarperCollins in April. An Adelaide venue, The Jade Monkey, gets a guest spot in the book, so watch this space for news of a party to celebrate.

Happy new year to all!

PS. To make things even sweeter, I finished the first draft of The Devoured Earth last night. Hurrah!

See here for the Ace cover, in all its infernokrushing glory...

S

I'm very pleased to have had a story accepted in an anthology called ELEMENTAL, subtitled "The Tsunami Relief Anthology", proceeds from which will go to charity, edited by Steven Savile and Alethea Kontis for Tor (and elsewhere). My story "Night of the Dolls" (with Shane Dix) is an excerpt from GEODESICA: DESCENT and will sit alongside works by Larry Niven, Janny Wurts, Brian Aldiss, Terry Bisson, Kevin J Anderson & Brian Herbert, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Joe Haldeman, Juliette Marillier, Elisabeth Haydon, Lynn Flewelling, David Brin, Guy Gavriel Kay, and others. Publication date I'm not so sure of at the moment; it'll either be the one year anniversary of the tsunami or sometime next year.

S