adelaidesean | Entries tagged with dust devils

Reviews are probably the least interesting part of this LJ, but I do try to keep on top of them for my future reference. While cleaning out the actual physical inbox on my desk I stumbled across some regarding the Broken Land books that I hadn't filed away, so here they are.

The Age thought The Dust Devils "deft and crisply rendered" while Viewpoint described it as "good speculative fiction" that "imagines a future upon familiar terrain. This is the arid interior of Australia gone to sand, its few denizens roaming the landscape for survival and seeking shelter in the half-buried remains of old cities." (Not true of the entire world, but a reasonable description of that part of it.) Viewpoint also thought that The Changeling "could be viewed as a thriller", a "thrilling" one at that, which "will keep you guessing into the end".

The Sunday Age concluded its crisp summary of The Scarecrow thusly: "In this third instalment in the Broken Land series, Ros is confronted by arduous choices about friendships and the future." Spot on, I'd say. Where those choices ultimately lead him and what kind of future he has won't be spelt out in future books, but will be revealed in short fiction coming out later this year.

It's that time of year again: the Aurealis Award judges honour some and overlooks others, sometimes seemingly on a whim, but always (he says from experience) after long and careful consideration. I feel very fortunate to be nominated again this year, since the field is so unbelievably strong, and I'm glad to be in such excellent company (on and off the lists). I'm looking forward to January 24, when we celebrate this wonderful, vibrant community of ours, and I hope you'll come along to join in.

For the record (because this is where I tend to keep track of these things) my nominations are:

Earth Ascendant - Best SF Novel
The Changeling - Best YA Novel and Best Children's Long Fiction
The Dust Devils - Best Children's Long Fiction
Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams - Best Collection

(Sorry about the subject line, btw. I knew

millisynth would like it. :-)

So I discovered last week that bits of roasted cacao beans taste really, really nice when mixed with Old Gold, and ever since then I've been making my own chocolates. But in the meantime, work goes on:

Stephen Baxter, Pamela Freeman, Pat Rothfuss and I compare notes on SF vs F over at The Second Bookgeeks SF and Fantasy Author Panel.

Voyager online has published some of my thoughts on Clarion (here and here) among a host of others, all thanks to the hard work of

jasoni.

My LibraryThing page is up and running, but it needs some work. So many books, so little time!

I discovered a couple of short interviews on YouTube: here, where I talk about how the Writers of the Future contest changed my life for the better; and here, on the Force Unleashed experience.

Bookseller + Publisher liked The Scarecrow, months ahead of its release: "everything you would expect from a good YA book [but] also quite different from most of its contemporaries. ... There is something in this series for both reluctant and confident readers." The review talked about the positive relationship between characters ("sometimes confused, often frightened but never pathetic"), magic ("another positive point of difference") and landscape, which Black also touched on in its review of the previous book in the series: "A short novel that will appeal to a broad spectrum of readership, The Dust Devils is Sean Williams tapping into the naive youngling in all of us. The villains presented here are the stuff of nightmares, and hold up to the strangest dangers being presented in fiction, today. But more appealing is the landscape itself, a scarred wasteland where not only Dust Devils lay in wait for the hapless traveler. The book bristles with a faint gothic undertone reminiscent of his grandest Space Opera..."

Lastly, Ansible published a letter in which complained about the Gender Analyzer, which responded to my request to analyse this journal with the error message: "Sorry, we can only classify web pages written in english." I can't imagine what I've been writing in instead all these years. Klingon, perhaps?

Oh, and I started a new book.

We're gradually coming to the end of my list of ill-advised odes. Another recording soon. Today's is in "The Demesne of the Deaf (a Song Without Words)".

Want an excerpt from The Grand Conjunction? What about reviews, interviews and shameless plugs? I am brimming over with links today, so I'm posting them all at once. Here's your chance to find out what my name looks like in Bulgarian (me, I've been dying to find out) and to learn which novella legendary Lou Anders recommends for the Hugo.

First up, the Book Show interview I mentioned a couple of weeks back is available as an MP3 download here. For readers outside Australia, I should explain that is about as big as non-paid promotion gets for writers down here. Almost literary, you could say.

On the other side of the world, Gary Reynolds at Concept Sci-Fi has been wallowing in Astropolis. The fruits of his labour (to confuse a metaphor or two) are now online. First, there's an excerpt from and a review of Saturn Returns:

"really good space opera that is a joy to read"

Then there's a review of Cenotaxis:

"superbly written...either as a standalone story or as part of the Astropolis series"

In his latest Ezine, Gary has reprinted "The Seventh Letter" with original artwork.

And on his website, right now, is an exclusive preview of The Grand Conjunction, the third and last of the Astropolis novels. Enjoy.

Gary promises a review of Earth Ascendant soon (to sit alongside this excerpt) but for now I have just one to post, and it's a corker.

A couple of weeks ago I received advance notice of a Jan '09 review in F&SF by Chris Moriarty, which I've been sitting on like a wriggly kid. It contains this wonderful line:

"Words like riveting, gripping, and page-turning get tossed around pretty cavalierly, but they all apply to the Astropolis series."

It can't get much better than that, can it? Actually, it can. This is one of those reviews that had me nodding along, going "yes...yes...YES" at every other line. Chris gets what I'm trying to do, and I'm grateful for it. I'll post more of the review next year, or whenever the issue is in print.

Meanwhile Mark Chitty of Walker of Worlds "recommend[s] Cenotaxis without hesitation" and Stuart Mayne in the latest aurealisXpress waxed somewhat lyrical regarding The Dust Devils, saying that it "works on all fronts". Stuart also gave me my first ever review of a workshop, specifically a weekend intensive I ran at the Victorian Writers' Centre while everyone else partied at Conflux. He says: "It was an absolutely fantastic workshop and can whole-heartedly recommend a workshop with Sean Williams as an experience that will help your writing immeasurably." I am blushing at such kind words.

To round out this enormous list of links, Robert Thompson emailed this morning to say that The Grand Conjunction is on his list of 2009 highlights, while Lou Anders, guest blogging on Tor.com, chided everyone in the US for not buying more of my books:

"His stand-alone novella, Cenotaxis, published by independent press Monkeybrain Books, was one of my favorite reads of the year and my personal choice for the Best Novella Hugo in 2008. It ably demonstrates why some people feel the novella is the ideal length for SF, and I say that because it’s true, not because he kindly set the novel’s resolution in my own home town (albeit of the far future.)"

And Bulgaria? I was very pleased to be interviewed by Darth Sparhawk for Citadelata.com. You can see the results here.

I'd end on the exciting news I have to impart, but that can wait until next time. No one will read down this far anyway. :-)

(Today's titles, btw, from the songbook of hell are: "Disconcert 1-6", "Praedeludium 1", and "Disconcerto for Violin, No. 1 (occasionally in G Mixolydian)".)

...in approximate order of release. Why? I was curious to see if they created their own little narrative. They don't, but I thought I'd post them here anyway. A list of the second lines, below, turns out to be a lot more interesting.

First Lines

The life of Darth Vader's secret student took a strange and deadly turn the day his master first spoke of General Rahm Kota.

(The Force Unleashed)

Ros drew the camel to a halt as a pair of very strange contraptions crested the next dune along from his. (The Dust Devils)

It is difficult to measure the time since my last communication. ("A Glimpse of the Marvellous Structure (and the Threat It Entails)")

Somewhere between Chemaly and Smerdon, Ros suspected they had become lost. (The Scarecrow)

The sky changed no less than three times on the way to the detective's office. (The Grand Conjunction)

The prisoner was both young and male, which suited Master Bannerman perfectly well. ("The Inevitable")

On the twenty-third day of his quest, the young man detected crabbler spoor. ("Ungentle Fire")

Second lines:

He had had no warning that a moment of such significance was approaching.  

It wasn't immediately obviously if they were machine or beast or a weird merger of the two.
  
Too much has passed, I fear, for the suspicion of my demise not to have become a certainty in some minds.  

Adi, as always, disagreed.

First, on stepping out the front door of the Iceberg building, a line of bright blue stars swayed erratically across the sky, casting sprays of sharply defined shadows down the length of Rammas Street.  

She had encountered his type before--headstrong, shallow, visceral--and refined numerous techniques for extracting what she needed.  

Swinging the reins of his mechanical steed sharply to the left, he parked in the shade of the yellow canyon wall and lightly hopped to the ground.

----------------
Listening to: Altus - A Different Universe

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.

It's been a hectic fortnight on the fantasy frontline.

The Devoured Earth debuted in the Dymocks national fantasy top ten list on its release in Australia. To celebrate its launch, readers in Adelaide are invited to Borders on Friday the 15th of this month, where I'll be talking about the book and signing anything thrust in front of me.

Publishers Weekly reviewed the beautiful Pyr edition of The Blood Debt thus: "The detail of Williams's imagined world and his characters' concern with the moral consequences of their actions compel interest". (Four books in this series, not three. I'll keep saying that here in the hope that the collective subconscious will eventually pick it up.)

Two new reviews of The Crooked Letter, here ("If you're looking for a good fantasy read that is part of the FWtE (fantasy without the elves) genre, check this one out.") and here ("as dark and gritty as a Miéville novel, as strange as Steven King, and more accessible than either"). I am well chuffed.

Drifting onto the topic of books not yet published, I finished the first draft of The Dust Devils on Sunday. How satisfying it is to whip out a completed ms in just thirty-three days! Kids books are fun. And on a similar note, this morning I finished my first short story in over six years, which I started yesterday. More of a "whew" than a "woohoo", but I am deeply excited about it. It feels like coming home.

Current Music: Devo - "Are We Not Men? We Are Devo"

August is going to be a busy kind of fun. Or a fun kind of busy. I can't decide which, or if there's even a difference.

First up is the 22nd Annual Writers of the Future Awards, which will be held with all due ceremony this year at the San Diego Air and Space Museum. I'm very excited to be involved in the WOTF, having won it way back in 1992 and returning lately as the only Australian judge in a truly stellar line-up. (Our very own Cat Sparks was another recent winner.) The night is spectacular, and the days leading up to it confirm everything I've learned since my early days of a writer: that you never stop learning. I return wiser from every year's celebration.

This year, though, I won't be returning straight away. Worldcon is just around the corner, practically, so it's off to Anaheim straight afterwards and my first World SF Convention outside Australia. I'm pleased to be on the program, so it won't be all pink drinks and schmoozing. See my schedule below. I'll also be catching Gary Numan live in concert (as noted earlier) and trying to keep The Dust Devils on schedule.

Afterwards, it's off to New York for a few days, then home to promote The Devoured Earth, since it'll be on the bookshelves around then. But that's a whole other month, and I've yet to get my head entirely around this one yet...

Worldcon schedule:
Wed 3:00 - Kaffeklatsch
Wed 4:00 - Fantasy Doesn't Have To Be About Kings And Wizards
Thu 4:00 - Changing Human Nature
Fri 2.30 - Pyr: A Look Forward
Fri 5:00 - Autographing
Sat 1:00 - Reading (expect something saucy)

PS. New security restrictions are making me a tad grumpy about the flight across the Pacific but I see no likelihood of changing my plans at the moment. I'll update here as required.

Current Music: Stars of the Lid & Biosphere

The US cover of The Blood Debt is online at the Pyr-o-mania blog page. Greg Bridge's artwork looks better every time I look at it. I can't wait to see this in print. Lou Anders is a legend.

While on the subject of the world of the Change: I've just started The Dust Devils, the second book of The Broken Land. In The Stone Mage & the Sea I referred to pseudo-mechanical creatures called "strand beasts" that wander endlessly across the desert of the Interior. At last, I'm getting to explore these creatures in more detail. They're inspired by Theo Jansen's incredible strandbeest, a new form of nature described as "skeletons which are able to walk on the wind". Eventually, he "wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives." There's a webcam on the site but I haven't seen what it reveals yet, as day here is night at the other end of the world. What wonders await?

While re-researching strandbeests, I stumbled across another site called Sodarace: "the online olympics pitting human creativity against machine learning in a competition to design robots that race over 2D terrains". Because fantasy and science fiction always overlap in my books, it seems fair to mention that here. I approve, also, of AIs getting the upper hand.

Quote of the day:

"Williams' mix of grand metaphysical vision, weird landscapes and wild adventure makes for a great read, but it's the deeply human story at the heart of The Crooked Letter, which really makes it something wonderful."
Hal Duncan (Vellum)

Current Music: Bear McCreary - "BSG Season 2"

Sci-fi Wire ran an interview with me concerning The Crooked Letter, which has just been released by Pyr in the US. See here for the full text of the interview, and here to order the book from Amazon.

Here's part of the blurb from Publishers Weekly: "Drawing on worldwide myths and legends, Australian author Williams (The Resurrected Man) expertly twists the familiar into the grotesque in this deeply spooky story, the first in a new fantasy series. When Seth Castillo is stabbed and killed, his spirit is whisked away to the Second Realm, a literally inside-out place full of hideous monsters, while his mirror twin, Hadrian, remains in the First Realm of the living. Their psychic link draws the two realms together, precipitating a world-warping cataclysm..."

But the really big news concerns a new series: The Broken Lands trilogy, written for kids of 10 and up, which HarperCollins Australia has picked up for publication in 2007-8. Set in the same world as the Books of the Change and Cataclysm, the new books--The Changeling, The Dust Devils and The Scarecrow--follow the adventures of a young boy living on the north side of the Divide. The Changeling was the ms I submitted for my MA in Creative Writing last year. Expect golems, crabblers, sand bandits, man'kin, ghosts, strand beasts and more!