adelaidesean | Entries tagged with inevitable

If you liked my story "A Map of the Mines of Barnath", then you might also like "Inevitable", which has just come out in the Strahan/Dozois collection New Space Opera 2. It's the first glimpse into the world of the Structure since "Barnath" was published, way back in 1994. It's the last until a much larger novella in Godlike Machines, hopefully this year. The collection as a whole is awesome, with people like Garth Nix, Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Moon and many, many others crowding out little old me. Here's the cover:

I had a lot of fun writing the story, which features two whole new space opera empires (the Guild of the Great Ships and the nasty Decretians) and has none of that real-physics nonsense of the Astropolis books. Here, when the characters want to go from one side of the galaxy to the other, they just go. Isn't that the way it's supposed to be?

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Maybe one day I'll get around to writing the novel.

I'm pleased to report that a novella "The Spark (a Romance in Four Acts)" joins several other large-ish pieces I have coming out in or around 2009. "Spark" clocks in at 20k and concludes one of the story arcs left hanging at the end of The Scarecrow (due March). The story picks up about five years after that book's end, with the characters facing challenges they never imagined as kids. I've just learned that it will appear in Australian Legends of Fantasy (edited by Jack Dann & Jonathan Strahan), and I'm very excited about that.

"Spark" is one of two stand-alone tales related to the Broken Land Series. The other is the 10k "Ungentle Fire", which is set just before "Spark" and due appear in The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy (Gardner Dozois & Dann).

The other stories aren't fantasy. "The Inevitable" will appear in The New Space Opera II (Dozois & Strahan), while "A Glimpse of the Magnificent Structure (and the Threat it Entails)" is due in Godlike Machines (Strahan), both around the middle of the year. At 10k and 25k respectively, they're related to a new space opera idea I've been noodling with in the last few months. It's based on an old story, "A Map of the Mines of Barnath"--and you can expect a spoken word version of that work sometime in 2009 too, just to refresh your memory.

(While I'm talking about spoken word stuff, I've recorded "A Longing for the Dark", a stand-alone excerpt from Geodesica: Descent, for Terra Incognita, and that will be coming out in March too.)

The other big release in 2009 is The Grand Conjunction (May), which will wrap up the Astropolis series once and for all. I've just finished the page proofs and I'm very excited at how it turned out. If you thought the scale of the first two books was big, this might do your head in. Mine is still recovering from writing it.

So that's the year ahead. It's a little less hectic than 2008, for which I'm grateful. Unless you count all the deadlines looming ahead, of course...

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Listening to: Telomere - Idiochrome

...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.

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Listening to: Altus - A Different Universe

That's the name I settled on for the story I wrote about yesterday.

"Ungentle Fire" is a stand-alone sequel to The Scarecrow, the last book of the Broken Land series, and is therefore set in the same world of the Books of the Change/Cataclysm.

It's also just been accepted into the Dozois/Dann Dragons anthology, the follow-up to their successful Wizards. Whew!

I'm having a pretty good run with shorts at the moment. As well as this sale, there's "The Inevitable" in The New Space Opera 2 and "A Glimpse of the Marvellous Structure (and the Threat It Entails)" in Godlike Machines, all of which were written in the last few months. Who'd've thought?

Up next is a novella for Dreamtime: Legends of Australian Fantasy (Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan), and then I have to get back to novels and the PhD. Alas. It's been a wonderful diversion, but at some point I have to go back to paying the bills.

There'll always be haiku, I guess.

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Listening to: Goldfrapp - Road to Somewhere

A few months back I was feeling empty of ideas for space opera novels. Maybe not surprising, since I've written quite a few of them in the last decade--and maybe not such a bad thing either, given my recent experimentation with thrillers and crime. How many genres can a guy juggle, anyway?

Then came Jonathan Strahan with a chance to write for his Godlike Machines anthology, which got me thinking about old ideas. And got me writing, too. Old ideas plus a new story led to new ideas and, like magic, here I am with a whole new space opera idea, and some more good news:

My story "The Inevitable" has just been accepted into Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan's uber-anthology New Space Opera 2. This new story is set in the same world as "A Glimpse of the Marvellous Structure (and the Threat it Entails)", which is in turn set in the same world as "A Map of the Mines of Barnath", first published in Eidolon way back in 1995 and now my most-reprinted story.

Collected in Damien Broderick and David Hartwell's Australian best-of Centaurus and Hayakawa's The Best Science Fiction of the Nineties, plus the inestimable Magic Dirt, "Barnath" is a glimpse into a world I've always wanted to revisit. Well, I've revisited it twice now, and I'm pretty sure there'll be more on the way. I picture a big fat novel simply called Structure with a cast of thousands set in a multiverse more challenging than anything I've ever tackled before...

This may be my space opera swansong, or else it's the beginning of something entirely and wonderfully new. I don't know yet. Either way, it's good to have space opera ideas again. When the stars stop shining in your protagonist's eyes, you can't help but fear that you've come back to Earth one time too many, and may never reach escape velocity again.

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Sean Williams

Entries tagged with inevitable

this stop: the structure

crystal balling

some opening lines...

120 = "Ungentle Fire"

"the inveitable" promotional post

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