Sean Williams

Music is my other love. In a parallel universe, I chose composition over novels and am now writing soundtracks for TV or strange electronic music for an audience of, say, twenty. So you can imagine my delight to be the first ever author interviewed for Tracksounds: the Film Music and SoundtracksExperience! The interview was ostensibly to promote The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance, but inevitably drifted. You can download my excited ramble as either a podcast or a transcript and marvel at what might have been...

Thanks to crankynick:

This track embodies everything I loved about the 80s: morose boys, crazy-dancing girls, pretentious videos, and above all the music.  How wonderful that this was released in 2009.  Music is good again.  Hurrah!  (Watch it at least to the chorus before you decide either way.)

Fourplay are touring at the moment, which is a reason for gladness all around the land.  I saw them last night and they were awesome.  (Pete Hollo: you are a rock god!)  There are lots of shows in the tour left, so check the gig guide and grab a ticket.  If you're in Perth, you'd better hurry.  They're playing there tonight!

Can't get to the gigs?  Check out their video page, which includes covers like "Sabotage" and "Killing in the Name of", or just buy the new album, Fourthcoming. Or both. :-)

If, on the other hand, you're looking for something in a more ambient vein, check out the new album by Deepspace, "Glittering Domain".  You can listen to it in its entirety over at last.fm.  (You might know Deepspace better as Kim Wilkins' husband Mirko, who has scored various Aurealis Awards down the years.)  The free album-length track "Another Empty Galaxy" was my favourite writing ambience for about six months.  There is no higher recommendation.

BSG + Goldfrapp = awesome!

'BSG ends tonight. But instead of mourning, let's focus on the positive, like the heaps of crazy Cylon sex. And to celebrate we rounded up all our favorite naughty robot moments into one NSFW clip. Enjoy our sexy round up to Goldfrapp's "Strict Machine" and remember wear a cylondom.'

Thank you, io9!

ETA See here for James Bradley's predictions for the finale. Will he be right or wrong? The world will know in minutes, but I won't (watching it Wednesday).

Gary is back after 29 years and I am going to see him play in Melbourne tomorrow.



I caught him for the first time during WorldCon in 2006. I had just finished Saturn Returns so his lyrics and music were very much on my mind. You know how sometimes you're afraid that the reality won't live up to the dream? Well, I felt exactly like that. (Sharing a suite with that trio of mockers--Simon Brown, Garth Nix, and Jonathan Strahan--certainly didn't help.) I shouldn't have worried. He was amazing.

If you're thinking "Cars" and "Are 'Friends' Electric?" then you've got some catching up to do. Here's a taste of his latest album, a song I've quoted many, many times through the Astropolis books. ( The last line is a killer. )

Concept Sci-fi is hosting its first annual Short Story Competition, offering entrants a chance to win £100 plus some signed goodies from competition judge, um, me.

Details in the link above. It's a themed competition. Here's the blurb:

Frank Zappa once said that everything in the universe is part of one great big note. He wasn't far wrong. There's music in the earth's core, in the sun's atmosphere, even in the roiling fire of the Big Bang. There's music in our interior lives too, in the stories we tell. "Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable", according to Leonard Bernstein, which makes it a perfect tool in the writing of space opera--my true but not my only love.

Way back in the late 1980s, I had to choose between two lives: one writing words and another writing notes. In an alternate universe, there's a version of me beavering away at a new symphony, or the score to a Hollywood movie. Here, the closest I get is putting Gary Numan lyrics in the mouths of my characters, and dreaming.

Dream for me. Tell me the note that ripples through spacetime in the wake of an ftl cruiser. Convey to me the songs that alien cephalopods whistle in their jovian soup. Give me the music of the spheres as you hear it. When the echoes fade, we'll all be richer for it.

I write listening to a particular kind of ambient music. What separates it from other, inferior kinds of ambient music is hard to tell sometimes, but I know the right stuff when I hear it. Mostly I source my fix from emusic (which I strongly recommend), while some comes from artist sites. The search goes on, and on.

Here are the top five most-played albums I downloaded this year, just in case anyone else happens to like my kind of sound:

Arc of Passion, Steve Roach
Glaciation, Patrick O'Hearn
Silver, Thom Brennan
Music for 18 Musicians, Steve Reich
Mysterious Skin, Harold Budd & Robin Guthrie

(Altus and Deepspace were also recurring favourite artists.)

Like laughter, music turns out to be good for the heart, hence the title of this post (from the other Bill Congreve). I really doubt, though, that anything called "Ode to the Misunderstood Potato" would be of much benefit (from the ongoing nightmare of nostalgia).

And speaking of nightmares, last night's dream was spookily appropriate.

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)".

I woke up today with this thought in my head:

"Boba Fett" is just one shift of an a away from "Bob Fetta".

I don't know about you, but now the thought's in my head, it kinda undermines his authority. If we didn't already have his back-story, I'd imagine it starting in some suburban lot on a backward planet--a tale of striving to stand out among the mundanes.

"How about a refill, Bob?" "That's Boba to you, punk." "Helmet off at the dinner table, darl." "A Mandalorian warrior removes his armour only once--when he's ready to die." "I'm afraid that's the best deal I can offer you, Mr Fett, but I can throw in that registration change if you're sure--?" "It's Slave or nothing. Will disintegration make that any clearer?"

I imagine him finally clearing out of that dump, only to fall foul of Vader and Jabba and ending up in Sarlacc's gut, wishing he'd given the whole thing a bit more thought.

The real Bob Fetta is on FaceBook. I hope he has a happier life.

Because these could be songs in the Star Wars universe, today's titles from Vader's party playlist are: "Squip, Tflim, Spuzno", "Mahti Tara" and "Ne Poera Seyeym" (geddit?).