Saturn Returns and Cenotaxis (billed as "Astropolis 1.5", which I love) are now available unabridged, via the preceding links, from the most excellent Audible.com, which means they're purchasable on the iTunes store here in Australia.

I'm excited by this because they're my first audio releases since my novella "Evermore" and the Star Wars: Force Heretic trilogy (all of which are also still available on iTunes, the latter books in abridged form). I haven't heard them yet, but I'm intending to work my way through both during my afternoon walks.

Each recording comes with an intro from me, recorded in my very own voice. At some point I'll post the full text here for those who have already bought the paper books, but here for now are some samples. ( Imagine me breathing heavily out of your headphones, and trying my best to sound learned... )

Here's a quick conversation between Jessica Wade, Ginjer Buchanan and me that covers all sorts of fun topics: the Philip K Dick nomination, where Astropolis is going, the weather in Darwin, chundering, and our favourite PKD novels. Enjoy!

Russell Letson reviewed Cenotaxis for Locus's latest issue, and I'm going to use his excellent summary as a way of promoting the book's release.

"Cenotaxis," he says, "is a free-standing novella set, according to Sean Williams's 'Note on Sources,' between Saturn Returns (reviewed in October 2007) and its yet-unreleased sequel in the Astropolis sequence. While it does feature the earlier book's protagonist, Imre Bergamasc, it is not really a sequel--the precise connection to prior events is uncertain, and (more important) the viewpoint is that of one Jasper, Bergamasc's mighty opposite in a war to control old Earth. In fact, events in general float around in time, since Jasper experiences a large part of his life not in linear sequence but as a series of flashbacks. The story begins in medias res, with Jasper already Bergamasc's prisoner and the serial interrogation well established. The first word spoken is 'anachronism,' and the first crucial fact we discover is that Jasper believes himself to be a god. Bergamasc wants information from Jasper, and he is willing to take a long time and go to some trouble to get it--but he is also willing to blow his prisoner's brains out if Jasper cannot or will [not] satisfy him.

"Among the ordinary plot questions posed by this initial situation are how a god (if he is such) came to be a prisoner; how he lost the war; why Bergamasc feels the need to interrogate him over what proves to be a very long imprisonment; why Jasper is unstuck in time; plus familiar science-fictional-background matters such as the nature of Jasper's mentality and of his relationship to the entity he calls the Apparatus (which may be kin to the now-extinct post-human intelligences called Forts). Some of these do get answered, but other thematic threads are more obscure, embedded in a network of allusions and echoes that rattle around in the text."

Russell found the rattling substrate less interesting than the "clear-text" part of the tale, enjoying "the rather Silverbergian combination of exotic far-future landscape and gloomy emotional atmosphere (think Nightwings or even Son of Man)" (comparisons I'm more than happy to accept). He notes that "the space-operatic and revenge-melodrama themes of Saturn Returns are so far in the background here as to be invisible, replaced by contemplation of modes of consciousness and/or of being," but that's okay, because it's a different sort of tale to Saturn Returns. That he thought "the sightseeing was worth the ticket price" is good news for me. I think it contains some of my best writing yet, and anyone who's enjoying Astropolis will find a lot in it for them.

Available soon through bookstores stocking MonkeyBrain!

I'm back from Canberra and Brisbane where I've had a lot of fun catching up with friends and celebrating the act of writing--something all of us have in common, even if our methods of celebration differ (mine seem to involve lots of red wine, but that will soon change). A big hello to everyone who danced, chatted, work-shopped, toasted, launched, or schmoozed their way across my path in recent days. My memories might be blurry, but the warm happy of companionship glows on.

A whole bunch of things have accrued while I was gone. I'll work my way through them over the next couple of days. Here's the first installment:

You can peer into my study (the place in which I spend about half my waking life) here, as part of the survey conducted by martinlivings. I was amazed while writing the accompanying blurb just how of much its contents relates to my personal as well as my professional life. Everything seems to have a story--and that's as it should be, I guess, for someone who makes a living from the damned things.

Cat Sparks informed me that we missed International Cephalapod Awareness Day. How did that happen?

Audible has bought Saturn Returns and the sequel novella Cenotaxis. I am dying to hear who will be cast as the voice of Imre Bergamasc!

For anyone in or near Adelaide on November 15, I'll be speaking alongside such literary greats as Nicholas Jose, Juan Garrido-Selgado and J M Cootzee at the Adelaide PEN "Denied a Voice" commemoration of the International Day of the Imprisoned Writer. That's between 12 and 2 on the lawns of the State Library of South Australia. Come along and help raise awareness of those with fewer freedoms than us--and remember how those freedoms we do have have been significantly eroded by our government in the name of security.

And for anyone out there who missed the blanket-bomb email I sent yesterday: in the month formerly known as November, I'll be growing a porn star moustache in order to raise money to help fight male depression and prostate cancer. You can help by sponsoring me (and if you're lucky I'll spare you the photos). Details below the cut.

That's it for today. It's nice to be home--and even nicer to see the rain outside! Huzzah!
( MOVEMBER )

Satima Flavell Neist contacted me a couple of days ago to discuss Saturn Returns in relation to an article she was working on for the Specusphere ("Write a Review Worth Reading", online here). We discussed some of the themes in the novel and the way I'd encoded them in the name of the main character. These particular details are now revealed for all to see at the link above (just scroll down a bit).

I assume that every writer plays these kind of extracurricular games with their stories. Would that be fair to say?

Anyway, all my books have sneaky details woven into the larger fabric, not all of them so profound, from giving Tripod a walk-on role in a Star Wars novel to slagging off people who've pissed me off in the past--in highly disguised forms, of course.

Saturn Returns is no different. There's "Cat's Arse", which I'm sure most people have guessed has something to do with our beloved catsparx (never ever, however, did I consider calling the series "Arstropolis"). There's Bianca Biancotti, no actual relation to deborahb but inspired by the same. Cat gets another throwaway mention thanks to a projectile rifle called "Sparks", and in fact every named weapon refers either to people and places in my life, or to the various Gothic authors whose work I've nicked for quotes and occasional dialogue.

It goes on. Hyperabad is obviously a typo away from Hyderabad. The ruined liner Deodati is a nod to Mary Shelley. The name of the "Aldobrand Cipher" comes from Robert Maturin's play "The Castle of St Aldobrand".

Maturin, in fact, appears several times in this book and Cenotaxis, the linking novella coming out from MonkeyBrain Books next month. The founder of the First Church of the Return is called "Mother Turin", which can be abbreviated to "Ma Turin". Another play, "Fredolfo", became a place-name, as did his great-uncle, Oscar Wilde. His pseudonym, Dennis Jasper Murphy, gave me the name of the main character of Cenotaxis. "Balzac beamers" are named after Honore de Balzac, who wrote a sequel to Maturin's classic Melmoth the Wanderer in 1835.

Friend and editor Lou Anders also gets two nods, once thanks to his surname (the proto-Fort Ampersand took its name from an anagram of its primary personality, Pam Anders) and his home town, which plays a major role Cenotaxis.

Some of the references are more obvious than others. The next book in the series, Earth Ascendant, moves away from Maturin to another famous Gothic writer, from whom I've lifted such creations as Bostonian sidearms, the Metzengerstein Nebula, Hansfaall base on the dark side of the moon, a colony called Al-A'raaf and another called Ulalune, conspiracy theorist from Tau Ceti called Reynolds and the mythical novel Zaknythos, by Henre Le Rennet and Edgar A. Perry.

I'm sure that most readers don't know that I'm having a whale of time like this behind the pages, and I'm sure that it doesn't add much, really, to the finished work. But to anyone who does go looking, I hope that details like this will surprise and delight them. Such eager readers--not to mention friends with legendary arses--deserve to be rewarded.

I've had a fun week coming up with new ideas and making the odd public appearance (including one with Fiona McIntosh on Thursday night--hi gumnut!) and both the Royal Adelaide Show and SA Writers' Festival are looming large on my immediate horizon. In the meantime, a number of things have accrued that I need to post here, since they relate to books I'm very proud of and am keen for people to buy. :-)

First up, fans of Saturn Returns will be pleased to know that they won't have to wait until March to find out what happens next. MonkeyBrain Books is publishing a stand-alone novella that also happens to sit between books one and two of Astropolis. Cenotaxis might be the best SF (below 100,000 words) that I've written for a very long time, and it's coming out next month. Here's the final cover and blurb. Gaze upon it in awe. Chris, Allison and Sparth have done a wonderful job; I am completely chuffed.

Another piece of short SF that has done well for me is "The Seventh Letter". The latest leg it has grown concerns Robert Drewe's Best Australian Stories 2007, which will be coming out in November this year from Black Inc Books. I'm very proud that my little effort has been included. That's mainstream attention no story of mine has ever generated before.

Reviewers have been kind to me in recent days, also:

SF Crowsnest on The Blood Debt: "Sean Williams has produced that rare of gems, a fantasy book that really feels like you're visiting a new world, rather than a rehashed version of somebody else's milieu. The easy style and likeable banter between protagonists makes the book an enjoyable read and the plot keeps you wanting to come back for more."

SFRevue on The Hanging Mountains: "This book moves fast and it quickly swept me into the complex, beautiful and deadly work that Williams has so artfully crafted."

SF Crowsnest again, also on The Hanging Mountains: "Sean Williams is writing an important series here that does a great service to the fantasy genre by encouraging it to break tradition. His powerfully creative world-building should stand as a call to arms for fantasy writers to leave the world of Tolkien-aping lands behind and really start being adventurous. "

The wonderful Donna Hanson at the Specusphere on Saturn Returns: "You have to be on your toes as Williams leads you around the galaxy in the search of the truth and the search for self. It is well worth it."

There's more on the way, but I figure that's enough ego-stroking for one day.

To close, here's a post I wrote a couple of weeks back but didn't post for fear of putting even my most ardent readers to sleep. I'm tacking it onto the end to prove (if there was any doubt) that I need to get out more...
( pointless stats #23: itunes play count data )

I finished the second book of Astropolis, Earth Ascendant, just yesterday, so I figure today's a good time to post some reviews. I'm really excited by the feedback so far. The book will be out here very shortly, in all its Orbity glory. (There's a review buried in that link, too.) Hurrah!

The Guardian: ( In the first book of the Astropolis trilogy, Williams renders the passage of aeons, and the rise and fall of civilisations, with cosmic poignancy. )

The Independent: ( Saturn Returns...is scientifically credible, ambitious, adventurous and thrilling....a wildly original, totally convincing, all-round wonderful novel. )

The Books of the Cataclysm have sold into Germany, specifically to Otherworld Verlag Krug Keg. I am excited!

The Crooked Letter (translated* by Google as "The Crooked type character") is listed on their site as a 2008 book.

The delays concern The Changeling and The Force Unleashed, both of which have been pushed to early 2008. That sits well with me, as it avoids the logjam that seemed to building around October, with those two books plus "Cenotaxis" due at the same time.

* Google insists on adding the word "jug" every time "Keg" appears, which would be hilarious if it wasn't such a cliche.

Hmm. What the hell does that mean?

I found this sentence in the first draft of "Cenotaxis", a novella that will slip between the first books of the Astropolis series (due out in standalone form late next year from MonkeyBrain).

What it's supposed to say is a complete mystery to me. Context doesn't help at all. It's like something reached into my head, scrambled up my neurons just long enough for me to write these words--words that look perfectly correct on their own but together, in that order, make no sense at all--then retreated so subtly I never noticed what happened.

I deleted the sentence rather than try to work out what it meant, then I reconsidered and kept it out of curiosity. Now it's here. Perhaps someone can tell me what I was trying to say.

Personally, I'm hoping it's a coded message from the collective unconscious designed to join with other such coded "errors" in order to reveal some deeply profound truth about the universe (cf. the "garbage" text in modern-day spam). That's much more interesting than the assumption that I'm just wearing out.

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.