Earlier this year, at Conflux, I was granted a unique opportunity. I'm not talking about interviewing Sir Arthur C Clarke, although that was another special moment from the same con. I'm referring to the reading of my sci-fi musical, "The Soap Bubble - A Space Opera", by a hand-picked cast consisting of some of this country's greatest writers, artists and editors, all giving up their spare time and energy to the project in a feat of generosity and goodwill for which I will forever be grateful:

Astrogator Jane Foo-Wong - Deborah Biancotti
Morale Officer Alek Maas - Simon Brown
Captain Gabe McKenzie - Richard Harland
Uncle Warren & The Alien - Rob Hood
Corporal Sarah Mravinsky - Cat Sparks
Security Chief Andre Passant - Nick Stathopoulos

Based on my novella "The Soap Bubble", first published in Alien Shores in 1994, the play version was a project fronted by Bluetongue Theatre director and old friend Catherine Adamek. With funding from Arts SA, and the help of dramaturge Sean Reilly and Phil Spruce, we knocked together a working draft in early 2003, then sent it to various places (such as Playlab) for feedback. The draft performed in June was the latest, and could be described as a deep space First Contact story with a reality TV edge.

Music doesn't currently exist for the songs, but a theme for the show-within-a-show does, as written by me and orchestrated for the reading by Jack Reineckie (this version) and Robert Dobson. Other incidental music used in the performance was written by Mirko Ruckels.

I'm a big believe in collaboration and community. The reading of "The Soap Bubble - A Space Opera" was a celebration of both. I will be eternally in debt to everyone involved: the readers, the musicians, Trevor Stafford for giving me a prime slot at his excellent con, and to the audience for coming along and, afterwards, offering suggestions on how the script could be improved. It all added up to a wonderful experience that I doubt will ever be equalled.

It was also fracking hilarious. Hurrah!

Given the relative imminence of Japan's first worldcon, I thought I'd dust off my old weblog of the time I spent in Nagoya for anyone curious about what might be in store for them. I've trimmed it a little, to reflect changed circumstances, but it's much as I originally wrote it. Brought back memories, too. I am hungry now for cake.

I finally have a Flickr account (here) containing photos that range from the professional (Writers of the Future) to the personal (dusty imprints of my arse). I'll post anything that takes my fancy, in no particular order.

My favourites at the moment are the photos of me and Garth Nix sitting in the original TV series Batmobile. That's about as close to fannish heaven as I'm ever going to get.

And speaking of Worldcon... I prepared a speech for one of my panels that didn't end up being used. It's about the flexible nature of humanity--whether it's changed in the past and should change in the future. I've put it up in the "Opinions" section of the web site. If you're interested you can download it here.

I could and probably should update my LJ with gossip from Worldcon and boring writerly stuff, but I won't just yet. Instead I'm going to talk briefly about Colin Thiele, who died earlier this week from heart failure. Australians will know him as the author of Storm Boy, a novel set on the South Australian coast concerning a boy and his father, a pelican and an outcast Aboriginal called Fingerbone (filmed in 1976). I grew up with book and movie, and am saddened by this loss to the Australian literary landscape. An author of 80 or more novels, he was something of an inspiration. An author with plenty of time and energy for new writers, ditto.

When asked on a list if I had met him, I had to say that I had not, but the degrees of separation between us were very small (as they always are in Adelaide). A few years back the government tried to award him an "SA Great" Literature Award, for services to the industry and promotion of the state, but he wouldn't accept it. He insisted it should go to the runner up, a younger fellow who, Colin felt, deserved the encouragement more. That young whippersnapper was me. It may not be much of an award outside SA, but I was pleased to have something with the word "Literature" in it and flattered by his generosity.

I'll never again be able to describe The Stone Mage & the Sea as "Storm Boy meets Mad Max" without feeling a little wistful.

The Writers of the Future bash was amazing fun, with new and old friends combining to make it just as mind-blowing as ever. I'll post something more profound than that soon, when photos of the event appear online. I'm in LA now and absolutely knackered (and very glad to have a working stereo again). In lieu of something topical, here's a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago for a newsletter in Tamworth, with thanks to Mark Snyder for inviting me to contribute.

Like many writers I know, I can pinpoint the moment I fell in love with the speculative genre. For some it was The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia, often passed on from a well-meaning parent, uncle or aunt. I was perhaps five years old and considered too young for such advanced texts. For me it was The Children's Sinbad, an adaptation by F. H. Pritchard who also produced kids' readers of classics like Brer Rabbit and Uncle Remus and collections of humorous essays. This thin tome, which I still have, was a gift from my mother. There's a hand-written note in the front identifying it as a presentation from the Miltalie Methodist Sunday School in 1953. Perhaps they would have given her a different book had they known what kind of chain reaction it would trigger in the mind of her son, twenty years later.

Why this book? What kind of bomb, exactly? Well, up until that point, the only exposure to anything fantastical I'd experienced had come through fairy tales, cartoons on TV, and the movies of Walt Disney. They were fun but not especially stimulating. Looking back on the adventures of Sinbad the legendary sailor, I can see key similarities between them and every other speculative story I had been exposed to: exotic lands, wild adventures, and improbable creatures. There was, however, one important difference. Sinbad survived his seven voyages not by breaking the laws of physics or waving a magic wand. He endured by virtue of his wits.

Here was a story combining the two things that later in life I would come to love most about speculative fiction, and science fiction in particular. All fiction begins with the question "What if...?" That question, given free reign, allows glimpses of worlds that not only do not exist in this universe, but can not exist. What value do they have, then? Their value lies in encouraging people to think out of the box--of exploring every possibility, no matter how improbable. The exercise of imagination is one we frequently let slip in adulthood, to the detriment of ourselves as individuals and of our species as a whole. Speculation is the juice that fuels our waking dreams, and such dreams can change the world.

Speculation is useless, however, without reason to back it up. The partnership between imagination and the scientific method drives every aspect of society today, unseen for the most part (such as technology relying on physics or chemistry far beyond matriculation levels) and sometimes vilified by people who forget that these two pillars separate us from blind nature, with its dead-ends and its absence of morality. Science fiction is the only avenue for writers driven to seek truths beyond the here and the now (and the "us") to see what possibilities await.

So...that's where it all started. The Children's Sinbad led to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Dark is Rising. From there it was an easy step to Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and the other Grand Masters of science fiction. And from there, perhaps, it was inevitable that I would one day begin to flex my own speculative muscles, and produce the stories I have written so far. I hope that one day, somewhere, one of my stories will inspire a child in ways I cannot presently imagine, so Sinbad's legacy will live on forever.

Well, here I am in San Diego, brain-fogged from jetlag and a 30-hour flight to get here. Security wasn't as bad as I had expected. My new itsy-bitsy laptop proved invaluable on many occasions. That may have been the best purchase I made this year.

No insightful thoughts today, but David Louis Edelman is having some on editing reality and self-censorship. My first reading of it made me think, well, so what? This kind of technology is just giving us a new way to do what we already do with some efficiency but sometimes without out conscious awareness, and which we will continue to do whether the software is in place or not–unless we perform some serious and permanent re-wiring of the human mind, which would be a bold leap forward. But then again, you could say exactly the same thing about the internal combustion engine vs walking, so there's no denying the far-reaching effects it might have on future society. I guess that's the trick with SF: fundamental shifts in thinking often come and go without people noticing, while the details change everything...

There's also a great review of The Crooked Letter here.

"There's nothing new under the sun. At least that's how it sometimes feels with regards to fantasy of the epic variety. However, Australia's prolific Sean Williams seems to genuinely scamper down untrodden roads in The Crooked Letter.

"Mythologies and religious beliefs are melded and warped in a world not unlike our own in many ways. Narration is divided through the separate realms, but manages to weave itself into a wonderful story. The prose is eloquent and the dialogue is flawless."

William Lexner also has great things to say about Greg Bridges' cover and Lou Anders' work at Pyr. Fantastic all round.

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.

So Jonathan Strahan rings me today and tells me that Gary Numan is playing a gig just up the road from the Worldcon hotel the same week we're there. This is a Big Deal for me, and not just because I've recently finished a book that relies significantly on the lyrics of a certain postpunk-then-electro-now-goth legend. Needless to say, I will be buying a ticket.

In newsy stuff: it's been a good week or two. Rob Stephenson published the world's first review ofThe Devoured Earth in aurealisXpress (he liked it; see below). I expect this to be the first of many reviews getting the number of books in that series wrong. :-) Also, Stephen Davenport posted reviews of Geodesica in The Independent and The Program (ditto; and ditto). Being compared to Asimov is, arguably, worth another smiley.

It's also been a good week for finishing mss, with drafts of The Changeling and Saturn Returns in their final-final stages. Both will be delivered early next week so I can get on with the former's sequel. All original thoughts are being pumped into these projects, so I apologise for the blandness of this LJ in recent weeks.

Lastly, some other snippets of good news: both The Blood Debt and Geodesica: Descent have been reprinted by HarperCollins. Also, the wonderful people at Arts SA have generously thrown some cash at the Broken Land series, for which I'm very grateful. And a movie production company has been in touch about one of my older short stories--a possibility I refuse to lose any sleep over, but will report on here in due course...

Reviews:

( Read on... )

I mentioned in an earlier post my alter ego, Sean Williams, author of The Sound of the Ancestral Ship and editor of The Ethnologist's Cookbook. (We occasionally exchange emails about collaborating, but can't agree on whose name should go first. Ha ha.)

The strange thing is this: Sean emailed me the week before Conflux to say hi and to let me know about the new book. Excellent, I thought. Doppelgangers are fun, especially when they write books I wish I'd written myself.

The very next day, I received an email from another Sean Williams, he of Lawrence Real Estate fame. His email threw me for a second because I naturally assumed it was a reply from the first (or is that second?) Sean Williams. The content made no sense at all until I realised what strange coincidence had occurred. This Sean Williams had chosen to drop me a line within twenty fours hours of the other, apropos of nothing. Weird.

Coincidence and confusion reached a peak two days later when I went to check into the Conflux hotel in Canberra. I'd arranged to share a suite with the excellent Deb Biancotti. She had organised for my name to be on the room. Simple, right? That's what I thought. Turned out there was no "Biancotti & Williams" registered, but there was a "Mr & Mrs Sean Williams". Hilarity ensued--except that it wasn't me. It was another Sean Williams also checking into a suite at the same hotel, on the same day.

Tempted though I was to assume his identity, I checked in under Deb's name and went to hide under the bed.

Just a quick note to say that I'm still here and intending to post properly soon. June was a hectic month, thanks mainly to finishing the first draft of Saturn Returns, editing the copy edited ms and final pages of The Devoured Earth on very tight deadlines and attending Conflux (which included the world premiere reading of the "Soap Bubble" script and interviewing Sir Arthur C Clarke via satellite). All are fabulous things to have done, but I'm glad it's now July and things are starting to slow down.

Attending Conflux reminded me, as cons always do, of the importance of the community down here to my sanity, if not my health. "A solitary human being is a contradiction in terms," said Archbishop Desmond Tutu in New Scientist recently. "You are human precisely because of your relationships; you are a relational being or you are nothing." That's been an important principle for me in writing the new space opera, just as it is in life. It's been hard sometimes in the last year or two to keep up with friends, so being in Canberra, busy as it was, provided a wonderful opportunity to do that.

One more thought to close with. Saturn Returns features quotes from Robert Charles Maturin's gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer. Here's one I didn't use, and which could apply to a certain great debate at a certain con, and to certain men who are clearly having trouble growing up:

"[I]n early youth superiority of depravity always seems like a superiority of power."

:-)