I've just had some dates confirmed by the most excellent Darren Nash, so here is my publication schedule for the next few months:

March:
The Changeling - Australia mass market paperback (Angus & Robertson)

May:
Earth Ascendant - US mass market paperback (Ace)
Earth Ascendant - Australian mass market paperback (Orbit)

June:
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: US hardcover (Del Rey)
Saturn Returns: UK mass market paperback (Orbit)

November:
Earth Ascendant: UK mass market paperback (Orbit)

The best part of this news is that local readers of the Astropolis series aren't going to be stiffed by import prices when the next book comes out.

Meanwhile, work on book three continues apace. (I can hear the whips cracking as I type...)

If you haven't heard enough of my sultry tones lately (ho ho), here are a couple of interviews you won't want to miss:

...with the excellent Shaun Farrell of Adventures in Sci-Fi on the topics of Cenotaxis, Saturn Returns, The Force Unleashed and more. Kevin J Anderson is also interviewed in the same podcast, as an added bonus.

...with the legendary Grant Stone of Faster Than Light on, well, anything that came to mind. There was a lot of talk about Saturn Returns and Earth Ascendant, iirc.

Both interviews were conducted last year. I've just been slow posting them.

Enjoy!

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!

I'm very pleased (and flattered) to learn that Saturn Returns has been nominated for the Philip K Dick Award, for "distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States." It appears alongside a truly stellar list of names, including Elizabeth Bear, M. John Harrison and Karen Traviss. The result will be announced in March.

This news has prompted a wave of Dick jokes, the likes of which I haven't seen since High School. Bring 'em on! :-)

( Full details here. )

Huge congrats to all the nominees of this year's Aurealis Awards, among which I'm pleased as punch to be numbered. Saturn Returns is in the running for Best SF Novel, making it my sixth consecutive appearance in that category and giving me my twentieth nomination all-up. I'm excited but not holding my breath. The short-list is very strong, and I haven't had a win in this category since 2001 (which is a bit of a worry :-).

Anyway, it's wonderful to be part such a fine line-up. What an amazing pool of talent we have here in Australia! I'm sure there were many, many other fine stories that didn't make it over the line, and my commiserations go to those who might be feeling disappointed.

Ultimately it's about celebrating the community we're all part of, and in that spirit I'm really looking forward to the bash in Brisbane next year--which will be co-hosted by Kim Wilkins and some big loser from Adelaide... :-)

I'm remiss for not posting much about writerly stuff lately, so here are some reviews of Saturn Returns that have been accumulating over recent weeks:

Colin Steele neatly summed it up for the Canberra Times--"Saturn Returns probes the nature of what it is to be human against the wider backdrop of the rise and fall of civilizations"--while Brooke Walker of Good Reading thought it "A breathtaking piece of space opera!"

Dirk Flinthart liked it in the pages of ASIM: "Saturn Returns is a fine book. It’s better than fine...a very entertaining read. Williams’ prose is sharp as ever, with vivid characters, imaginative techno-splashy stuff, and a satisfying dash of dry, sly humour tucked up around the edges."

Keith Stevenson very kindly raved in Aurealis: "In Saturn Returns, I felt a new assuredness, a strength of voice that was compellingly entertaining and thought-provoking. Saturn Returns is Sean’s best yet—go out and buy it."

My favourite review of all, though, was in Locus. Russell Letson describes it as a "Jacobean revenge melodrama" featuring "a mysterious, memory-damaged, morally-ambiguous but militarily potent hero; even-more-mysterious masked opponents; a gang of companions evincing varying degrees of loyalty, sympathy, and resentment; wildly various, extra-large-scale, magical-technology-filled environments; murky pasts, secret histories, hidden agendas, sudden reversals, murky and shifting alliances; plus the usual amusements of chases, captures, escapes, kidnappings, rescues, befriendings, betrayals, and blowing stuff up."

As if that wasn't enough, he goes on to add "malcontents, tainted protagonists, secret and shifting alliances, and convoluted plotlines in pursuit of revelation or revolution or simple payback--mixed motives; love-hate relationships; unholy alliances, affections, and obsessions; amnesiac heroes, masked enemies, and wheels within wheels. And again the setting, in which every kind of scale is exaggerated and the sheer weight of millennia of history (and characters' lifetimes) and millions of cubic lightyears of space, dwarfs even the extravagant foreground action."

Exactly the kind of book I like!

And lastly, while on the topic of reviews, David Conyers in Albedo One had this to say: "Geodesica Ascent and Geodesica Decent have some great ideas, clever characters, and present a convincingly imagined world. These two novels are amongst the best Australian science fiction written in the last few years." For which I am very grateful.

From the site that remains my favourite at the moment comes this:

"Some people contend that the premises for most great speculative fiction can be summarized in one sentence."

(I remember someone saying this once. Does anyone remember who, exactly?)

"We here at Smart Bitches like to go a bit further than that: we maintain that the premises and plot points for the best (and worst) romance novels can be summarized in four words."

Whereupon numerous four-word synopses are offered, many of which cracked me up, including the one in the subject line of this post.

One of them ("No memory? No problem!") might even work for both Saturn Returns and The Resurrected Man, which is a slightly mortifying thought.

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.