Author Profile: Tad Williams

Tad Williams is an American writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Born in 1957 in San Jose, California, Williams has held a huge number of jobs in his time, working in theatre and television production, singing in a band and hosting his own syndicated radio show for a decade among them. In 1985 he published his first novel, Tailchaser's Song, and has been a fixture on the speculative fiction scene ever since, publishing twelve additional novels, numerous short stories and several comic series. He currently has two more novels about to hit the stands and five more books planned.


Tailchaser's Song is an animal fantasy which depicts cats as a race of intelligent beings who consider themselves the dominant species of Earth, with humans a generally untrustworthy nuisance. The book garnered some (generally favourable) comparisons to Watership Down and marked Williams as an author to watch.

For his next project Williams decided to directly tackle the epic fantasy genre with a full-on, Tolkien-esque epic meant to rival (and in some cases redress) The Lord of the Rings. Whilst acknowledging that the earlier work was a substantial masterpiece, Williams felt that Tolkien let some implicit suggestions of racism slide through unchallenged in the earlier work, with its depiction of the purely good elves and the purely evil orcs, not to mention the fact that all of the dark-skinned peoples in the book were allied to Sauron. Tolkien himself had noted these facts and struggled with them in various post-Lord essays trying to explain these issues, but reached no satisfactory conclusion before his death (although The Silmarillion did expose the ancient history of the elves in a somewhat less flattering light).


Williams' answer was to craft the vast fantasy landscape of Osten Ard, centred on the immense castle of the Hayholt, a Gormenghast-esque warren of kitchens and halls from where King John the Presbyter (also called Prester John, in a nod to the legendary figure) rules over the unified races of humanity. Upon his death, his sons quarrel for the crown and the land falls into civil war at the same time an ancient force of destruction, the Storm King, returns.

In comparison to many of the post-Tolkien fantasy potboilers, Williams attempts in Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (the names of the three swords at the centre of the story) to create a mythic epic punching at the same weight as Middle-earth. In that he falls short (Osten Ard being the work of a few years, not the decades poured into Middle-earth by Tolkien), but it remains a noble effort. The trilogy is gargantuan - the final book, To Green Angel Tower, is commonly split into two smaller volumes, Siege and Storm - and steeped in rich atmosphere, but to deliver that atmosphere Williams utilises a huge amount of words. The result is a somewhat straightforward narrative which doesn't really need the immense page-count the series spans. The result is a series that divides critics. Those who love it really love it, whilst a lot of other critics are unimpressed with Williams' somewhat needless verbosity. Also, Williams fails at the last hurdle in challenging some of the conceits of the genre. Whilst giving the Storm King and his minions a logical rationale for their actions, the epilogue to the trilogy is somewhat cloying and invokes several of the key cliches of the genre that Williams was supposed to be subverting. As a result, the trilogy leaves the reader feeling somewhat dissatisfied, although sporadically entertained along the way.

But for all its faults, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn did break through the barrier that had hitherto suggested that epic fantasy was solely a kid's genre, completing the work begun by Donaldson's Thomas Covenant a decade earlier. Williams' trilogy can thus be seen as a late but key progenitor of the modern doorstopper fantasy epic, coming as it did just a couple of years ahead of Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World. It also had an inspirational impact on other writers, as George RR Martin, who had previously been sceptical of the genre as a setting for adult stories, but read Williams' books, was fired up, and began writing A Game of Thrones in 1991.


Despite the immense pressures of writing the trilogy (Williams has said the third book in particular demanded vast amounts of sweat, blood and tears), Williams found time to expand his short story, Child of an Ancient City, into a novel with the help of fellow writer Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Whilst different to the trilogy - it's a historical vampire story - it didn't find as large an audience.

In a similar vein was Caliban's Hour. Having just finished a colossal trilogy taking eight years to write, Williams chose to work on a much smaller project next, essentially a companion to The Tempest examining the fate of the 'monster' Caliban. Despite some critical acclaim, the book also failed to shift many copies, to the author's distress and suspicion that some of his fans only wanted huge blockbuster fantasies from him, which he wasn't always prepared to do (a similar problem for many in the genre).

Despite his not-always-pleasant experiences on the trilogy, Williams did come up with an idea for another huge story, this time a science fiction epic called North on the Data Stream which would mix in elements of SF and fantasy with a river-based narrative similar to Heart of Darkness or Huckleberry Finn, or indeed Dan Simmons' Hyperion which was published around the same time he came up with the idea. Eventually coining the catchier title Otherland, Williams set to work after finishing Caliban's Hour, using many of the lessons learned whilst writing the trilogy and generally having a better time.


Otherland was, perhaps more sensibly, planned as four big books in the first place, published between 1996 and 2001, and marked an interesting departure and contrast to the earlier fantasy epic. On the one hand, it is similar: another huge story with hundreds of named characters, dozens of major ones and vast numbers of plots and subplots. Yet the differences are notable: some of the action takes place in the recognisable real world of forty years hence, in South Africa, the USA, South America and elsewhere, whilst the majority takes place in the many virtual worlds of the Otherland computer network.

Like the fantasy trilogy, Otherland has been accused of being too long-winded, but it's a different style of verbosity. Otherland's extra length is mainly due to, as admitted by the author, his treatment of the story as an episodic kitchen-sink novel with tons of ideas thrown into the mix. Some of the episodes in the books are almost self-contained, more like short stories that exist within the novel with their own beginnings, middles and ends before the main narrative resumes. Reading Otherland is an experience akin to watching a TV series with an ongoing storyline which sometimes takes a break for the odd self-contained episode along the way. Some readers hate this, others love it, and accordingly Otherland is Williams' most divisive work. For my money, it is the best thing Williams has written, with interesting, strong characters and the worlds within the Otherland network are well-realised. There is a surprising emotional punch to the finale as well, partially continued by a subsequent novella, The Happiest Dead Boy in the World, that answered a few dangling questions. Otherland was a reasonable success worldwide, but proved to be unexpectedly and particularly big in Germany, where it won some mainstream success and became a national bestseller, with a German software company now working on a particularly ambitious Otherland MMORPG.


Williams' post-Otherland work has proven less popular. The War of the Flowers, published in 2003, was a solid single-volume fantasy tale but a bit of a come-down after the epic SF series. More problematic has been his new work, the Shadowmarch Trilogy. Williams had been suggesting that his next project post-Flowers would be a return to Osten Ard for a series of short stories (presumably following the success of The Burning Man, a novella published in the 1998 collection Legends), but instead he chose to write a new fantasy book that would be released in stages online. The experiment was interesting, but whilst writing the book Williams was inspired to turn it into a full trilogy. Due to the break from his normal writing scheme, this meant writing the outline for the series between Books 1 and 2 rather than before the first one, and the result was a trilogy which simply didn't feel as polished as his former multi-book series. In particular, Shadowplay, the second book, garnered some of the worst reviews Williams has received in his career. The final volume, Shadowrise, is due in about a year's time. He is now embarking on a five-volume children's book series, Ordinary Farm, which he is writing with his wife, Deborah Beale, whilst his next adult project will be a series of 'noir' fantasy thrillers.


Looking at Williams' body of work, the conclusion one reaches is that he is an author with a variety of interests in different genres who has been sucked into the world of the giant fat fantasy epic. It's hard to ignore the impact the two big series have had or that they are both immensely popular, but at the same time Tailchaser's Song, Child of an Ancient City, Caliban's Hour and his often excellent short fiction (The Lamentably Comical Tragedy of Lixal Laqavee is one of the highlights of Songs of the Dying Earth) suggests an author who in his heart of hearts is perhaps more Neil Gaiman than Robert Jordan, and his concentration on huge series has perhaps deprived us of many interesting short stories, comics and single novels that he could have written in the meantime. Yet Otherland is a singularly impressive work and Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, if it failed at the final hurdle, is a nevertheless valiant attempt to analyse the problems within commercial epic fantasy, even if it ironically fell prey to many of them in the process. Still, with the huge epics apparently out of the way, for now, I look forward to Williams' future work with renewed interest.


Bibliography

Stand-alone Books
Tailchaser's Song (1985)
Child of an Ancient City (1992, with Nina Kiriki Hoffman)
Caliban's Hour (1994)
The War of the Flowers (2003)
Rite: Short Work (2006, collection)

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn
The Dragonbone Chair (1988)
Stone of Farewell (1990)
To Green Angel Tower (1993)

Otherland
City of Golden Shadow (1996)
River of Blue Fire (1998)
Mountain of Black Glass (1999)
Sea of Silver Light (2001)

Shadowmarch
Shadowmarch (2004)
Shadowplay (2007)
Shadowrise (forthcoming in 2010)

Ordinary Farm The Dragons of Ordinary Farm (2009, with Deborah Beale)
A Witch at Ordinary Farm (forthcoming in 2010, with Deborah Beale)

The Bobby D Mysteries
Sleeping Late of Judgement Day (forthcoming)
The Bobby Dollar Books (forthcoming)
My So-Called Afterlife (forthcoming)

Author Profile: Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer, born in 1952 in Illinois but resident for most of his life in California. His books are noted for a strong utopian or optimistic streak running through them and he a fascination with the environment and how society reacts to various crises. He has won the Hugo Award for Best Novel twice, the Nebula Award for Best Novel once, the World Fantasy Award once and the Locus Award six times.


Robinson is best-known for his three core trilogies, Orange County (recently rejacketed with the awkward title 'Three Californias'), Mars and Science in the Capital, and a number of stand-alone works. The Orange County Trilogy, comprising The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge, is an interesting work as it is set in three distinct, parallel future timelines, namely a post-apocalyptic landscape (where the USSR has beaten the USA in a nuclear war that didn't totally end civilisation), a dystopia and a utopia. Throughout these three books Robinson engages his interest in sociology and the environment, analysing how the three different Californian cultures and governments react to the situations they find themselves in. Pacific Edge is particularly notable for its portrait of a self-sustaining, non-polluting, high-tech nation where technology has been harnessed for the betterment of mankind, an unusually optimistic view of the future at the time. The book also features a manned mission to Mars and the people's reaction to it watching from home, which may have been a hint as to where he was planning to take his next work.


Robinson followed this up with what is widely considered his masterwork, the Mars Trilogy. Spanning two hundred years, the trilogy consists of Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars, the titles referring to the planet at different stages of colonisation and terraforming. The first novel sees the arrival of the 'First Hundred' colonists in 2027 and their building of a permanent Mars base. As the years pass additional settlers arrive and as Earth's resources dwindle, interest in exploiting Mars' resources increases. Tensions rise between the native Martian settlers and the controlling forces of the United Nations, culminating in a bloody revolution. The subsequent novels see the terraforming of the planet in full swing, the rise of native Martian myths and religions and the development of a new human society isolated from the problems of the homeworld. The Mars Trilogy is vast, breathtakingly ambitious and packed to the gills with interesting scientific speculation and ideas. The first novel contains much of the 'drama' in the series, with the latter two books sometimes being criticised for reading more like extended textbooks on the possible colonisation of Mars and it is hard to argue with that, but they're still a fascinating read. Arthur C. Clarke once said, the idea that Robinson created this trilogy is impossible to believe, as instead it reads like a real history that Robinson experienced and has travelled back in time to share with us.


Robinson's interest in exploring the same story from different angles was revisited with Antarctica (in which many of the ideas from the Mars Trilogy are revisited on a smaller scale) and The Martians (a collection of short stories and essays related to the trilogy, some of them occurring in parallel and different timelines). In 2002 he released a well-received stand-alone novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, which was based around the high concept that, in a parallel timeline, the Black Death actually killed 100% of the European population, so when Tamerlane's armies reached Europe they found the continent open to easy occupation. The novel then spans the next thousand years of history as the focus shifts to Asia and India, with the Industrial Revolution beginning in Samarkand and China leading the settlement of the North American continent. Key characters are reincarnated again and again across multiple decades and lifetimes, allowing us to follow the very development of this different world. The results are, as usual with Robinson, fascinating.


Robinson's most recent work, which I have not picked up yet, is The Science in the Capital Trilogy, which charts the development of global warming and how scientific evidence is politicised for various purposes. Al Gore is a big fan of the trilogy, but it does seem to have divided Robinson's fans.

His new work, which I'm hoping to read in the near future, is Galileo's Dream, a retelling of Galileo's life but with the addition of the scientist being visited by visions of the world three thousand years in the future, and what effect this has on his ideas and his struggles with the Church.


Robinson is a consistently interesting science fiction writer, who has a fascination with the work and world of scientists and and with not just the science and drama inherent in technological development, but also its impact on the environment, politics and human sociology. Robinson is, refreshingly, an optimist who seems to think that the human race can survive and flourish, but not if it continues to be shackled to the attitudes and prejudices of the past. He is a key author in the modern science fiction field.


Bibliography

Stand-alone Books
Icehenge (1984)
The Memory of Whiteness (1985)
The Planet on the Table (1986, collection)
Escape from Kathmandu (1989, collection)
A Short, Sharp Shock (1990)
Remaking History (1991, collection)
Antarctica (1997)
Vinland the Dream (2001, collection)
The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
Galileo's Dream (2009)

The Orange County Trilogy
The Wild Shore (1984)
The Gold Coast (1988)
Pacific Edge (1990)

The Mars Trilogy
Red Mars (1991)
Green Mars (1992)
Blue Mars (1996)
The Martians (1999, companion volume)

The Science in the Capital Trilogy
Forty Signs of Rain (2004)
Fifty Degrees Below (2005)
Sixty Days and Counting (2007)

Author Profile: Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is a Welsh science fiction author. Born in 1966 in Barry, he lived and studied in Wales, Cornwall, Newcastle before graduating with a PhD from St. Andrews in Scotland. He then went to work for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands, leaving in 2004 to pursue writing full-time.

As a teenager he wrote two novel-length stories, A Union World and Dominant Species, which were never published but gave him ideas about writing discipline and what ideas he wished to pursue in his SF. In particular, he vowed not to employ cliches such as faster-than-light travel, magically Earth-like planets or easily-relatable humanoid aliens again. His first short story, Nunivak Snowflakes appeared in Interzone, where much of his short fiction would appear over the years. His second published story, 'Dialation Sleep' (1989, published in 1990, reprinted in the 2006 collection Galactic North), rejected such concepts and is also the earliest work set in his signature Revelation Space universe. Interestingly, despite a steady stream of short fiction sales in the following years, Reynolds did not revisit the setting for seven years, until the short stories 'A Spy in Europa' and 'Galactic North' were developed in parallel to Reynolds' first two novels, Revelation Space and Chasm City.

Having established himself as a reliably entertaining short story writer, Reynolds made the leap to writing full-length novels with the rapid appearance of his first two novels, Revelation Space and Chasm City. Revelation Space established the presence of a threat to humanity, a machine-based intelligence known as the Inhibitors who had rendered many thousands of races extinct for reasons unknown. Curiously, despite ending with several plot threads unresolved, Reynolds' next novel, Chasm City, actually stepped back before the events of Revelation Space and told a different, self-contained story mixing hard SF and thriller elements, with a very minor character from Revelation Space as the main protagonist. Both novels were highly acclaimed and Chasm City in particular warmly received.

Reynolds proceeded with two direct sequels to Revelation Space, named Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap, and two self-contained novellas set in the Revelation Space universe (Diamond Dogs and Turqoise Days, later issued as an omnibus by Gollancz).

The Revelation Space universe is a dark, disturbing and often brutal place. Humanity has spawned numerous factions and sub-races, none of which particularly like one another, where cybernetic militants find themselves opposed by religious fanatics. Faster-than-light travel is impossible, so humanity is restricted to a sphere of stars just a few dozen light-years across, with huge ships known as lighthuggers providing interstellar trade and commerce across journeys of years or decades. Yet even in this restricted area of space, humanity keeps finding the ruins of various alien civilisations that were obliterated by unkown forces centuries or millennia ago. Riven by occasional wars, mankind is then threatened by the outbreak of a biogenic virus known as the Melding Plague which infests numerous worlds and habitats. Yellowstone, one of the richest and most powerful of the colony worlds, is particularly hardly hit, its orbital band of space stations, the Glitter Band, reduced to a dark, impoverished place known as the Rust Belt and its capital, Chasm City, becomes a twisted and grotesque mockery of its former ultratech self. But, whilst the human factions squabble between them, a darker threat emerges in the Delta Pavonis system when a belligerent machine intelligence known as the Inhibitors is inadvertantly made away of mankind's existence, plunging humanity into a desperate war for survival...

Although the Revelation Space universe was very popular, Reynolds had already moved away from it in his contemporary short fiction and followed suit with his next two novels, Century Rain (a hard-bitten noirish detective story partially set in 1950s Paris and partially in the remote future) and Pushing Ice (a gleefully-told 'big dumb object' SF novel), and a short story collection called Zima Blue. Reynolds returned to the RS universe with Galactic North, a short story collection, and The Prefect, a new novel set before the Melding Plague and substantially earlier than any of the prior RS novels in a brighter time long before the emergence of the Inhibitors. Sequels further exploring this period before the dark times of the plague, and perhaps chronicling the arrival of the plague itself, have been promised.

Alastair Reynolds is one of British SF's most reliably entertaining talents. His hard SF ideas are combined with deft characterization and sometimes impressive action sequences and draped in atmosphere, ranging from noir to the gothic to the baroque.

Alastair Reynolds maintains a website here. Myself and Pat from Pat's Fantasy Hotlist interviewed Reynolds here.

The Revelation Space Trilogy
Revelation Space (2000) ****½
Redemption Ark (2002) ****½
Absolution Gap (2003) ****

Other Works in the Revelation Space Universe
Chasm City (2001) *****
Diamond Dogs, Turqoise Days (2003) ***½
Galactic North (2006, collection)
The Prefect (2007) ****

Stand-Alone Books
Century Rain (2004) ***½
Pushing Ice (2005)
Zima Blue (2006, collection)
House of Suns (2008)

Sir Arthur C. Clarke Has Passed Away

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, British science fiction writer and visionary, probably the most famous and well-known science fiction writer of all time, passed away yesterday at his home in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

Arthur Charles Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset on 16 December 1917 and grew up reading the early SF pulp magazines. During WWII, Clarke worked in the RAF on radar projects, and contributed to the development of Ground-Approach Radar, which later played a key role in the Berlin Airlift. After the war he achieved a degree at King's College, London and became involved with the British Interplanetary Society, later going on to serve as its chairman. In October 1945 he published an article in Wireless World outlining how relay satellites positioned in geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometres above the Earth could be used to create a global communications network. After the publication of the article the geostationary orbit became known as the 'Clarke Orbit', a term still used today by the International Astronomical Union.

Clarke begun his writing career by penning short stories in WWII. His first sale was Rescue Party, which appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in May 1946. In1948 he wrote The Sentinel for a BBC competition, but it did not win. The same year he also wrote Against the Fall of Night, one of his earliest classic stories, and in 1950 wrote another short story called Guardian Angel. In 1951 he began writing full-time, quickly publishing his first two novels, Prelude to Space and The Sands of Mars, that year. In 1953 he rewrote Guardian Angel as Childhood's End, which rapidly became his first truly successful novel, and the one that brought him to international attention, particularly in the USA. In 1956 his short story The Star won him his first Hugo Award. In 1958 he moved to Sir Lanka, then still called Ceylon, and remained there for the rest of his life, attributing his longevity to the climate and his love of scuba diving.

A string of successful novels and short story collections followed in the 1950s and early 1960s, including A Fall of Moondust, The Deep Range and The City and the Stars, his novel-length rewrite of Against the Fall of Night. In 1964 Clarke began a collaboration with film-maker Stanley Kubrick designed to make 'the proverbial good science fiction movie'. They used the jokey working title How the Solar System Was Won and Clarke's story The Sentinel as a basis for the project before retitling it 2001: A Space Odyssey. Production of the movie, and Clarke's accompanying novel, took over four years and involved the creation of never-before-used special effects technology. The movie was released in 1968 to immediate acclaim and won plaudits from critics for its innovative visuals and stunning use of classical music, as well as its philosophical outlook. However, the movie became a popular hit due to its basic storyline (about a murderous computer) and its 'trippy' end sequence. Clarke became a popular figure after the movie came out and was an official commentator for the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon in July 1969.

In 1973 Clarke published what became his most successful novel, Rendezous with Rama. It was his first novel to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, but it simultaneously won the John W. Campbell Award and the Nebula as well. It remains the only book to have won all three awards. Thanks to Clarke's friendship with Sovient cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the novel was also published in the Soviet Union with absolutely no edits or changes from the original text, an extreme rarity for Western books during the Cold War. After the success of Rama, Clarke entered a period of growing critical acclaim. He released a further string of successful novels - Imperial Earth, The Fountains of Paradise, 2010: Odyssey Two, and The Songs of Distant Earth and 2061: Odyssey Three - as well as producing and presenting a television series, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World.

In 1988 Clarke began to seriously suffer the effects of post-polio syndrome (having previously suffered from polio in 1959). He became increasingly reliant on wheelchairs and left Sri Lanka less often. His writing also changed, with a shift to collaborations with other authors such as Gentry Lee, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, Mike McQuay and Stephen Baxter. Two of his last solo novels, The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990) and The Hammer of God (1993), were not as well-received as earlier efforts, although both proved influential. Ghost predicted the problems associated with the Millennium Bug, whilst God, about an impending asteroid collision, both directly influenced the movie Deep Impact and ironically featured a NASA project named SPACEGUARD, which was inspired by Clarke's own novel, Rendezvous with Rama. His last solo novel was 3001: The Final Odyssey, published in 1997 after Clarke received the largest advance in SF history for the novel. The book was partially a 'greatest hits' of Clarke's ideas, taking in computers, computer viruses, ancient alien intelligences and space elevators (the idea for which - first visited in The Fountains of Paradise - he believed he would eventually be best-remembered by history).

In 1989, Clarke had been made a Commander of the British Empire and in 1998 was made a Knight Bachelor, although the ceremony was delayed until 2000 due to unfounded allegations about Clarke's personal life made by the The Sunday Mirror, which subsequently withdrew them.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, CBE, died at 1.30 am, 19 March 2008, local time, from breathing difficulties and complications arising from his post-polio syndrome. He left behind no immediate family, but a colossal body of work and the condolences of millions of fans.

On the occasion of his 90th birthday, he sent this message to his fans:

"I want to be remembered most as a writer. I want to entertain readers and hopefully stretch their imaginations as well.

"If I have given you delight in all that I have done, let me lie quiet in that night, which shall be yours anon."

For all his fame and prolific output, only one movie has ever been directly made based on his work: 2010. 2001: A Space Odyssey was a collaborative effort between Clarke and Kubrick, but with substantial differences between movie and novel. A film version of Rendezvous with Rama (directed by David Fincher and starring Morgan Freeman) has been in development for some years.

Bibliography of Novels
Prelude to Space (1951)
The Sands of Mars (1951)
Islands in the Sky (1952)
Against the Fall of Night (1953)
Childhood's End (1953)
Earthlight (1956)
The City and the Stars (1956)
The Deep Range (1957)
A Fall of Moondust (1961)
Dolphin Island (1963)
Glide Path (1963)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, with Stanley Kubrick)
Rendezvous with Rama (1972)
Imperial Earth (1976)
The Fountains of Paradise (1979)
2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
The Songs of Distant Earth (1986)
2061: Odyssey Three (1987)
A Meeting with Medusa (1988)
Cradle (1988, with Gentry Lee)
Rama II (1989, with Gentry Lee)
Beyond the Fall of Night (1990, with Gregory Benford)
The Ghost From the Grand Banks (1990)
The Garden of Rama (1991, with Genry Lee)
Rama Revealed (1993, with Gentry Lee)
Richter 10 (1996, with Mike McQuay)
3001: The Final Odyssey (1997)
The Trigger (1999, with Michael P. Kube-McDowell)
The Light of Other Days (2000, with Stephen Baxter)
Time's Eye (2003, with Stephen Baxter)
Sunstorm (2005, with Stephen Baxter)
Firstborn (2007, with Stephen Baxter)

"Look," whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

Very Sad News

James Oliver Rigney, Jr., better known to millions of readers as Robert Jordan, passed away yesterday at 2.45pm EST. He was 58 years old. He had been battling cardiac amyloidosis since being diagnosed with the disease eighteen months ago, and many of his fans had donated money to the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minnesota (where he was being treated), in his name.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr. was born on 17 October 1948 in Charleston, South Carolina. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam with the US Army and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross with bronze oak leaf cluster, the Bronze Star with "V" and bronze oak leaf cluster and two Vietnamese Gallantry Crosses with palm. He later attended the Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, where he received a degree in physics. He was then employed by the US Navy as a nuclear engineer.

He began writing in 1977, but decided early on to use his real name only on the 'definitive' novel of the Vietnam War he one day planned to write (he later chose not to pursue this project after other books about the conflict had emerged). Using the pen-name Reagan O'Neal, his first published work was The Fallon Trilogy, consisting of The Fallon Blood (1980), The Fallon Pride (1981) and The Fallon Legacy (1982), originally published by Ace Books but later reissued by Tor under the Forge imprint. This was a historical series set in South Carolina and southern states in the 18th Century and charted the life story of an Irish immigrant, Michael Fallon, and his family.

Rigney switched to the pen-name Robert Jordan to pen a series of fantasy novels set in Robert E. Howard's Hyborean Age and revolving around Howard's signature character, Conan the Barbarian. He wrote six original novels and a novelisation of the second Conan movie. These were: Conan the Invincible (1982), Conan the Defender (1982), Conan the Unconquered (1983), Conan the Triumphant (1983), Conan the Magnificent (1984), Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Conan the Victorious (1984). These books were later compiled as The Conan Chronicles and Further Chronicles of Conan. He also compiled a chronology of the Conan stories in 1987.

Whilst working on these books, Jordan was also creating his own fantasy story and world to set it in. He conceived of some of the ideas as early as the late 1970s, but didn't begin writing the book that eventually became The Eye of the World until 1985. It was a very tough book to write and the entire world, plot and protagonists shifted several times in the writing process. It was published in February 1990 by Tor Books, preceded by an impressive publicity campaign. Despite the delays on the first book, Jordan very quickly delivered the successive five novels in The Wheel of Time series before dropping back to a more sedate pace of one book every two to three years.

The Wheel of Time became an international bestseller, with every volume from the seventh onwards debuting at Number One on the New York Times bestseller list.. At this time only works by JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling, Stephen King, CS Lewis and Terry Pratchett have outsold the series in the fantasy genre. Despite his enormous commercial success, Jordan found critical acclaim harder to come by, and the series has never won any of the major SF or Fantasy awards. Critical reception to the seventh through tenth volumes was mixed, but that for the eleventh volume in the series, Knife of Dreams, was highly positive as the series moved towards its conclusion. John Clute's Encyclopedia of Fantasy also gave the series a warm review, stating that "a sense of an intelligent creative enterprise is sustained throughout the sequence," and, "when complete, the sequence will almost certainly constitute one of the major epic narratives of modern fantasy".

Jordan was diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis in early 2006, and announced it to his fans in May of that year. Despite often highly uncomfortable and painful treatment, he continued working on the twelfth and final novel in the series, A Memory of Light, until he passed away. Aware of his condition, he prepared more detailed notes than usual for the novel and discussed its plot with his wife Harriet and cousin Wilson, who posted to the Dragonmount.com website with updates and messages when Jordan was too ill to do so. The fate of the final novel is unclear at this time, but it is likely it will see print in some shape or form.

Jordan was a keen fan of literature in many different genres, but was more than happy to use his popularity to give other fantasy writers he enjoyed a good boost in sales through endorsements and blurbs. George RR Martin, author of the series A Song of Ice and Fire, has stated that he believes Jordan's endorsement of the first novel contributed to its sales. Jordan also approved of the works of Mike Ford (who himself passed away last year) and J.V. Jones.

The success of Jordan's series is widely believed to have opened the doors for subsequent fantasy series that were longer than the traditional trilogy. It is arguable that writers such as George RR Martin, Scott Lynch and Steven Erikson would have found a willing publisher to handle their lengthy series if Jordan had not blazed a trail there first. For that, his influence on the field of fantasy must be acknowledged.

Condolences to his family and friends.

The news of his passing was announced on Dragonmount.com here.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Tor Books has commented on Robert Jordan's passing here.

As has George RR Martin here.

A brief comment by Diane Duane.

Scott Lynch, Neil Gaiman and Brandon Sanderson have also commented on Robert Jordan's passing.

John Clute, arguably SF&F's most famous critic and editor of three editions of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and one of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, speaks very positively of RJ's contribution to epic fantasy here:
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article3001613.ece

Robert Jordan's wife Harriet speaks here.

Robert Jordan's stepson Will pays tribute to his stepfather here.

And the local press.

The Wheel of Time Series
1: The Eye of the World (1990)
2: The Great Hunt (1990)
3: The Dragon Reborn (1991)
4: The Shadow Rising (1992)
5: The Fires of Heaven (1993)
6: Lord of Chaos (1994)
7: A Crown of Swords (1996)
8: The Path of Daggers (1998)
9: Winter's Heart (2000)
10: Crossroads of Twilight (2002)
11: Knife of Dreams (2005)
12: A Memory of Light (forthcoming)

The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time (1997, with Teresa Patterson)
New Spring: A Wheel of Time Novel (2004)
The Wheel of Time Encyclopedia (a planned collaboration with his wife, Harriet MacDougal)

Author Profile: Peter F. Hamilton

Peter F. Hamilton is a British writer of science fiction, born in 1960 in Rutland, where he continues to reside. His work falls into two broad categories: near-future thrillers and mysteries exploring high-tech but plausible ideas; and far-future grand space operas, featuring richly detailed fictional universes awash with different alien races and technology based on modern theoretical physics. He began his writing career in 1987 and sold his first short story to Fear magazine in 1988. After several years writing short stories, his first novel, Mindstar Rising, appeared in 1993 and was the first book featuring near-future psychic detective Greg Mandel. Two sequels followed. However, it was Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, which began with The Reality Dysfunction in 1996, which made him a well-known name on the SF stage.

The Greg Mandel Trilogy was an interesting start to Hamilton's career. Set in the 2040s in a Britain devastated by global warming (London has apparently been destroyed by a fusion explosion and the new capital is Peterborough) and then ruined by an oppressive, socialist government, some critics complained it was little more than a right-wing writer's attack on the Labour Party (although the 'New Conservatives' who are trying to restore Britain are hardly painted more sympathetically). More to the point, it established Hamilton's credentials as a writer who enjoyed telling a good, rip-roaring, page-turning story. Although keen to use 'hard science', Hamilton's books have never been about the nitty-gritty details of string theory calculations, instead preferring to show the effects of such science and technology on ordinary people. The Mandel trilogy is a successful work, prefiguring the rise of the SF thriller subgenre of the early 2000s (led by Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City and Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon) and establishing Hamilton as a writer to watch.

That promise was delivered, with interest, in The Night's Dawn Trilogy. Whilst David Brin and Iain Banks had had some success in keeping the original space opera novel alive in the preceding years, it was Night's Dawn that brought it back into vogue. Set in the 27th Century, Hamilton painted a picture of a universe where humanity has spread across 860 worlds, splitting into two divergent strains (the traditional Adamists and the telepathic Edenists) and building vast, sentient space habitats and living starships whilst vast corporations fund the expansion of the human race. On a remote colony world a chance encounter between a low-tech colony and an utterly alien entity unleashes a nightmarish force upon the Confederation which is soon overrunning entire worlds. Night's Dawn is an impressive example of 'genre-bending' and horror and SF collide. The trilogy also established Hamilton as a writer of huge, brick-thick volumes. Whilst the Mandel trilogy had consisted of sensibly-sized 400-page books, each of the Night's Dawn novels extended across 1,200+ pages in paperback and were split in two apiece for American publication.

Hamilton's next two books were related to his grand trilogy. A Second Chance at Eden, published between the second and third volumes, collects several short stories from the Night's Dawn universe and shows a greater range than perhaps Hamilton had evidenced previously, most notably his ability to use different prose styles. His main novels employ a fairly straightforward, somewhat prosaic or 'clean' style to tell the story (with stories this complex, a fancy prose style is the last thing both the author and the reader want to worry about), but his short stories display a greater talent. After the release of The Naked God, Hamilton followed it up with a guide to the series, The Confederation Handbook, which published a lot of the background materials and notes he'd used to create his future history.

With Hamilton now established as a major force in British SF, he chose to move away from his Night's Dawn setting rather than exploit it through further novels. His next book, Fallen Dragon, was a stand-alone novel which postulated that mankind's expansion into space had faltered and run out of steam, leaving dozens of dead-end worlds essentially left to their own devices. Although a clever novel with a great twist ending, Fallen Dragon showed a more melancholy aspect of Hamilton's writing, and was not regarded as much of a success as Night's Dawn.

Hamilton's next work was not very well received. Misspent Youth returns to a near-future setting, but a different continuity to the Greg Mandel novels. In this new future, Britain is part of a greater European Union and its national identity seems in question. At the same time, a rich entrepreneur becomes the first human to undergo rejeuvenation technology and goes from being in his late 70s to having the body and health of a 20-year-old, which leads to conflict with his teenage son. Misspent Youth features some fantastic ideas, such as Hamilton's 'nightmare future' of what will happen if the Internet does kill off creativity since copyrights cannot be protected: a world where writers, directors and musicians cannot make a living and the only forms of entertainment left are soap operas and pornography. Misspent Youth is a relentlessly downbeat book, and did not receive much critical acclaim.

Interestingly, despite its weaknesses, Hamilton had cleverly used Misspent Youth to seed ideas for his next novel series. Choosing to return to the world of space opera, he planned two books set some 300 years after the events of Misspent Youth in a world where everyone undergoes rejeuvenation at regular intervals, with some people now being over 300 years old. Hamilton also cleverly reverse-engineered technology from Night's Dawn, so that freestanding wormhole gates directly and permanantly link various planets together, and travelling across the Galaxy is as easy as catching a train. Starships do not exist (they are not needed) and the apparently benign SI (Sentient Intelligence, essentially a friendly version of Skynet) watches over humanity from afar to ensure its survival. However, the disappearance of two stars some one thousand light-years from Earth proves the impetus for mankind to build its first starship, and unleashes a chain of events that leads to the wealthy and indolant Intersolar Commonwealth facing a full-scale war, whilst treachery lurks within. His Commonwealth Saga restored Hamilton's reputation as a writer of large-scale SF blockbusters, capable of addressing myriad storylines simultaneously and bringing them to a reasonable conclusion. Perhaps aware that Night's Dawn had been criticised for its 'neat ending', Commonwealth left more unexplained questions to be resolved in his newest series, The Void Trilogy, which picks up the storyline some eleven centuries further on.

Hamilton is now established as Britain's biggest-selling science fiction author, and is increasingly a well-known figure in the USA as well. Whilst Hamilton is not a flawless writer (some may feel his books may feature somewhat more sex than is necessary for the story and he sometimes shies away from big SF issues, such as the Singularity), he is reliably entertaining and extremely inventive. As Colin Greenland once said, his books often feel like "fifty SF novels in one," leaping from subject to subject, idea to idea, in dizzying fashion. He remains one of the more notable authors in the field today.

The Greg Mandel Trilogy
Mindstar Rising (1993) ****
A Quantum Murder (1994) ****
The Nanoflower (1995) ****

The Night's Dawn Trilogy
The Reality Dysfunction (1996) *****
The Neutronium Alchemist (1997) ****½
The Naked God (1999) ****

A Second Chance at Eden (1998) ****
The Confederation Handbook (2000) ***

Fallen Dragon (2001) ****
Misspent Youth (2002) ***

The Commonwealth Saga
Pandora's Star (2004) ****
Judas Unchained (2005) ***½

The Void Trilogy
The Dreaming Void (2007) ****
The Temporal Void (planned for release in October 2008)
The Evolutionary Void (planned for release in 2010)

Author Profile: Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay is a Canadian writer of fantasy novels and poetry. He was born in 1954 in Weyburn, Saskatchewan and raised in Winnipeg. In the early 1970s, whilst at the University of Manitoba, he came into contact with Christopher Tolkien, the son and literary executor of the late JRR Tolkien. In 1974 Christopher Tolkien requested Kay's aid in the editing of The Silmarillion, the vast collection of myths and legends that forms the immense backstory to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Kay accepted and spent ten months outside Oxford working on the project. In the 1980s he published his first - and to date only - epic fantasy trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry, which was well-received. Resisting the urge to do a straight sequel, he set about writing a series of 'historical fantasies', books based very closely on a real time and place. This resulted in the book largely acknowledged as his first masterpiece, Tigana, inspired by Renaissance Italy. In Tigana the protagonists are battling for the very heart and soul of their nation, the spirit of which has been crushed in the conflict between two powerful warlords and the name of which has been removed from its people's memories.

Kay followed Tigana with A Song for Arbonne. Inspired by Provence and the south of France, the book is a slightly more traditional fantasy than Tigana, but remains a vital and engaging work, painting the country of Arbonne and its neighbour Gorhaut in vivid detail. There are hints that Arbonne and Tigana are set in the same world (and both may be on the same world, or at least in the same universe, as Fionavar), but Kay eschews traditional worldbuilding, preferring merely to tip the hat between his works.

Kay followed this with the book widely acknowledged as his second masterpiece, The Lions of Al-Rassan, based on Spain during the Reconquista. This book and the three subsequent novels are all set in the same world, a world which is clearly a fantasy version of Europe. Interestingly, these books take place at different parts in history, but as they share little except for some parts of their maps overlapping and some references, the background can safely be ignored. Instead, Al-Rassan's story shines through, combining a love triangle with religious strife against the backdrop of a struggle for power on the peninsula between several groups. The history is rich and the writing elegant and layered.

Kay's next project was The Sarantine Mosaic, a duology based closely around the history of Byzantium (Constantinople). The two books had dark, haunting atmospheres but for me they fell short of his best work and the story felt slight for it to span two novels and over eight hundred pages. Nevetheless, the writing is still as impressive as ever and eagle-eyed viewers will spot references to his earlier work (including the subtle mentions of a man called Ashar, who goes on to found the Asharite faith which plays a major role in Al-Rassan).

Following a poetry collection, Beyond This Dark House, Kay's most recent novel is The Last Light of the Sun, set between the Mosaic and Al-Rassan. This time the setting is England at the time of the Viking invasion and the central character is closely based on King Alfred the Great (he who burned the cakes). Some fans found Sun disappointing, but I enjoyed its setting, storytelling and the nice parallels and contrasts between the various characters.

Kay has moved to pastures new with his forthcoming, newest work, Ysabel. Published here in the UK in March (January for Canada and February for the USA), Ysabel is a modern story employing elements of urban fantasy and myth. Reviews have been extremely positive, some citing it as Kay's best work to date.

In a world dominated by five-book-plus series made up of brick-thick volumes, Kay is a writer who shows that sometimes less is more. His books are extremely pleasent to read, his prose is sparkling and poetic and his characters are engaging.

Home Page
A review of Ysabel courtesy of I Hope I Didn't Just Give Away the Ending.
An interview with Guy Gavriel Kay at OF Blog of the Fallen, conducted on 16 August 2006.

The Fionavar Tapestry
The Summer Tree (1984) ***
The Wandering Fire (1986) - unread
The One Tree (1987) - unread

Tigana (1990) *****
A Song for Arbonne (1993) ****
The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995) *****

The Sarantine Mosaic
Sailing to Sarantium (1998) ****
Lord of Emperors (2000) ***

Beyond This Dark House (2003) - unread
The Last Light of the Sun (2004) ****
Ysabel (2007) - forthcoming