Into the Narrowdark by Tad Williams

The High Kingdom is in peril. The Norns have returned and are advancing from the north, threatening both the Hayholt and the Sithi strongholds of the old forest. The tribes of the Thrithings are threatening an invasion from the east. There is civil war in Nabban. The realm needs King Simon to act decisively to crush these threats, but he is bereft and grief-ridden. As the king's allies try to rally to save the kingdom, his enemies move against him.

The Last King of Osten Ard is a sequel series to Tad William's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, an acknowledged classic of epic fantasy. Picking up the action thirty years later, this sequel series asks hard questions about what happens to the heroes who saved the day in one story and if they are the best people to lead the land through all the complexities of life in peacetime.

The first two volumes of the series, The Witchwood Crown and Empire of Grass, set up a fascinating, multi-sided conflict as the human kingdoms struggle with internal divisions whilst their old Norn enemies have managed to rebuild and are now threatening a fresh offensive. But, unlike the original trilogy, Williams also spends a lot of time in the Norn camp, exploring their internal divisions and politics as well, humanising this previously faceless enemy. The result is a richer, more interesting series which is less interested in being a retread of the hero's journey (though a few characters also get arcs more akin to that).

Into the Narrowdark is both the third book in the series and the opening half of the concluding chapter; yet again (to the point it's virtually become a meme) Williams delivered a book far too vast to fit between two covers and the book was split in half for publication. Unfortunately, this is to this volume's detriment. In normal circumstances, Williams is the very embodiment of the "slow-burn" writer, setting up his guns very carefully in a row before firing them, but when he fires them the story comes together impressively well, even within individual novels of a series. This novel is, unfortunately, all setup and no resolution, which is fairly frustrating given, at almost 600 pages in hardcover, it's not exactly a short book.

The other problem is that Williams is not at all shy to revisit previous story ideas. So, for those who were kind of over the characters spending hundreds of pages lost in the Aldheorte forest in earlier books, the prospect of spending yet more time with characters wandering through the exact same woods may not entice. The same for characters lost in the Nabbanese wilderness, or roaming back and forth through the Thrithings or even just roaming lost through the labyrinth cellars of the Hayholt. If we were getting major character growth or huge backstory revelations in these sequences, that would be one thing, but we're not, or very little. After the first two books did a good job of matching plot development, worldbuilding, political intrigue and character growth, this third volume feels more like an exercise in wheel-spinning.

That said, Tad Williams is still an excellent prose writer and a gifted evoker of atmosphere. The few battle sequences are vivid and well-described, and Morgan, at least, gets some much-needed growth. Returning to the world of Osten Ard is like revisiting an old favourite haunt, and there is much to enjoy in the scenery even if it doesn't feel like it's moving past very quickly.

The book does end on a rousing, startling cliffhanger and at least the second half of the novel is complete (although being revised), but Into the Narrowdark ends up feeling exactly what it is: half a book, in urgent need of its conclusion.

Into the Narrowdark (***) is half of a potentially very interesting book, but until the second half is published, it's hard to fully appreciate if this novel's slow, slow-burning pace is justified. The novel is available now in the UK and USA and the final volume in the series, The Navigator's Children, should hopefully follow in 2023.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Brothers of the Wind by Tad Williams

Mortals have come to Asu'a from the west with dire news: the dragon Hidohebhi has descended from the mountains to wreak destruction and death on innocent farmers and settlers. The immortal Sithi usually pay little heed to the doings of mortals, but, recognising that the dragon presents a threat to everyone, the fiery and proud young prince Ineluki rides out to confront the beast. His steadier, calmer brother Hakatri rides with him, but the power of the dragon is greater than they could have feared. Their quest to slay the beast takes them far across the lands of Osten Ard, and their adventure is chronicled by Pamon Kes, Hakatri's faithful servant.

Brothers of the Wind is a stand-alone prequel to Tad Williams' masterwork of epic fantasy, the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, and its currently ongoing sequel quartet, The Last King of Osten Ard. Set more than a thousand years before the previous books in the series, it chronicles an important event from the backstory to those novels. It is also a short, self-contained work which can be read as a standalone.

Williams is best-known for his immense doorsteppers of books. Case in point, the final Last King of Osten Ard novel was recently deemed unpublishable in a single volume and has been split in two. However, Williams is also a skilled writer of shorter fiction, in which his always carefully-crafted prose and finely-honed characterisation is also given an impressive sense of pace and focus. That could be seen in The Heart of What Was Lost, his 2017 short novel released as a prequel to The Last King of Osten Ard, and can be seen even more here.

Brothers of the Wind can be read as a tragedy. It has two lead characters, Hakatri and Ineluki, both seen through the eyes of Hakatri's servant Pamon. We get a much clearer view of Hakatri, whilst Ineluki - destined to become the Storm King of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn - is a more transient figure, flitting in and out of the story according to events and his changeable mood. Seeing mythical characters from one series, described in awe or terms of legend, as real flash-and-blood characters in another can be deflating, but the POV device Williams employs here lets us both get to know Ineluki better without damaging or reducing his mythic power.

The novel is divided into several parts. In the first part, the brothers seek out the great dragon to slay it, only to be comprehensively defeated. They find themselves wandering western Osten Ard in search of allies, lore or weapons that can help them in their quest. This part of the book is fascinating, as we see lands we know much better from the earlier novels in a more primitive state of existence: the people of Hernystir before the kingdom becomes known as that, and many more areas where the Sithi are still extant. Williams is a great travelogue writer and worldbuilder, and his skills here are put to good use, painting this earlier era of Osten Ard's history in as much colour and detail as his larger books.

In the latter part of the novel, the great dragon is once again confronted, but the consequences of that confrontation have wide-ranging affects. Those who have read the other books will get glimpses of the path that Ineluki sets out on that will lead to the events of the Storm King's War, but others will be more concerned with the relationship with Pamon and Hakatri, which takes an interesting turn. The story turns into one of a servant caring for his master and having to make hard choices on behalf of another, sometimes in ways that hurt himself.

The sheer size of the average Williams novel allows for a relaxed pace, sometimes too relaxed (the very first Osten Ard novel, The Dragonbone Chair, famously takes the better part of 200 pages to get moving), but Brothers of the Wind (****½) moves faster and with greater focus. It starts off as an adventure and gradually turns into a tragedy of genuine moving power, as well as foreshadowing events in the other books in the setting. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

The third volume in The Last King of Osten Ard, Into the Narrowdark, is due for publication in July, and should be followed by The Navigator's Children.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Shocking no one, the next Tad Williams book will be published in two volumes

In news that will not be a surprise to anyone, the final volume of Tad Williams' Last King of Osten Ard series, The Navigator's Children, will be published in two volumes.

This is a matter of history repeating itself. To Green Angel Tower, the final volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, Williams' prior work in the same world and possibly the longest epic fantasy novel ever written (and around the fifth-longest SFF novel of all time), was split into two volumes in paperback. The final book in the Shadowmarch series was also split into two volumes for publication, Shadowrise and Shadowheart. Williams deliberately paced his Otherland series as four volumes, fearing the same thing would happen again, and very nearly extended that series to five books as the final volume came in so long, but they were able to keep it to four.

At the moment it is unclear if the two volumes will be published as "Part I" and "Part II" or if they'll have to be retitled. Tad is currently rewriting and editing The Navigator's Children with a view to Part I being published in 2022 and hopefully Part II six to twelve months later.

Williams' next novel, Brothers of the Wind, a prequel to the entire Osten Ard saga so far, will be published this November.

Empire of Grass by Tad Williams

The kingdoms of Osten Ard are in turmoil. A resurgent Norn threat in the north threatens Rimmersgard and northern Erkynland. The tribes of the Thrithings are in turmoil, a conflict that threatens to spill across the borders into Nabban and Erkynland. Hernystir is in danger of falling under the power of a dark cult. Civil war threatens in Nabban. The High King Simon and the High Queen Miriamele both try to tackle these issues, but the number of their reliable allies is falling and their grandson and heir is missing. But the threat is greater and closer than they think, as for the first time in thousands of years, the deathless queen of the Norns prepares to leave her stronghold.

The Witchwood Crown marked the start of The Last King of Osten Ard, a fresh trilogy picking up thirty years after the events of Williams' break-out work, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. It was a slow-paced novel but one that had to set up an awful lot of plot points, as well as revisiting characters from the first trilogy and introducing new ones. At the end of the book things kicked off, with Prince Morgan fleeing into the Aldheorte Forest, Unver beginning his unification of the Thrithings tribes, Miriamele setting off on a dangerous mission to Nabban and a band of Norns confronting a dragon.

Empire of Grass picks up on these plot points and expands on them, ticking along at a faster pace than the first novel (helped by it being a slightly shorter book), with us rotating between events in Nabban, the Hayholt, Aldheorte, the grasslands, Nakkiga, Naglimund and other locations quite rapidly. The key difference between the two trilogies is that Memory, Sorrow and Thorn was focused very tightly on Simon with occasional cutaways to other characters, but Last King is a broad-spectrum, multi-POV, multi-location, full-on epic fantasy series with a lot more going on in different places. The loss of tight focus may be bemoaned by some, but it does at least present us with a really epic story told on a huge scale.

Empire of Grass is also important in that it identifies the long-missing children of Josua and Vorzheva, whose identities and destinies have driven a lot of discussion by fantasy fans for well over a decade. We learn more about the twins and where their paths have led them, with a real sense of mythic power that both may hold the fate of the world in their hands, despite not being primary POV characters. We also learn more about Vorzheva, but Josua remains missing, with a hunt for him by agents of the crown forming an intriguing subplot through the novel.

As usual, Williams' gifts remain in atmosphere, with his stately worldbuilding and measured prose, and characterisation. I've seen criticism of the first book stemming from Simon's apparent lack of success in being king, but I see this as Williams simply furthering his subversion of epic fantasy tropes that began way back in 1988 with The Dragonbone Chair: it turns out that a kitchen boy with no background in statecraft might not be the best person to make king. It's made clear that the more experienced Miriamele is a far better ruler and the real power on the throne, which helps better explain why things get worse once she leaves for Nabban. The assumption that the guy who saved the world in the first series would automatically be a greater ruler who never did anything wrong is a bit odd, and is Williams' exploration of the question George R.R. Martin asked of Tolkien about Aragorn: yes, he may have been a great warrior, but does that mean has great insights into tax policy and crop rotation techniques?

If Williams does have a slight weak spot it's political intrigue: Nabban sets up the facade of being a hotbed of double-crosses and Xanatos gambits, but the final revelation of what's going on in Nabban is more than a little simplistic and lacking, with the villain explaining why they are doing everything and might as well have twirled a moustache in the process. There's also a decided lack of explanation as for why the powers in Nabban think they can win a multi-pronged conflict against multiple enemies simultaneously, which is what they seem to be setting up at the end of the book.

There's some great battle scenes, as the Norn invasion gets underway in full, and some excellent character beats (particularly among the Norns and half-Norns of Operation Dragon Retrieval, probably the best storyline in the new series). There's also some decided repetition stemming from Williams' decision not to expand the story to new geographical areas. The big battle takes place on the site of an already massive battle from the first trilogy, and seeing Morgan struggle through Aldheorte Forest for dozens of pages on end might have been more compelling if we hadn't seen Simon do exactly this in the first trilogy, even visiting many of the same exact places along the way.

Where Empire of Grass is most successful is furthering the themes that The Witchwood Crown explored so thoroughly: ageing, losing loved ones and the younger generation not listening to its elders and making the exact same mistakes all over again. There's a melancholy strain in this trilogy which recalls Tolkien at his best.

Empire of Grass (****½) is a somewhat tighter and better-paced book than its forebear, developing the first book's stories, characters and themes well, and setting things up splendidly for the final novel in the series, The Navigator's Children, which I would be expecting to be published in 2021. The novel is available in the UK and USA now.

Tad Williams provides EMPIRE OF GRASS update

Tad Williams has provided an update on Empire of Grass, the second volume of his Last King of Osten Ard trilogy, to Unbound Worlds.

Empire of Grass is complete in its first draft and needs to go through the editing process. At the moment the book is 460,000 words long, which makes it one of Williams' longest novels (although the 520,000 word record set by his To Green Angel Tower remains intact). Apparently this was done to ensure that the trilogy is indeed completed in three books and doesn't expand to four (as happened with the original Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, at least in paperback, and then Shadowmarch)

As the editing process still has to be gone through and the book is so long, the initial working date of 6 September 2018 seems a bit tight. Williams moots an early 2019 release date instead, which sounds a bit more likely at the moment.

Williams is currently mulling over whether to write The Shadow of Things to Come, a short prequel novel, or to dive straight into The Navigator's Children, the concluding volume of the trilogy. He also has a short story in the planning stages for a new Gardner Dozois fantasy anthology.

All in all, it's a good time to be a Tad Williams fan.

Tad Williams Signing and Q&A Report

Last night Tad Williams was in London to do a signing at Forbidden Planet and also to take part in an interview and Q&A session. I had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time and it turns out he's a really friendly and nice guy.

New information from the signing: Tad confirmed that Empire of Grass, the second volume of The Last King of Osten Ard, is complete but needs to be edited. The publishers are mulling over when to release it: if they go for an early release (presumably in 2018), Tad will immediately start writing the concluding book of the trilogy, The Navigator's Children. If they decide to hold off until later, Tad will write the second short prequel novel, The Shadow of Things to Come, first. Unlike The Heart of What Was Lost, which was a bridging novel between the two trilogies, Shadow is a completely self-contained story with no connections to the latest work; in fact, it's more about Sithi and Norn characters from the first trilogy in the heyday of Sithi civilisation (Sithilisation?), so can come out before or after the trilogy is done.

Otherland remains under a film option but Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is not under any option at the moment, despite some vague interest from time to time.

Tad prefers writing his shorter novels like the Bobby Dollar books, which only took four to five months each to write rather than two to three years like his big epics. We may see more shorter books from him in the future.

When asked which of his fictional worlds he'd like to live in, he replied "The one with the best toilet facilities".

Video blogger Kitty G recorded the interview so keep an eye on her YouTube channel to see when it goes up.

The Witchwood Crown by Tad Williams

Thirty years have passed since the Storm King's War. Simon and Miriamele have ruled Osten Ard well, keeping the peace between the nations that make up the High Ward and the noble families within them, but their life has been tinged by the tragic death of their son. Their grandson Morgan stands to inherit the throne, but he is a wastrel more interested in drinking and wenching than in learning what he needs to rule. The heroes of the old war are passing and a new generation is coming to power, one that is less impressed by stories of old conflicts that they only half believe.

But in the far north, Stormspike is stirring. The Norn Queen has awoken after a long sleep and the lust for vengeance against humanity is resurgent. A band of Norn and half-Norn warriors strikes out on a quest they only barely understand. In the far south the kingdom of Nabban is on the brink of civil war. The Sithi have gone silent, their last messenger shot with arrows within sight of the Hayholt. The long peace is coming to an end, and the fate of the world again hangs in the balance.

The Witchwood Crown is the first novel in the Last King of Osten Ard trilogy, which sees Tad Williams return to the setting of his classic original trilogy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell and To Green Angel Tower) and the short novel The Heart of What Was Lost, published earlier this year. It's been twenty-three years since Williams last wrote in this world, the author wary of "franchising" his earliest and most iconic work until he had a story that was worth telling.

There is much to admire about The Witchwood Crown. Williams is telling a very large story from a large number of points of view. The original trilogy was very focused in the Hayholt and told a more linear, focused narrative which only gradually expanded outwards. This novel starts with a more George R.R. Martin-esque approach of having a larger cast in disparate parts of the world. One second we are with a slave living in the depths of Stormspike and then we're a thousand miles or more away in the palaces of Nabban, riven with Byzantine plotting. Old favourite characters return, including Simon, Miariamele, Tiamak, Eolair and Binabik, but there's a lot of new characters such as Morgan, as well as the return of characters like Porto from The Heart of What Was Lost. The worldbuilding is more in-depth, with reflections on time passing (Erchester is now a real city rather than the more modest town of the previous trilogy). Epic fantasy, as a genre, is at its best when it can indulge in "long-breathed storytelling" and The Witchwood Crown certainly does that. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and Williams develops his story with surety, confidence and time.

This does mean that The Witchwood Crown is a slow-paced work. Major plot revelations are separated by many chapters in which apparently little happens (although it does, it's just a lot more subtle). Although Williams tries very hard to make this book approachable for new readers, there's some instances of self-indulgence as Simon catches up with Binabik and asks about his family and his wolf, but this is generally kept to a minimum. The reason this book is so large (700 pages in hardcover) and so deliberately paced is because he is setting up a very big story and it's only towards the end of the novel that he fires the starting pistols which really get the narrative fired up.

This slow pace could be a bigger problem - and it's certainly put some other reviewers off - if Williams didn't also take his time to explore thematic ideas of ageing, grief and the passing of the years. Simon and Miriamele are now grandparents in their early fifties and apparently slightly baffled that so much time has passed so quickly. Those of us who read the original books when they first came out or shortly afterwards can sympathise: I finished reading the first trilogy on a fine summer afternoon in the park behind my old house almost exactly twenty years before I started reading this book, and a similar shock at the passage of time went through me. The characters are also haunted by the memory of the death of their son, John, and how this has impacted not just them but his son Morgan. Ironically, the joint grief they share has also divided them, with the natural lack of understanding between the generations preventing them from reaching an understanding.

This thematic idea gives the book a somewhat melancholy aspect. We also learn a lot more about the Norns and even sympathise with them (or at least some of them): they are a slowly dying race and their constant search for blood and vengeance seems pointless, corrupting further what was once a noble people. When they gain access to a new supernatural weapon, the reaction from some of the Norns isn't triumphant but instead weariness at the idea of yet another war, yet more pointless slaughter. The Witchwood Crown, on this level, is an epic fantasy that rejects some of the martial triumphalism and blood-letting that other epic fantasies revel in.

At the end of the book, some long-standing questions are raised, some long-missing characters return and other characters are left on immense cliffhangers, their fates unclear. Fortunately, we will not have to wait to learn more: the second novel in the trilogy, Empire of Grass, is already complete and should be published in late 2018 or early 2019.

The Witchwood Crown (****) is slowly, deliberately-paced and sometimes meanders or is allowed to become self-indulgent rather than being tightened up. It's certainly a slower novel than even the original Dragonbone Chair, and Tad Williams newcomers may be put off. But it's also wonderfully well-written and explores ideas of ageing, dying and living which are universal. For the most part the new storylines are logically extrapolated from the original trilogy without lazily rehashing it and confirms that yes, the return to Osten Ard is (so far) worth it. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

The Heart of What Was Lost by Tad Williams

The Storm King has been defeated, his army of Norns driven off and peace returned to the lands of Osten Ard. King Seoman and Queen Miriamele have taken the throne in the Hayholt and a new age of peace beckons. But for Duke Isgrimnur of Rimmersgard the war is not entirely over. Along with the famed warrior Sludig, Isgrimnur has been given command of an army with orders to pursue the fleeing Norns back to Stormspike and ensure they are destroyed forever.

The Heart of What Was Lost acts as a bridge between the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy by Tad Williams and its upcoming sequel series, The Last King of Osten Ard. The first novel in that trilogy, The Witchwood Crown, will be released in June 2017. This book is useful for laying some groundwork for that trilogy and wrapping up some loose ends from the earlier series that Williams was unable to address at the time.

The Heart of What Was Lost is short, focused, lean and mean. Just 200 pages long in hardcover, making it barely a short story by the author's normal standards, it moves with pace and energy. As a war story it has quite a bit of action, but also with some strong moments of character-building as characters reflect on what is going on.

The book is related from three different points of view. Porto is an ordinary soldier in Isgrimnur's army who yearns for an end to the war so he can go home, but is distracted when he befriends a terrified younger fellow soldier and tries to keep him alive. Isgrimnur, a returning character from Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, is the gruff general and old warrior, still charismatic and skilled at warfare but hurting from the death of his son in To Green Angel Tower. Viyeki is a Builder, one of the main orders of Norn society, tasked with maintaining walls and fortifications, and the first Norn POV character in the series.

This POV rotation is effective, although Porto's contribution to the story is limited. I suspect Porto, or maybe his offspring, will play a role in the upcoming trilogy otherwise I can't see much reason for him being in this book. Still, he provides an interesting ground's eye view on the battles. Isgrimnur is the same world-weary warrior we met in Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, but fleshed out as he grapples with the fall-out of his son's death. Williams is successful in making Isgrimnur's grief raw and convincing, given he last wrote for the character some twenty-three years earlier. The most successful character is Viyeki, who gives us a much-needed "bad guy" perspective on events. Although the first trilogy successfully established why the undead Ineluki wanted to destroy the world, it was less clear on why the Norns would support him. This book goes much deeper into their motivations, backstory and histories, fleshing out an under-explored area of the original trilogy's worldbuilding.

The story is short, mostly concerned with moral concerns as Isgrimnur ponders the wisdom of trying to make the Norns extinct and the Norns' battle for survival and hope to leave something for future generations to build upon. But it is powerfully and effectively told. Williams slips back into Osten Ard like he's never been away, and the novel feels weightier than it could have been, as the author slips extra moments of worldbuilding and foreshadowing for the future books into the narrative. There's also some nice misdirection. At one point the Norns outline a plan which feels almost like it could be the plot synopsis for the next trilogy, but this is then abruptly undercut when a major character dies and the plot takes an unexpected 90 degree turn onto a different path. Ultimately, this makes the book more self-contained than I was expecting. Certainly there is pipe-laying for The Last King of Osten Ard trilogy, but it's done very subtly.

The Heart of What Was Lost (****) is not just an effective scene-setter and palate-cleanser for the new trilogy, but a strong self-contained story in its own right, with more twists and turns than you might expect for its short length. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Read THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR for 99p

To celebrate their acquisition of the Tad Williams back catalogue, Hodder & Stoughton in the UK are offering the ebook of The Dragonbone Chair for 99p for a limited time.

The Dragonbone Chair is the opening novel of the epic Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy and the first of a planned total of eight (or nine, depending on how you count it) novels set in the world of Osten Ard. You can read my full review of The Dragonbone Chair here. You can also read my assessment of the impact of the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn saga on the history of epic fantasy here. The full list of Tad Williams' novels is as follows:

Novels of Osten Ard
Memory, Sorrow and Thorn
The Dragonbone Chair (1988)
Stone of Farewell (1990)
To Green Angel Tower (1993, often published in two volumes subtitled Siege and Storm)

Stand-alone Novels
The Heart of What Was Lost (2017)
The Shadow of Things to Come (forthcoming)

The Last King of Osten Ard
The Witchwood Crown (2017)
Empire of Grass (forthcoming)
The Navigator's Children (forthcoming)

Other Works
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 (2010)
Shadowheart (2010)

Bobby Dollar
The Dirty Streets of Heaven (2012)
Happy Hour in Hell (2013)
Sleeping Late on Judgement Day (2014)

Solo Novels
Tailchaser's Song (1985)
Child of An Ancient City (1992)
Caliban's Hour (1994)
The War of the Flowers (2003)

Tad Williams delivers final version of THE WITCHWOOD CROWN

Tad Williams has formally delivered the completed and revised manuscript of The Witchwood Crown, the first volume of The Last King of Osten Ard, to his publishers.

This is the first volume of a sequel trilogy to his classic Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series, one of the defining works of modern epic fantasy. According to Williams, the new novel is 340,000 words in length. This is quite hefty (A Game of Thrones, for example, is 298,000 words and A Storm of Swords is 420,000) but it's not Williams's longest novel. That remains To Green Angel Tower, the titanic concluding volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn which weighs in at 520,000 words and is probably the longest epic fantasy ever written (The Lord of the Rings, altogether, is about 450,000).

The publishers have prepared a - somewhat undetailed - plot summary as follows:

The first book in The Last King of Osten Ard, the sequel trilogy to the epic Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, which propelled Tad Williams into bestseller status and defined him as one of the most important fantasy writers of our time.
 
THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR, the first volume of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, was published in hardcover in October, 1988, launching the series that was to become one of the seminal works of modern epic fantasy. When the third book in the trilogy, TO GREEN ANGEL TOWER was published in March, 1993, it remained on the New York and London Times bestseller lists for five weeks. Many of today’s top-selling fantasy authors, from Patrick Rothfuss to George R. R. Martin to Chrisopher Paolini credit Tad with being the inspiration for their own series.

Now, twenty-four years after the conclusion of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Tad returns to his beloved universe and characters with THE WITCHWOOD CROWN, the first novel in the long-awaited sequel trilogy, The Last King of Osten Ard. Thirty years have passed since the events of the earlier novels, and the world has reached a critical turning point once again. The realm is threatened by divisive forces, even as old allies are lost, and others are lured down darker paths. Perhaps most terrifying of all, the Norns—the long-vanquished elvish foe—are stirring once again, preparing to reclaim the mortal-ruled lands that once were theirs….

Series Overview: The New York Times-bestselling epic fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, about Simon, a young castle servant who saves his kingdom from evil, defined Tad Williams as one of the most important fantasy writers of our time. This series finds Simon, now decades into his reign as King of Osten Ard, facing a dire new threat to the land.

It's worth remembering that The Witchwood Crown will be preceded by a stand-alone Osten Ard novel called The Heart of What Was Lost, which will help bridge the thirty-year gap between Memory, Sorrow and Thorn and The Last King of Osten Ard.

The Heart of What Was Lost will be published on 3 January 2017, with The Witchwood Crown following on 6 April 2017. The Last King of Osten Ard will continue with Empire of Grass and conclude with The Navigator's Children. A second stand-alone novel, The Shadow of Things to Come (working title), will also be released at some point.

New US covers for MEMORY, SORROW AND THORN

Tad Williams's classic Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy is being rejacketed for a new American trade paperback edition being launched later this year.

The new editions come ahead of the publication of two new novels set in the same world, the stand-alone (ish) The Heart of What Was Lost in January 2017 and then The Witchwood Crown, the opening volume of The Last King of Osten Ard, in April 2017.

The new cover art is also, like the original editions, by the supremely talented Michael Whelan. George R.R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss and Christopher Paolini provide fresh cover blurbs as well.

Release dates for Tad Williams's THE HEART OF WHAT WAS LOST and THE WITCHWOOD CROWN confirmed

DAW Books have confirmed the release date for Tad Williams's next Osten Ard novel, set in the same world as his classic trilogy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. The Heart of What Was Lost will be published on 3 January 2017. Hodder & Stoughton in the UK is expected to release the novel in the UK around the same date.

The Heart of What Was Lost is a "short novel" (368 pages, also known as "a normal-sized novel" for everyone else) that will bridge the gap between Memory, Sorrow and Thorn and The Last King of Osten Ard, Williams's sequel trilogy. The first volume of that trilogy, The Witchwood Crown, will be released just three months later in April 2017.

The blurb:

A short sequel to the epic Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, which propelled Tad Williams into bestseller status and defined him as one of the most important fantasy writers of our time.

The Heart of What Was Lost is a direct sequel to Tad Williams’ To Green Angel Tower, the New York Times bestselling third volume of his high fantasy trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. Heart takes place between the end of that beloved novel and its year-later epilogue, and tells the story of how newly-crowned King Simon and Queen Miriamele’s forces, drove the Norns, the most human-antagonistic fae race, back into their mountain stronghold and out of the lands of men. Combining characters from the first trilogy and the upcoming second trilogy, The Heart of What Was Lost is a perfect bridge novel and introduction to The Witchwood Crown, the upcoming first volume of The Last King of Osten Ard, which will be published just three months after this novel.
Series Overview: The New York Times-bestselling epic fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, about a young castle servant who saves his kingdom from evil, defined Tad Williams as one of the most important fantasy writers of our time. This book picks up right where the series left off.

To Green Angel Tower by Tad Williams

The power of the Storm King gathers over the lands of Osten Ard. Snow falls on the desert lands of the south, howing blizzards inundate the ruins of Naglimund and even the magic-wreathed Sithi strongholds are failing. Josua Lackhand is gathering an army as Sesu'a, the Stone of Farewell, but his brother Elias has sent a vast army to destroy him. Far to the south, Miriamele remains a captive at sea to an arrogant noble, and forces good and evil seek out the three magic swords which hold the key to the fate of the world: Memory, Sorrow and Thorn.

Originally published in 1993, To Green Angel Tower is the concluding volume of the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy and also the largest single fantasy novel ever written: at 520,000 words it outstrips The Lord of the Rings in its entirety by a cool 50,000 words. To this end the novel is frequently published in two volumes in paperback (entitled Siege and Storm in the UK, just "Part 1" and "Part 2" elsewhere).

Surprisingly, the novel is not as long-winded as that may sound. This is very much a novel of two halves, making the split more organic than might have otherwise been the case. In the first half the armies of the two brothers clash for control of the Stone of Farewell in an epic, vividly-described and lengthy battle. In the second, forces converge on Green Angel Tower, the tallest tower of the Hayholt, where the fate of Osten Ard will be decided. It's all pretty standard epic fantasy stuff, but Williams was one of the first post-Tolkien authors to pulls this off on such a large scale and so well.

As with the previous novels, The Dragonbone Chair and Stone of Farewell, the focus is on the characters more than the scenery. Although the history and landscape of Osten Ard are fleshed out well in this book (both better and more organically than in the previous two volumes of the series), we get more development (and more convincing development, critically) of characters like Josua, Miriamele and Simon. By now these have all developed into more complex, interesting protagonists.

Unfortunately, the same does not extend to the antagonists: Elias's descent into madness precludes us getting to know the real character, and Pyrates as a villain never really raises above the "evil wizard" archetype. The Norn Queen is more interesting but has only limited appearances, and Ineluki is mostly missing in action until the climactic showdown. Williams excels with the heroes and the more conflicted figures (like Cadrach, Guthwulf and Camaris) but the villains unfortunately lack greater depth.

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn has attracted some acclaim for its stance as a revisionist fantasy, because the bad guys have a genuine grievance and their apparently insane plan to conquer/destroy the world actually makes sense (in a twisted, dark way). There's also some subtle commentary on Tolkien's more regressive use of racial archetypes (something Tolkien himself later regretted, and did note on even in Lord of the Rings itself), with representatives from all the races of Osten Ard playing a key role in the final battle.

For such a huge novel, the pace flags only in a few key places: Miriamele spends so much time on a boat you expect Gendry from Game of Thrones to show up and Guthwulf's blind adventures beneath the Hayholt drag on for an exceptional length of time. The old epic fantasy problem of having characters sit around and talk about the plot rather than getting on with it also rears its head from time to time.

But for the most part, To Green Angel Tower (****) works well both as a novel in its own right (despite it's hippo-stunning bulk) and as a conclusion to the greater series. The novel is available now in the UK and USA (Part 1, Part 2).

Tad Williams will return to Osten Ard for the first time in twenty-three years in late 2016 with the novel Heart of Regret, which will be set some months after To Green Angel Tower and also act as a prequel to the much bigger project, The Last King of Osten Ard. This is a new trilogy set to begin with The Witchwood Crown in early 2017.

Stone of Farewell by Tad Williams

Elias rules as the High King of Osten Ard, but his policies have triggered war between the provinces and civil war within some of them. The continent is slipping into chaos and the only hope may be the mad king's younger brother, Josua Lackhand. Escaping a devastating siege, Josua travels eastwards to find a new stronghold, gathering allies as he goes. Meanwhile, it is said that only three great swords of legend can defeat the machinations of Elias's puppet-master, Ineluki the Storm King. Simon Snowlock has recovered Thorn from a remote mountain, but two of his friends have been sentenced to death by the Qanuc, his own erstwhile allies.

Stone of Farewell continues the story begun in The Dragonbone Chair, and is less the sequel than the simple continuation of that story. Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is really one titanic, 1.2 million-word novel split into three (or four, depending on edition) for ease of publication.

Williams expands and deepens the story in this book, with a more thorough exploration of the various cultures of Osten Ard. In particular, the Qanuc, Sithi and Norns all get more screentime and we learn more about the meadow-people of the Thrithings, the political and religious intrigue in Nabban and how the Hernystiri are surviving in exile.

These elements are fascinating, but also come at the expense of critical plot development and incident. The Dragonbone Chair was itself a relaxed novel, but Stone of Farewell is even more chilled out. Simon spends a long time kicking back amongst first the Qanuc and later the Sithi, Josua's apparently desperate flight to safety has more of the feel of a holiday outing and Miriamele spends altogether too much time hanging out on a boat. It's more the stories inbetween that resonate, with Isgrimnur's increasingly fed-up journey into the south being enjoyable for its brevity and our glimpses into life in the Hayholt (effectively under occupation by Elias's troops) via characters like Rachel and the redoubtable Guthwulf.

There are moments of real horror when the story kicks into a higher gear, such as Pyrates's confrontation with the Lector or the Red Hand's assault on Jao e-Tinukai'i, but these are relatively few and far between. Instead, the novel expands itself on helping the characters (particularly Simon and Miriamele) grow into more interesting people.

Stone of Farewell (****) is well-written, richly characterised and features moments of real tension and horror. It arguably takes its hands off the throttle at the wrong moment, however, allowing momentum to dissipate a little rather than ramping up for the grand finale. But if you can forgive the slower pace, a fascinating, enjoyable and deeper fantasy novel than most awaits. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 14

By the latter part of the 1980s, epic fantasy had established itself as a big-selling, popular genre. The shadow of Tolkien still loomed large over the field, but authors had begun moving away from his paradigm. David Gemmell was telling stories about heroism in worlds bleaker than Middle-earth, Glen Cook was challenging fantasy conventions of good and evil and David Eddings was releasing feel-good stories in which everything always worked out okay.

What the genre did not have was a work that tried to follow up on Tolkien directly, a work that built on - but maybe challenged - his themes and ideas over a very long page count and covering a vast amount of territory and characters. That work, and important step up in the development of epic fantasy, arrived in 1988.


The Dragonbone Chair

Robert Paul "Tad" Williams started writing The Dragonbone Chair in 1985. It was his second novel, having previously published Tailchaser's Song, a fantasy that used cats and an internal mythology that recalled both Watership Down by Richard Adams and Tolkien. The Dragonbone Chair, the fist volume of a planned trilogy called Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, was a more traditional fantasy.

The story is set in Osten Ard, a continent consisting of several distinct nations unified into a single empire by the High King, Prester John. As the story opens, Prester John is failing and his oldest son, Elias, prepares to take the throne in a peaceful transition. However, Elias is quarrelling with his younger brother Josua Lackhand and is under the influence of Pyrates, a priest commanding strange powers. As Elias takes the throne and begins a reign of terror over the population of Osten Ard, risking civil war and anarchy, a young kitchen boy named Simon is thrust into prominence when his mentor, an enemy of Pyrates, is killed. Simon flees into the wilderness after rescuing the imprisoned Josua, triggering a war for succession at the same time that a supernatural force of apparent evil, the Storm King, arises in the distant north.

So far, so standard. But the novel, and the trilogy as a whole, challenges conceptions of the genre. The Storm King and his minions have a genuine grievance against humanity and their plan to conquer/destroy Osten Ard is surprisingly original. There are tinges of science fiction around the edges of the story: the elf-like Sithi are hinted at being arrivals from another planet and the presence of Prester John (a legendary Christian king who established a kingdom in the far east in medieval times) and some very Earth-like cultures suggests an ancient link between our world and Osten Ard. The book also engages with other subgenres of fantasy: Simon Snowlock's journey into the mystical realm of Jao e-Tinukai'i recalls the woodland fantasy of Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood and the Amber series by Roger Zelazny. The vast and forbidding fortress known as the Hayholt, riddled with secret tunnels and long-forgotten rooms, a relic from an ancient, more glorious time, feels like a nod towards Mervyn Peake's titanic Castle Gormenghast.

The series also has extensive maps, a glossary and notes on pronunciation, as well as appendices and cast lists. The books feature an elaborate backstory extending across thousands of years, and numerous notes on culture and language. The trilogy heavily riffs of Tolkien but also does not just steal ideas but repackages them. There is an implicit criticism of the (unplanned but implied) racism in Tolkien's work, which Tolkien himself later struggled with, and also a darker take on the elves, whose continued existence over thousands of years has ossified them and their culture. There is also a nice nod to historical revisionism: our initial understanding of the complex backstory is later challenged, both by the Storm King's own (and rather different) viewpoint of what happened and by the revelation that Prester John may not have been quite the man he is presented as when the story opens. Williams's Aragorn-analogue, Prince Josua, is also shown to be riven by self-doubt and sceptical of his own claim to the throne, as well as his ability to lead the fight against Elias, in sharp contrast to Tolkien's character (although, interestingly, Peter Jackson's film version of the character is more similar to Josua).

Williams's work was influential on what came later. In particular, American SF and horror author George R.R. Martin had not been particularly inspired by the fantasies that had come after Tolkien (Stephen Donaldson's work aside) and had no plans to write in the genre. That changed after reading The Dragonbone Chair, with its use of memorable sayings ("All Men Must Die," is said in the first chapter), the notion of freezing winters lasting years and the alien, otherworldly pale white beings threatening from the north, as well as a dynastic struggle between competing factions and a more realistic take on violence and sexuality. Only three years after The Dragonbone Chair was released, Martin would start work on his own fantasy novel, A Game of Thrones, which he has acknowledged many times as being inspired by Williams (and Tolkien, Vance and Zelazny).

In addition, there are echoes of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn to be found in Scott Bakker's challenging Second Apocalypse mega-series. The (apparently) space-borne race in a fantasy setting, the elves whose immortality has come at a terrible price (of ennui in Williams and outright insanity in Bakker) and the philosophical-religious overtones (much more central in Bakker) are shared ideas between the works.

Williams also, like Tolkien before and Jordan and Martin after, found that his tale had grown in the telling. The Dragonbone Chair was 900 pages long in paperback. Its sequel, Stone of Farewell (published in 1990) was only marginally shorter. And the third volume, To Green Angel Tower (1993), was almost as big as both combined, and remains the longest individual work of fantasy ever published. The book was so huge it had to be split into two volumes for paperback publication, creating a "four-volume trilogy". Williams would also repeat this trick later on, with his cyberpunk/fantasy hybrid series Otherland (which he cleverly pre-sold as four volumes as he knew what would happen, only to find the fourth volume so huge it narrowly avoided being split itself) and a later fantasy trilogy, Shadowmarch, which also expanded to four books.

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is now an acknowledged classic of the genre, important in its development and ambitious in its scope. It also set the tone for a variant form of fantasy, works consisting of thousands of pages extending across multiple volumes. Many, many authors would follow in his train, not least himself: in 2017 Williams will publish The Witchwood Crown, the first volume of The Last King of Osten Ard, a sequel trilogy set thirty years after the events of the first three books. It is one of the most eagerly-awaited epic fantasy projects on the horizon, and it remains to be seen if Williams can recapture the impact of his classic trilogy.

As epic fantasy began transitioning to the Big Fat Endless Series that has become one of its defining features, there was also a different subset of fantasy that was interested in mashing things up, blurring genre boundaries and generally being a bit weird.

The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams

Prester John is the unchallenged High King of Osten Ard, the ruler of all the lands from the Nornfells to the southern deserts. He has ruled wisely and well - but not without bloodshed - for seven decades. Now his health is failing and his son Elias prepares to inherit the throne. Elias is strong and a canny general, but is also mistrusted for his close relationship with the sinister priest Pyrates. There is also a growing rift between Elias and his younger brother Josua Lackhand that threatens the peace.

Simon, a simple kitchen boy in the High King's castle, the Hayholt, is drawn into events beyond his understanding. A cold winter is coming, things are stirring in the far north that have not been seen for centuries and the fate of the world will turn on three lost swords: Memory, Sorrow and Thorn.


The Dragonbone Chair is the opening novel of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, a massive trilogy written by American author Tad Williams. First published in 1988, the novel was an important milestone in the development of epic fantasy. Previous fantasy novels had been split between easy reading versions of Tolkien (Brooks, Eddings) or insanely dark reactions to it (Donaldson, Cook), but Williams's novel was arguably the first to really engage with Tolkien on the same kind of playing field. It's a huge book (over 900 pages in most paperback editions, and only the first part of the story) filled with a complex backstory, numerous ethnic cultures and different races, lots of made-up names and maps. Lots of maps. And an appendix, just to show you that this author means business.

Of course, epic fantasy is a very different field in 2015 to what it was like in 1988, so does the novel hold up?

The answer is a qualified yes. This is a big, epic story which Williams tells well, with some colourful prose, some solid characterisation and development and a bit more depth to the story than it just being another Tolkien clone. The (relatively few) action sequences are well-handled and there are some evocative descriptions, particularly of the vast Hayholt and its Green Angel Tower, as well as the forbidding Aldheorte forest. The characters are a fairly diverse and interesting bunch, although Simon himself, at this early stage, is a bit too much of a wet blanket with a tendency to pass out (either from injury or magically-induced visions) every time something important happens. His companions, particularly the "troll" Binabik, are altogether more compelling in this first novel.

The book also constantly develops and restructures the stakes and the scope of the story as it goes on, bringing in more history, factions and people as it develops. This works in both the Tolkien-esque sense of starting small and branching out later on, and also in forcing a constant reappraisal of the world and the situation. It's telling to see how Prester John is viewed by his own people as a mostly just and benevolent ruler but people from other lands remember him as a conqueror.

There are some structural issues. The book can switch POVs several times in a conversation, which is a bit bewildering for those readers used to the modern convention of staying with one POV for a whole chapter, or for POV switches to be marked by at least a paragraph break. This is also not exactly the fastest-paced novel in the world. Compared to Lord of the Rings, The Eye of the World or A Game of Thrones, The Dragonbone Chair (which is only marginally shorter than the latter two) drags its feet a little. Williams is a good enough writer to make lengthy travelogues or conversations between two minor characters hold the attention, but you do realise from time to time that not actually a lot has happened in the previous hundred pages. Finally, the POV structure can be a bit jarring: much of the first half of the book is shown from Simon's POV, but the latter half introduces a ton of other ones, including some who have an important role to play but we only get a few pages with them because so much time is being spent elsewhere.

But these are both standard (for the genre) and forgivable problems, especially given that this was only the author's second novel. The Dragonbone Chair (****) may be slow to get off the mark and occasionally low-key given the scale of the events, but it's a well-written novel that is rather smarter than it first appears (this becomes more apparent in the sequels). It's well worth checking out ahead of the publication of the sequel series, The Last King of Osten Ard, due to start in 2017. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Tad Williams' WITCHWOOD CROWN delayed until 2017

The Witchwood Crown, the first volume in Tad Williams's Last King of Osten Ard trilogy has been delayed until March 2017, due to issues at the publisher.

DAW and Penguin Books have been forced to delay the novel due to undisclosed publishing problems with their schedule. The novel is mostly complete and Williams is working on edits and rewrites now. The novel had been planned for a Spring-Summer 2016 release, so this delay pushes back the novel almost an extra year.

Whether the delay means that there will be a much shorter gap before the second volume, Empire of Grass, is published remains unclear.

The Last King of Osten Ard is a sequel to the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy (The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell and To Green Angel Tower), published between 1988 and 1993. The original trilogy (named for three swords) chronicled the land of Osten Ard being torn apart in war, with a young kitchen-boy named Simon escaping the vast Hayholt castle and playing a pivotal role in saving the land from the machinations of the Storm King, Ineluki. Despite a standard premise, the trilogy is credited with revitalising the epic fantasy genre through some smart writing, strong characterisation and a mildly revisionist take on standard fantasy tropes, such as including characters with many shades of grey rather than being all good or evil, and challenging the notion of "inherently evil" races. George R.R. Martin has cited the first two volumes as being highly influential on A Game of Thrones, which he started writing in the summer of 1991. Later Song of Ice and Fire novels feature nods to Williams's characters (such as Josua and Elyas of House Willum, whose arms show a skeletal dragon and three swords). The trilogy is the biggest-selling of Williams's works, which have sold over 30 million copies to date, whilst To Green Angel Tower is the longest work of epic fantasy ever published in one volume, outsizing even the combined Lord of the Rings by almost 100,000 words.

The Last King of Osten Ard is set thirty years after the events of To Green Angel Tower and will feature both established characters from the first trilogy, some of their children and some completely new characters as well.

Meanwhile, there is some additional "big" news linked to Williams's work expected in September. This may be related to Warner Brothers acquiring the Otherland film and TV rights a couple of years ago, or possibly a development deal for Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (aside from Wheel of Time, currently mired in development hell, MS&T is probably the highest-profile fantasy series not under option at this time). Or it could be something completely different.

Tad Williams returns to his signature fantasy setting

Tad Williams has confirmed that his next project will be a new epic fantasy trilogy which serves as a direct sequel to his Memory, Sorrow and Thorn sequence.

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn was originally published as a trilogy, consisting of The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Stone of Farewell (1990) and To Green Angel Tower (1993). The final book in the sequence was so huge its paperback edition was issued as two volumes: Siege and Storm. Although traditional in set-up, chronicling a civil war between two brothers for control of the kingdom of Osten Ard whilst a kitchen boy discovers an amazing destiny ahead of him, the trilogy was notable for its mild revisionism, with Williams using a traditional fantasy narrative to chronicle on the shortcomings of the genre. It was also influential in being the first large, Tolkien-esque fantasy aimed explicitly at adults that wasn't completely trying to upend conventions (like earlier works by Donaldson and Cook), and in terms of market and timing paved the way for works like The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire. George R.R. Martin is a huge fan of the trilogy and named some very minor characters in ASoIaF after Williams's characters.

After years spent working on other works (such as the Shadowmarch quartet, the SF Otherland series, the Dragons of Ordinary Farm series for children and, most recently, the Bobby Dollar urban fantasy trilogy) and occasionally mentioning the possibility of an Osten Ard short story collection, Williams has confirmed that he is returning with a full trilogy of - probably massive - novels. The new trilogy will be called The Last King of Osten Ard and will consist of the tentatively-entitled The Witchwood Crown, Empire of Grass and The Navigator's Children.

According to Williams:

"I haven’t gone back to my old worlds very often, precisely because I never wanted to be doing so simply to be doing it. (That’s called “franchising” and I don’t like it much, personally.) I always said, “If a story ever comes to me that wants to be written, then yes, I’ll consider it.” And it finally did. In fact, it sprang out of a conversation with wife Deborah Beale late last spring, and it’s been coming together for most of a year now, so we kept it secret pretty long.

I believe I can now write a story worthy of those much-loved settings and characters, one that people who haven’t read the originals can enjoy, but which will of course mean more to those who know the original work. More than that, I feel I can do something that will stand up to the best books in our field. I have very high hopes. I’m excited by the challenge. And I’ll do my absolute best to make all the kind responses I’ve already had justified."

The blurb:

"In this new trilogy, Williams journeys back to the magical land of Osten Ard and continues the story of beloved characters King Simon and Queen Miriamele, married now for thirty years, and introduces newcomer Prince Morgan, their heir apparent. Also expanded is the story of the twin babies born to Prince Josua and Lady Vorzheva—a birth heralded by prophecy, which has been the subject of feverish fan speculation since the release of To Green Angel Tower in 1993."

No release date has been set for the first book, although Williams conceived of the idea a year ago and has been working on the project since handing in the final Bobby Dollar book a few months ago. On that basis, we will likely see the first novel in 2015 or 2016.

This is interesting news. I am cautious, as Shadowmarch felt like it steered too close to the ground already laid by Memory, Sorrow and Thorn and felt a little redundant as a result. However, Williams on top form is certainly a strong writer and it will be interesting to see if his new trilogy can make as much of a stir as the original did a quarter of a century ago.

Tad Williams talks to George R.R. Martin

There's an interesting transcript here of a George R.R. Martin book signing in California hosted by Tad Williams. Before the signing itself started, Williams fired off some questions at George about his work. Particularly interesting is when Martin expands on how he was partly inspired to write A Game of Thrones after reading the first two volumes in Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy. Amusingly, Williams avoids responding to Martin's request to write more stories set in Osten Ard.


There's another report of the event and some pics here as well.

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)