Amazon.co.uk: Otherland
is one of the most ambitious sf and fantasy
projects of recent times - how does it feel to have finished it, and will you
ever do anything as gigantic again?
Tad Williams:
My standing joke is that after I finished Memory, Sorrow and
Thorn
I told my friends, "If I ever start something this big again, just
shoot me." One look at the Otherland
books suggests they're either not
very good friends or not very good shots.
I'd like to think I'll never let myself in for another one of
these mind-bending, multiyear projects, but the stories seem to suggest their
own lengths, and some of them just scream "I am the next five or six years of
your shortening lifespan!"
I certainly don't have any ideas for anything like that at the
moment, but this long-book stuff is a chronic illness -- you just don't know
when the next attack will flare up.
Amazon.co.uk:
One feature of the sequence is its visiting of a large number of
locations: from a virtual version of
H G
Wells' London besieged by Martians to Oz and a vast house a bit
like Gormenghast, all of which are very
strongly conceived of in visual and other sensory terms. How did you go about
giving each location its own distinctive flavour?
Williams:
Unlike the real-world settings, which I approached in much the
same way I would a novel set in the present (figuring things don't change THAT
much in a few decades) I tried to find a way to put a bit of a twist on all the
fantastical settings, whether my own (the House, although it's influenced by
several things, including Peake, of course) or someone else's, like the
environments based on Wells, Baum's
Wizard of
Oz,
Alice Through the Looking
Glass, etc. I probably did the least with the Wells section in
terms of tweaking it, because I wanted to emphasize Paul Jonas' solitude, and
because it was important he recognize it as a literary creation -- his first
major clue that he couldn't be traveling through real worlds.
In fact, most of these settings were affected by where in the
story they appeared and who experienced them. Some of the early ones, like
Looking Glass, I allowed to be a little murky, so that Paul wouldn't quite
realize where he was (although the reader would twig pretty quickly.) Others
came at a point when the idea of the simulation worlds was established, or,
like the Oz world, were visited by characters like Renie and !Xabbu who
knew
they were in a simulation, so I tried to find other things to make
the experience interesting -- in that case, a sort of Kansas-as-80s-Lebanon
version of Baum's stories.
Amazon.co.uk:
The book is also set in a lot of different real world places -
unusually, not just the US, but, very convincingly, a South Africa and
Australia of the near future. How did you go about researching not just the
facts, but the feel, of this?
Williams:
As mentioned, I had to approach this multiplicity of settings as
though I were writing something more like a contemporary novel -- that is, I
didn't have the usual science-fiction escape hatch of "But there's been a
nuclear war and everyone and everything is different." Think about how much
most major cities have changed in forty years. Substantially, yes, but far more
has remained the same.
I researched every way I could -- extensive reading, phone calls
to bewildered strangers, merciless bugging of friends whose only crime was
having lived in or visited one of the locations. I'm proud that lots of South
African readers have asked me if I spent a lot of time in Durban, researching.
(Interestingly, I've had more kind but firm "I like the book, but you got this
detail wrong" comments from folks in Sydney, which I've visited twice, than
from South Africa, where I've never been.)
Fortunately, there haven't been a lot of those, even from the
Australians. Several of the comments came from readers who thought the
characters talked too much like Americans, and I had to point out that I think
in forty years Australians and South Africans WILL talk a lot more like
Americans. (I'm not in favor of that, by the way, I just think it's already
happening.)
Amazon.co.uk:
'Otherland' is a book which wears, very lightly, the marks of
considerable reading on questions like Artificial Life, Virtual Reality,
Artificial Intelligence and so on. Could you discuss some key books that helped
you think about these subjects?
Williams:
Unlike many of my more distinguished science-fiction writing
comrades, almost all the science I read is of the "for passably intelligent
know-nothings" variety, since I didn't discover until long after I was out of
high school that the natural world was an interesting place, and thus am a
complete amateur. So most of my understanding on these subjects comes from
reading people like Daniel Dennett, Brian Greene, Fritjof Capra, K.C. Cole, and
Steven Pinker, to name a few, not to mention old favorites like
Stephen Jay
Gould and
Richard
Dawkins. I also enjoyed (although didn't always agree with) the
cyber-enthusiasms of
Douglas
Rushkoff, and would recommend without hesitation
Steven
Levy's
Artificial
Life to anyone who can read anything more complicated than a
laundry list.
Amazon.co.uk:
It is also a book about story - not just the stories on which the
various virtual worlds we travel through are based, but story as part of the
way human beings construct their universe. Can we talk about this?
Williams:
The final book makes this even more explicit, if it needed to be
hammered any harder. Part of it was my original intent -- to contrast those new
extensions of our being, mostly electronic, which seem to be changing humanity
and the world, with those human things which have not changed in a million
years. The need for order, narrative, and meaning is clearly one of the latter,
no matter how much watching MTV may lead one to wonder whether the trait is
finally atrophying.
That was one of the reasons I wanted a character like !Xabbu (a
South African bushman) whose way of looking at the world is shaped by a
mythology his ancestors have sent down to him from prehistory, but who is also
a very intelligent visitor to this new world of untrustworthy,
electronically-enhanced experience. I was interested to see how he would filter
this new world's events through his old-world sensibilities -- in fact, I was
half-hoping myself to find other ways to look at the information-world that
seems to be all around us, like air.
But there are also layers on layers of other story-related themes
in the book, and in fact one of the ways we get to know most of the characters
is through their stories, either those they tell to others, those they present
as their reality (like their simulated appearances), or even those they have
constructed and in which they want to live, like the old rich monster
Jongleur's universe of childhood nostalgia-worlds.
And then of course a lot of these themes and their recurrence
simply rose out of the complexity of the piece. I didn't intend for folktale
and nursery-rhyme themes to be such a part of the book, but I suppose when two
of your strongest themes are "children" and "the power of story" it's
inevitable. This was something else that became explicit in the last volume, in
part because it sort of wrote itself (which means that when it occurred to me,
I couldn't think of a reason to avoid it. In for a penny, in for several more
pounds, basically.)
Amazon.co.uk:
You write very well about childhood and adolescence - little
Christabel and the endlessly resourceful teenagers Orlando and Sam are as
thoroughly visualized as adult characters like Renie and !Xabbu, particularly
in the way their thought processes are as complex and peopled , even if
dependent on fewer bits of context and background. Is this memory, parenting or
just efficiently making things up?
Williams:
A little of all three, I suppose. My kids aren't quite old enough
yet to be models for Christabel and the others, but I've been around a lot of
other people's kids in the last ten years, and of course I remember my own
childhood, at least the parts of it that happened before I discovered
recreational drugs. But there's a lot of making-things-up, too. For me, the
main thing in writing characters is trying to create a context for how the
character feels and thinks -- that is, to try to imagine the small details of a
life, even if you don't have time to imagine the life in full. Perhaps also it
has something to do with the reason that some readers have kindly told me "You
write women well." I don't know if that's true, but if I am sometimes
successful, it's because I don't think of them as "woman characters", but just
as characters. That doesn't mean being female doesn't affect their experience
in a huge way, just that it isn't the most important thing -- and certainly
isn't the only thing -- about understanding who that character is. As Renie
Sulaweyo realizes -- in an ethnic context rather than a gender context, but
it's still the same dynamic -- she, a black African woman, has more in common
with a middle-class white American or European than she does with !Xabbu
(because of his bushman heritage), a black man from her own country.
Amazon.co.uk:
Your villains and various morally ambiguous characters like Dulcie
are as well-imagined as your good guys - and yet some of them are totally
without redeeming features. How does it feel to inhabit the mental landscape of
someone like Johnny Wulgaru?
Amazon.co.uk:
I think you HAVE to inhabit it a little, find some points of
connection within your own self, or you'll never write it convincingly. But, of
course, it doesn't feel particularly good.
Now, I hope people would understand I don't mean I'm just getting
in touch with my inner psycho-killer, that part of me that truly wants to
torture people and chop them up. As far as I know, I don't have that particular
interest lurking somewhere underneath the netting of superego. But I do try to
find that in me which is secretive, that in me which is controlling of others,
which revels in power or supremacy. Then I take the part of me which genuinely
delights in women as people and throw it out, try to think "What would it be
like if I still felt the same attraction, but with all interest in them as
human beings, all my desire for friendship or reciprocal attraction somehow
erased? And what if that attraction in my end could only be expressed
satisfactorily through control and violence?"
Thus, little by little, I extrapolate by addition and
subtraction, trying to make a place where I can stand and imagine something of
what someone like that feels. It's not easy. I suppose that's a good thing...
Amazon.co.uk:
You have been doing a lot of work with film in the last few years.
Does this add something to your writing?
Williams:
I wish I could say it's added something financial to my writing,
but not so far. However, it's certainly made me much more sensitive to the
grammar of film and television writing, and in some projects (like SHADOWMARCH,
which I'll discuss in a moment) it's made me much more economical. Yes, that's
hard to believe of someone who's just finished a four-thousand-page story, but
I do write short stories too, you know. It's just that the long books are
so...well, long that they sort of prevent me from doing much in the shorter
forms.
Amazon.co.uk:
What is your next project? One of your shorter books, or another
large-scale one?
Williams:
I'm currently working on two projects simultaneously, testing the
limits of both sanity and effective childcare. THE WAR OF THE FLOWERS will be
my next novel (single volume!) a rather dark fairy-tale about what things are
like in the Other Fields these days (hint: very urban) and what happens to a
young man who is drawn there after his girlfriend has left him and his mother
has died and his life has generally gone to hell in a handbasket. The other
project is an online epic-fantasy serial called SHADOWMARCH. I say "serial" as
opposed to "online novel" because SHADOWMARCH.COM will be modeled more closely
on, say, television -- it will be episodic, with frequent updates, and the
website itself will have lots of additional material, illustrations, background
information on the world, behind-the-scenes stuff, message boards, etc. We're
launching it June 1st, 2001, but the first little free installment and other
information will be up by the time this interview is being read.
Amazon.co.uk:
Anything else you want to talk about?
Williams:
Just that I'm working too hard, and it will be interesting to see
what happens trying to write two novel-length projects in one year (especially
considering that one of them, the website for SHADOWMARCH, has a whole raft of
other launching details that goes with it.) That which does not kill me makes
me stronger, or so I'm assured. If so, I suppose I will be terrifyingly strong
by this time next year.
I'll still have two really little kids, though. Terrifyingly
strong people are allowed to sleep sometimes, aren't they?
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