Tad Williams

Writing long stories was an early hallmark for Williams. "I remember specifically one 'folktale' assignment when I was thirteen that was supposed to be three pages, and I wound up writing a seventeen-page sword-and-sorcery epic with illustrations, etc." His first attempt at professional writing was "a rather awful science-fiction screenplay called The Sad Machines that I’ve never shown to anyone outside my family, I think. The only interesting thing about it now is that its main character, Ishmael Parks, was a definite precursor to Simon in the Osten Ard books."

In "Tad Williams: The American Tolkien?" Ash Silverlock observes that "echoes of Williams’s work" can be seen in the works of Robin Hobb, Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan. Blake Charlton, Christopher Paolini, and Patrick Rothfuss have also indicated they've been inspired by Williams.

In Caliban’s Hour, Williams revisits Shakespeare's The Tempest from Caliban's point of view. "Shakespeare, brilliant thinker that he was, was pointing out some problems of colonialism before anyone else realized that such a thing as colonialism even existed." "Caliban was one of the first representations of a colonized people in English literature -- the first thing he says is, 'This was my island once.'" "Like all those other folks in the New World who accepted visitors from Europe only to find that those visitors soon became their masters, Caliban is as much a victim of history as he is of Prospero the magician."

"That’s hard to say because the research is mostly something that is happening while I am writing. There are some cases where I know ahead of time that I’m going to have a lot of research in a particular area, and I will actually start researching before I start writing. But with something like Bobby Dollar where it’s set in the contemporary world, yes, there are many things to be researched including things about Heaven and Hell and people’s ideas and the religious writings about them—but most of that I was doing as I was writing. So in a given day, if I’m spending three hours thinking before I start writing, and two or three hours actually typing, I’m probably going to be spending another hour or so checking things, looking things up, as I go, because I don’t want to try to think too much ahead, I want to be in the scene, in the story… if it takes me six months to write a book, or a year, then I have probably spent a month or two months just doing research."

Williams is an ideas-driven author: the idea comes first. “Usually for me the trigger is an idea more than a character or a title. The Bobby Dollar book idea was ‘cold war,’ the Otherland idea was ‘river that links different virtual worlds together,’ the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn idea was ‘after a King-Arthur-type Great King dies.’ Then they sort of find their own characters and titles. (Well, I help.)” In an interview with Heiner Wittmann for Klett-Cotta, Williams explains, “Almost every book starts out as maybe one or two or three small ideas and then they kind of go into the mix and I wait. And if they last, if they survive for awhile, they begin to agglomerate with other ideas. They begin to become something more than the sum of its parts.”

Answering a question about the "inspiration or processes" he uses to mesh reality with fantasy, to take his big ideas and fit them into his worlds, Williams said: "I find the words ‘What if…?’ infinitely valuable. But you have to keep re-rolling those particular dice over and over until you get an answer that works for the story. It's one of the reasons I like quiet: I do most of this in my head, running different simulations, almost, to see which possibilities will lead to the best outcomes."

"The band was called 'Idiot' and I still regret that we fell apart just when we were all finally out of school and might have done something. There was a lot of creativity there, a lot of talent—several of the members are still professionally making music—but most of all, there was no one else like us. We were our own weird animal… We wrote songs about bowling and voles and luxury camper vans and the end of the world. We were a little ahead of our time. It was fun." Idiot's band members—Andrew Lawrence Jackson, vocals and rhythm guitar; Rick Cuevas, lead and rhythm guitar; Tom Sanders, Bass; Patrick Coyne, drums; and Williams, vocals—held a Reunion Concert in 1997 that Williams commemorates in "IDIOT: A Brief History of a Band."

Williams has also had an influence on other authors in his genre. His Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series was one of the works that inspired George R. R. Martin to write A Song of Ice and Fire. "I read Tad and was impressed by him, but the imitators that followed—well, fantasy got a bad rep for being very formulaic and ritual. And I read The Dragonbone Chair and said, ‘My god, they can do something with this form,’ and it's Tad doing it. It's one of my favorite fantasy series." Martin incorporated a nod to Williams in A Game of Thrones with "House Willum": The only members of the house mentioned are Lord Willum and his two sons, Josua and Elyas, a reference to the royal brothers in The Dragonbone Chair.

Genre just means a contract between a writer and a reader, that the writer will deliver a certain amount of expected things. In my particular genre, I can do anything I want, I can be as ambitious as I want, I can be as literary as I want, as long as every 5 or 10 pages something really horrible tries to eat my main character. I enjoy that part of it because it's almost subversive, I can write anything, I can deal with big ideas, I can try to be an ambitious writer in my prose style—all those things as long as I also do what the reader wants. The readers are very forgiving, they are interested in experiments and ideas, as long as you remember you're writing fantasy.

Williams's epic fantasy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is a trilogy that became four volumes when it was published in paperback format. While the first two books were long—672 and 589 pages, respectively—the third volume, To Green Angel Tower, weighed in at a massive 1083 pages on hardcover publication. But the paperback would have been 1600 pages—too big to be printed in one volume—so it was split into two separate volumes: To Green Angel Tower, Part 1 and To Green Angel Tower, Part 2. In the UK, the two volumes were titled To Green Angel Tower: Siege and To Green Angel Tower: Storm.

I don't know how well you know Michael Moorcock's cosmology of Law and Chaos. It wasn't intentional—though I'm a big Moorcock fan—but the way it worked out as I was thinking these things through is that heaven winds up being sort of like Ultimate Law in Moorcock's version of things, which is something that doesn't change. It's very static. It's all about the same frequency of reward and existence, and it just keeps going on and on and on and on. Hell is much more dynamic...the main character's presumption is that hell has to be varied, otherwise punishment is no longer effective, because it becomes familiar. So hell has to be something where your punishment surprises you, and part of your punishment is that there is no getting used to things because you never know what will happen next. That's a very simplified version, but that's one of the main differences. So hell is quite dynamic and changing. It's very feudal. It's very much about 'whoever has the power makes the rules.' In heaven that's true also, but you don't know who made the rules. The rules have all been made and they're not changing.

In Shadowmarch, the Rooftoppers are drawn on the great tradition of "Wee Folk" in western folklore. "I used Tom Thumb and Thumbelina, of course, but also The Borrowers—very well known in the English speaking world, at least—and many others. I just like the idea of little tiny people, and find them more interesting and heroic if they are not otherwise inherently 'magical.'"

In Williams's short story "The Writer's Child"—first collected in the short story anthology The Sandman: Book of Dreams edited by Neil Gaiman and Ed Kramer -- Lord Byron is depicted as reincarnated as a child's teddy bear.

I quickly became more culturally significant than I had been up to that point in the States or England. So it was a combination of factors, but it was quite startling how the same exact books that were being reviewed kind of like Star Trek novels or something here in the States were being reviewed by very knowledgeable people who were talking about the future of human civilization and about what the 21st-century was going to be like economically. It was the same books, but they had been moved to a completely different context—namely 'real fiction with important issues being discussed,' which I had always felt they were. It just shows you how much of this stuff is circumstantial, how much of it is context, and where you are, and how fortunate you are in getting into the cultural discussion."

"One of the things that I love about the field of writing that I'm in—science fiction and fantasy—is you spend time researching the weirdest things," Williams said during a Q&A session in Stuttgart. He gave an example of some of the research he did for the Bobby Dollar books which feature a were-pig character:

"I spent a good portion of a day on agricultural websites, and specifically, because I wanted to get an emotional feeling for pigs—not just a clinical, dry feeling—I also went and researched pig enthusiast websites. I don’t mean the kind of websites you have to hide from your children, I mean there are people in America, probably here too, who own pigs as pets and they write lots of articles about pigs and how pigs feel and what pigs like (besides other pigs)… Off the top of my head, I could not tell you how much a full-grown, male farm pig should weigh. I knew ‘Big,’ but when you’re a writer, you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about, so I actually went and spent some time."

"For me, probably trying to slow down and explain my jumps of logic–the sort of thing you don’t have to explain when you’re working by yourself (unless you’re really weird and you don’t trust your own judgment and you argue with yourself). Because all I have to do when I’m writing on my own is feel the ‘ping’ that says, ‘that fits!’ and the problem is solved and I’m on to the next one. But you can’t always convince someone else so quickly that you’re right. (And, to be fair, you might not BE right when someone else’s ideas are taken into account.)"

The German radio network Hessischer Rundfunk produced the Otherland radio play in January 2004, and the public premiere was at the International Frankfurt Book Fair in October that year at a club in Frankfurt called the U60311. It was produced as a "24-hours radio play" broadcast on two stations. The play was published by der Hörverlag, Munich, as an audiobook. Walter Adler directed, and also adapted the book for the radio play. The music was composed by Pierre Oser.

While at Apple, Williams developed an interest in interactive multi-media, and he and his colleague Andrew Harris created a company, Telemorphix, in order to produce it. The result was "M. Jack Steckel's 21st Century Vaudeville", which was broadcast on San Francisco Bay Area local TV in 1992 and 1993. People at the station and viewers were asked to provide images of themselves, which were then animated primarily at the mouth: viewers phoned in to the show and could then be these characters. The action was a mix of improvisational performance and storylines which Williams created (along with secondary, non-interactive characters.) M. Jack Steckel himself—the host—was played by Andrew Harris.

In his mid twenties, he turned to writing and submitted the manuscript of his novel Tailchaser's Song to DAW Books. To get his publishers to look at his first manuscript he spun a story about needing a replacement copy because his had been destroyed. It worked. DAW Books liked it and published it, beginning a long association that continues to this day. Williams continued working various jobs for a few more years, including three years from 1987 to 1990 as a technical writer at Apple Computer’s Knowledge Engineering Department, taking problem-solving field material from engineers and turning it into research articles (which led, in part, to the Otherland books), before making fiction writing his full-time career.

Williams worked for KFJC, a college radio station. As an occasional DJ and station music director, he played whatever music the community working at KFJC thought cool, weird and interesting from the late 1970s to 80s. KFJC—Foothill College radio station—was a home to punk/new wave music, one of the first of its kind in California. From 1979 to 1990, Williams hosted a talk show called "One Step Beyond." His interests on the show were politics with an emphasis on the covert and clandestine.

Robert Paul "Tad" Williams (born 14 March 1957) is an American fantasy and science fiction writer. He is the author of the multivolume Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, Otherland series, and Shadowmarch series as well as the standalone novels Tailchaser's Song and The War of the Flowers. Most recently, Williams published The Bobby Dollar series. Cumulatively, over 17 million copies of Williams's works have been sold.

Robert Paul “Tad” Williams was born in San Jose, California on March 14, 1957. He grew up in Palo Alto, the town that grew up around Stanford University. He attended Palo Alto Senior High School. His family was close, and he and his brothers were always encouraged in their creativity. His mother gave him the nickname “Tad” after the young characters in Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo. The semi-autobiographical character Pogo Cashman, who appears in some of his stories, is a reference to the nickname.