Actually, it's been great fun. One of the things that's been really exciting has been the chance to write near-future SF. It's really fun to play around with stuff that's happening in the contemporary world, to write satire. To play the Swiftean card.
In Otherland, you're blending futurism -- the worlds we create -- with myth -- the worlds we inherit from the past. This reminded me of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and how we don't just carry the Earth along with us, we carry our ideas about what Mars should be like as well. Could you say a bit more about this?
You're the first person to pick up on the Bradbury thing! It's been in all my work. He's really been second only to Tolkein in terms of things I read when I was young that have shaped what I write.
What I loved about Bradbury is that he really didn't ever care about the distinction between SF and fantasy. That's largely a modern marketing distinction. The Martian Chronicles is a working-through of various human themes -- Mars is purely incidental in scientific, real-world terms. Even at that time we knew Mars wasn't like that, we knew people weren't just going to hop the rocket to mars to set up a hot dog stand
Most SF is about the era it's being written in and always has been. It's an excuse to write about who we are and where we're going. The idea that it's actually extrapolative or predictive is part of its own publicity campaign. Heinlein was writing about what it was like to be Heinlein -- or someone like him -- in the 1950s and Jules Verne was writing from a 19th century perspective and his future was a 19th century future.
The point is, are the human values and the human ideas interesting? If so, the work stands up.
You've cited Bradbury, Dick, Sturgeon and a number of other "poetic" SF writers as favorites. If you have to name a few works dealing with space and other planets, what would they be?
Martian Chronicles you mentioned, the science of it is incidental. There have been books -- I'm not a science guy, but the first time I read Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, I thought that it showed how magic could happen just through real physics. That was it for me. I remember being very struck by Rendezvous with Rama. Dan Simmons' Hyperion books, because of that kind of idea of the scattering of human thought throughout the universe and seeing what happens as people build whole civilizations for themselves
Do you think you might stay in the SF field for awhile, once Otherland winds down?
I can't be sure yet. With the kind of length I tend to work with [Mountain is just under 700 pages long], you have to have a story that you're actually in love with. It just hits you. Whatever I do next will have to have that kind of effect on me.
How far have you gotten into the fourth book? At last report, you were about a quarter of the way done -- I guess that's about 200 pages?
That's right. About a third of the way through, 250 to 300 pages.
Can you leak just the smallest teasing detail about the surprises that lie in store for Renie, !Xabbu and company?
A lot of the more subtle plotlines -- the subplots, the elements of the books that have gotten people wondering, "what's that doing in there?" -- will leap into the foreground.
There's sort of a larger scientific theme that I can't really give away about the nature of humanity and humanity's future. For me, that's one of the major SF elements of the book. Anyway, that's going be coming near the end of the fourth volume.
What interests you in our drive to explore first new lands and now new planets?
One of the things about human beings -- and this is kind of the very core of our nature -- is that at a certain point in our evolution we became a species that stood up and looked around. That has been the formative experience. All other species move along parallel to the ground almost all the time.
Humans became upright creatures and tool-using creatures. What you're going to have at a certain point is a species that has specialized in general abilities, general problem solving abilities. We are not dependent on a certain part of the food chain -- what we developed was a real set of generalist tools, a thinking brain, hands to manipulate, the ability to stand up above the undergrowth.
To be human meant the ability to say, "hey, once we've exhausted the value of a situation, let's move on to another niche." It's in the nature of human beings to look around to say, "what else is there out there? Let's try it out."
And as we come to the limits of our own planet, we still have mysteries to solve but we've mostly exhausted them. As such, it's perfectly logical to move outward. Why not start trying another part of the galaxy?
What does space "mean" for humanity, in your opinion?
One way or another, when we explore space, we are going to find out what we really are. In that sense, and not wanting to sound excessively self-absorbed, space is the biggest mirror that there is.
We will either find that we are part of a community of complex life in the universe -- which just has endless ramifications -- or we will find out we are absolutely alone (and I think this is a small possibility) and earth is solitary as far as the life franchise goes.
One way or another, we will be finding out things about ourselves, about thinking life -- the observer observing the universe -- and until we reach out off our small planet, we are never going to understand ourselves.
How do you perceive the space program? Is it doing enough, too little, too much?
I think that the space program is in need of a major new resell to the generations coming along now because we have not effectively been able to connect most of the people who grew up after the triumphs of the Mercury and the Apollo programs into the possibilities.
What it now has to do is become a special interest group. It's a small group of people who are pushing for real serious space exploration and except for the commercial potential of low space, most people don't have a reason to get involved. It's just not part of the national consciousness.
There was a sense in the '50s and '60s that it was incredibly important. The human race was unified in this interest, "we're going to the moon." That has been almost completely lost.
There's a real strong need for the space program to become an item of national -- and international -- consciousness again. Maybe an international thing would help, maybe there are kids in Zimbabwe or Melanesia who might be the folks who would be the equivalent of the people who did the moon shot in the 1960s. They might bring the new energy to it. We need to make it interesting and important to people.
What inspires you?
I grew up in that strange mixture of being a kid in the 1960s, when at the same time you had this massive social upheaval -- and I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area -- and the space program was just rushing along. All this SF stuff was coming true also -- people were actually living in space for weeks at a stretch -- and the combination of these factors was so exciting. It was this feeling that anything can happen, we can remake society, we can go to other planets.
I was wondering today, actually, if this generation -- or two, now -- that has come after me has this sense of possibility, or whether there is this sense of things that are possible. Are people feeling positive or negative?
If there's a 17-year-old Tad Williams reading out there right now, what would you like to say to him?
Basically the one message -- I feel like I'm sending most of my messages across the iron curtain of adulthood, like I think most of us are, and so there's this strange feeling that I'm still around that age -- is that I wish I could make you understand me. Everything that you're feeling, others have been there before, and even though the world can seem grim or pointless or whatever -- and all these things are true -- this is the life you've got, so make the best of it.
Just learn something. It's the one thing they can never take away from you. Terrible things can happen to you, but as long as you enjoy learning, you'll always have that.
I always think of the scene in T.H. White [The Sword in the Stone], where Merlin tells Arthur -- even before he's the king, he's still just the Wart then -- the best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the one thing that never fails.
Mountain of Black Glass: Foreword
Mountain of Black Glass: Heart of the Beast (exclusive)
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