Tad Williams
Tad Williams
Robert Paul "Tad" Williamsis an American writer. He is the international bestselling fantasy and science fiction author of the multivolume Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, Otherland series, and Shadowmarch series as well as the standalone novels Tailchaser's Song, The War of the Flowers, Caliban's Hour, and Child of an Ancient City. Most recently, Williams published The Bobby Dollar series. His short fiction and essays have been published in anthologies and collected in Rite: Short Work and A Stark and Wormy...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth14 March 1957
CountryUnited States of America
Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.
If God is all-powerful, then the Devil must be nothing more than a darkness in the mind of God. But if the Devil is something real and separate, than perfection is impossible, and there can be no God... except for the aspirations of fallen angels....
Our lives aren't even about doing real things most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been to, discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age - Hell it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds. No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds.
So, now I am a man , he thought. Well, almost. Almost a man.
Don't go out in the world and get chased by monsters and madmen. Don't make enemies.
We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.
We tell lies when we are afraid, . . . afraid of what we don't know, of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.
Never make your home in a place -- make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it -- memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.
Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.
One of the fascinating things about researching Heaven and Hell is, of course, the fact that there are so few descriptions of Heaven, because most people can't really explain what it would be like beyond a couple of sentences, whereas Hell is quite often personal.
My parents were perfectly open-minded about everything. They never tried to convince us of what was true or what wasn't true in their minds. We were just presented with the information that was around and pretty much allowed - though, I mean, we knew how they felt. We knew they didn't go to church. So obviously that had an effect.
If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's really hard to do if you don't know a lot, at least in a basic way, about how the real world works.
People may get tired of hearing from me, but I don't think I'll ever run out of things that I want to write about.
I've always been partial to werewolves, perhaps because there's a desperation to their plight that resonates.