Swift Author Sean William says 'Hello'

Hi!  I live in the heart of Adelaide, South Australia. In another universe I write music for a living, but here I write science fiction instead.

In 1990 I started writing professionally, devoting thirty to forty hours a week on top of various part-time jobs to see how far I could get. If I hadn't had a novel published by 2000 I would reconsider my decision and maybe try music instead. Thankfully, things have worked out well: more than a hundred finished short stories and six novels down the track, I'm pleased to say that it looks, in this universe, like I made the right decision.

Of course, not all of those short stories have been published. About fifty -- covering horror and erotic comedy as well as science fiction -- have seen the light of day so far.

On the novel front, I write either solo or with Shane Dix -- a fellow-Adelaidean who, like me, enjoys science fiction for all its New Wave highs and sci-fi lows. In Metal Fatigue I explore the possibilities of the next century while at the same time indulging my love of crime and detective fiction. Shane and I have written the space opera Evergence series, in part to pay homage to the sort of stories we grew up with -- Blake's 7 in particular -- but mostly because we just plain like the stuff. It's fun to write and it's fun to read (we hope): what else can one ask for?

But life isn't all writing. With my borderline muso hat on, I have studied for BA in music, qualified as a Sound Engineer and currently work in a specialist CD shop. I like 20^th century serial and electronic music, and am a particular fan of such diverse acts as Devo, Gary Numan, and Frank Zappa (no-one said my taste had to be any good, did they?).

My other interests include archaeology, particularly that of the Old Testament, and psychology. From there, maybe it follows that I have an interest in religion: I was once a practising Anglican, then an initiated witch, then a card-carrying SubGenius, but I'm now just an open-minded atheist and sceptic. I discovered gardening a year ago, and am still in awe of it. Jack Dann and Janeen Webb recently reported in their anthology Dreaming Down-Under that I cook a "mean curry".

Find out more about Sean's great first novel, Metal Fatigue

Look up The Evergence Trilogy (The Prodigal Sun , The Dying Light , The Dark Imbalance ), co-written by Sean and Shane Dix

Editor's Update

Sean recently finished working on three series simultaneously: The Books of the Change (a solo fantasy trilogy generously supported by the Australia Council), the Orphans series (a post-Spike space opera co-written with Shane Dix, and the Force Heretic trilogy (set in the Star Wars: New Jedi Order universe and also co-written with Shane Dix).

 

Future series include the Books of the Cataclysm, a prequel/sequel series set in the same universe as the Books of the Change, and a diptych of science fiction novels (Geodesica) in collaboration with Shane Dix.

 

(For information on these and other titles, go to www.seanwilliams.com)

 

As well as novels, Sean has had over 60 short stories published in a variety of places around the world.  "Ghosts of the Fall" was first published in Volume IX of the annual anthology series of the Writers of the Future Contest, in which it was a prize-winner.  Three stories were reprinted in the Strahan and Byrne Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy series.  "Going Nowhere" appeared in The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories, "A Map of the Mines of Barnath" was chosen for inclusion in Centaurus, a collection of the best short Australian SF published in the last 25 years, and "Evermore" was reprinted in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best SF 17 (2000).  His work has been translated into French, Japanese, Hebrew, Russian and Polish, and collected in the Ditmar Award-winning New Adventures in Sci-Fi (1999) and A View Before Dying (1998), both from Ticonderoga Publications, and Doorway to Eternity (MirrorDanse Books, 1994).

 

He won two Aurealis Awards in 1996, one of them for Best Horror Short Story ("Passing the Bone").  The other was for Best SF Novel (Metal Fatigue, reprinted by the UK's Swift Publishers in hardcover in 1999).  His 1998 novel The Resurrected Man won the Ditmar Award for Long Fiction for that year.  He was short-listed for the SA Great Literature Award in 1999, and received it in 2000.

 

He is also known as a collaborator.  A non-fiction piece with Simon Brown, "No Axis, No Boundary: the Search for a Definition of SF", was nominated for the William Atheling Jr Award.  Together they also won the 1999 Best Horror Short Story Aurealis Award (for "Atrax") and were reprinted in Gardner Dozois' Year's Best SF 15 ("The Masque of Agamemnon").