TALKING MEAT

ANNE GAY talks to best-selling author TAD WILLIAMS about his Otherland sequence.

With the Otherland series, Tad Williams has come up with that triumph in sf, an endlessly flexible concept. 'It was certainly one of the things that appealed to me when the idea first came to me,' he says. 'It really could go almost any direction. Yes, it was really exciting coming up with that. There was a sense of hand-rubbing glee: this is going to be fun! I get to go wild and drag in anything I want to, and play with things, and invent concepts as much as I want. I did also very definitely say, "I will have a story that has arc to it," because it would be too easy to indulge myself.'

Otherland is his second multi-volume epic, this one very much sf rather than the fantasy of his first, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. 'One of the most fascinating things about writing multi-volume books.' Williams explains, 'is that you actually have to know what you're doing at the ending better than people who write single volume novels, because your revisions can only occur in the later parts of the books. You know, you've already published the first parts and what's your option? To go door to door with a red pen and ask people to give you your books back and cross out "dead" and write "not quite dead" because I need that character? So I had the bold skeleton of the thing and I knew what was going to have to happen by the ending, and I know generally what the big points are: the endings and the set pieces. What I didn't know was everything that would happen along the way.

'The flip side of that is you have to commit yourself to certain things to be able to foreshadow properly. On the other hand, what glories for the author in writing a really big story! These multi-volume books are huge, self-organising things and what begins to happen is that ideas bubble up out of the mixture. You didn't necessarily expect them but they have to happen, they make complete sense, they fit with everything else.

'Mostly it's enjoyable because there is a certain amount of chaos in it. You have turned all of these things loose and let them scatter, and invariably some of them are going to bump together in ways you can find useful. And of course if you're going to have to go into the next volume before you find out if that was worthwhile or not, it's a real risk. What you're doing in a sense is trusting in your own subconscious patterning, trusting that you actually knew at some level what would feel right, what would fit into something later on. I literally did not know what a lot of things in the first volume meant. I just knew that it felt like there had to be something here that would be explained later on, and I had to leave it dangling and then come up with a solution. So there are times when you let the dogs loose and you just kind of hope they come back. Otherwise it's just stenography and that's boring.'

Does it always go smoothly? Tad says not. 'When I was lost in the vast and seemingly endless track through the third volume of the epic fantasy, and I was going through a bad time in my life anyway, and this book was just getting longer and longer and longer, one of my friends said to me, "I have the perfect solution for you. Just tell everybody that it's a post-modern novel and that the second volume is actually the end! That's life, you know? Nothing resolves." It was very tempting to just go, "No, it is done! Didn't you realise? That was the final volume!"

The hard-edged science fiction of the Net is about as far as you can get from fantasy. The ramifications of virtual reality is the principal matter with which this sweeping epic deals. Does Tad really foresee cyberspace developing in the ways he has predicated, a place where people can assume bodies and personalities that are impossible in real life? 'Is the real-world Net as shown in this book going to come to pass? Well, absolutely. What we're eventually going to have is essentially full-service plumbing. It's going to come into the household in one pipe. You'll do everything that way, in the same way that people are with electricity now. They'll just take it for granted. It won't be, "Oh look, Johnny, the special hyperscreen is doing this and this," any more than we go, "I'm going to turn on the electrical light switch now and ignite the filament." It'll just be part and parcel of everyday life, and we're getting there a little bit already.

'One of the things that fascinates me is that we already live in the info-sphere completely, without necessarily realising it, even people who are not particularly computer people. Eighty percent of stuff that people think about is stuff that they've had no physical face-to-face contact with anyway. They're thinking about people that they see on television, things they read about in newspapers that have been electronically printed based on wire-stories from all over the world, things people have told them about on the telephone. Princess Diana, for example, was more real to a lot of folks than people they actually come into contact with every day. We live in the info-sphere already. We just don't quite acknowledge this because it's come up on us incrementally. To my way of thinking Otherland is a pretty straight-line extrapolation of trends that already exist.'

Are his predictions then both good news and bad? 'Well, yeah. Sure, there's crass commercialism and radical factions. That's already in place. But I tried also to show that there are positive sides to these technologies. There are things that people can do in this near future that are fabulous, and a lot of readers are going, "Oh, I'd love to be able to do that!" You juggle what's going to work best and still be within the realms of possibility.'

But this is not Mary Poppins. Scattered throughout Otherland there are characters who are obsessed with death. Williams says, 'I have hit that point in my life where I have realised in an emphatic and undeniable way that life is a one-way journey. One of the things that came very clear to me early on in is that these books are about mortality, which is why the sub-themes that run all through these books are about childhood and children, because that is the flipside. If you are a person like me of uncertain at best religious beliefs, then when you talk about immortality you're talking about essentially two things: you're talking about the works of the human hand and mind, and you're talking about the fruit of our being, which are our children. And you're also dealing with the very human impulse: "No! I don't want that to be true of me, that I have to die like everybody else. That's not fair! I want to live forever!"

'But the spin-offs from those, the adjunct stuff, derive from that central theme of coming to terms with mortality or trying to buy your way out of it, which is what these rich and powerful people in the books are doing. The series is developing a whole bunch of resonant sub-themes about childhood, about fairy-tales, about what makes us human.'

At that intersection of death and humanity Williams has set Western science against Eastern mysticism in the person of a young Bushman. 'When you get all these things going they're like strings on a guitar, they resonate with each other. But what I thought was interesting was to put those two things into opposition. Now, obviously if you've got the world's most powerful information network ever created, at some level there's a representation of scientific thought in its most modern form. Yet at the same time as we're doing these incredible things, human beings are still animals. We are still meat organisms with a million-year-old brain in our heads. It perceives no difference between virtual and real. It processes what it's given. So I wanted to get the very basic form of — not basic in the sense of simplistic, but basic in the sense of tied to earlier versions of humanity — the very basic form of human response to the human condition, so I could put these two things in apposition, or in opposition actually, and let them comment on each other subtextually as the story went along. I picked the Bushmen for a very specific reason: I wanted somebody aboriginal to be a central character. Just as all the other stuff was being interpreted in a kind of science fiction way, like the universe is a collection of inputs and outputs, I wanted somebody over here saying essentially, "No, the universe sits on the back of a giant turtle". You know, an approach which feels very common-sensical to people if that's what they've lived with. So I wanted an aboriginal character and I eventually chose Bushmen because when you're setting up this dynamic of modern wisdom versus ancient wisdom, I did not want the easy identification of purely a First World-Third World issue. And the Bushmen were hosed by everybody, Black and White.'

East versus West, death against life: does Otherland come down to that? Williams laughs. 'I did not expect people to go through four incredibly long volumes without realising why the richest and most powerful people in the world would build this incredibly wonderful Valhalla for themselves where they can be anything they want to without having to worry about physical harm or physical health. Rich people grasping for immortality, that's not the big secret of Otherland. The big secrets are yet to come!

Anne Gay is the author of the highly acclaimed Mindsail and editor of the popular Science Fiction Zone at www.lineone.net. Her psychotherapy self-help book Your Emotional Toolkit: Relationships will be published in spring 2002 under the name of Anne Nicholls by Piatkus of London. Her own SF website is at www.herebedragons.co.uk/gay/index.htm while her psychotherapy site is at www.emotionalmagic.net.