My Nebula-nominated novel Metropolitan is on sale for a mere 99 cents, and may be purchased at Amazon, Google Play, iBooks, Kobo, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble.
If you’re interested in more about the novel and its, um, colorful history, you’re welcome to check out the series of essays I wrote about it, the Worldbuilding, the Writing & Reception, and the Lawyers.
And if you’re not content to take my word, feel free to check out some reviews:
“A spectacular blend of fantastic science, high politics, and low intrigue . . . Williams’s world and characters are richly imagined yet utterly real.”
—Melissa Scott
“Entertaining . . . Williams understands that science fiction can breathe life into language . . . [His] writing is always lean, lively and engaging.”
New York Times Book Review
“Blends SF aspects with noir stylings to create a potent atmosphere or urban dystopia . . . Ever the expert storyteller, Williams provides more than enough suspense.”
Publishers Weekly
To “be that guy” for a second: do you have any notion of when, if ever, you might get around to writing Heaven In Flames?
Well, right now I’m being paid to work on =another=- unfinished series, so it’ll be a while yet. Heaven in Flames has been turned down by every publisher, pretty much, because they don’t want to reprint an “unsuccessful” series (even though the series wasn’t unsuccessful really).
I’d really like to write it, but life keeps turning up other projects for me.
I love this series! What a pity that it was “unsuccessful.”
It reminds me of a running joke my wife and I have over J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. We both love this book, so we offer it fairly often to people who ask for book recommendations, particularly if they are amenable to gallows humour in the line of, say, Evelyn Waugh. (One of the funniest episodes is the cholera epidemic – humour just doesn’t get any blacker.) We have lent out copies many times, and even received some of them back.
But here’s the thing that keeps us laughing: I don’t think a single one of our victims enjoyed the book. The usual response is polite but noncommittal, followed by a sort of edging away, as from a bad smell.
I just don’t get it, because it’s not like we are singular in liking the book. Crikey, it won a Booker! But I think Farrell’s reputation suffered when he died untimely (if poetically, being swept out to sea by a wave.)
Thank you for posting links to your earlier remarks on these books, which I had not seen.
I think this is exactly right: “Metropolitan has the same relationship to a future Earth that Lord of the Rings has to Europe’s past.” And I think that is also the source of the trouble: for many people, the appeal of fantasy is nostalgia for an imaginary past. You can be nostalgic for something that never was, but not for something that will never be.
Or put another way, any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. If magic isn’t a little clunky, a little unreliable, and doesn’t involve sacrificing any newts or salamanders, then golly, it just isn’t magic.
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