David J. Williams

Ok, ok, ok, it took me till yesterday to see it, but I’ve been #$# swamped trying to figure out how to get the Operative and a bunch of other guys off a spaceship (i.e., working on book three). Anyway, I loved it. Sure, it wasn’t as good as the graphic novel—how could it have been?—but this will be the definitive film version; there’ll be no remake decades from now while our kids’ kids tease us for our questionable fashionable choices.  Others have dealt with the big picture; I’m going to tell you the details I appreciated the most:

1.  The fight between the Comedian and Ozymondias:  finally we get to see the WHOLE FUCKING THING.

2.  The credit-sequence in general, and the bit where the Comedian blows away JFK in particular.

3.  The capturing of that paranoid, Cold War feel. Charlie Jane Anders over at io9 had a great piece on this, btw.

4.  And speaking of. . love the Doctor Strangelove war-room.  That #$# ruled.  And it makes us realize, too, that the one thing the original war-room lacked was . . . Nixon.

5.  Snyder kept Bubastis the Technicolor Lynx!!!  And wasted him too.  Alright.

6.  Rorschach.  They had so much less time/bandwidth to develop him here, but they kept those prison scenes, so it’s okay by me.

7.  The ending. I’d love to have been a fly in the wall during the script rewrites on this one, while they specced out the budget for 20,000 tons of squid, and their ability to reach an audience beyond the fanboys . . . . and considered that the only way to make it work would be to simultaneously pump airborne LSD into the movie theaters.  Maybe they should have gone for it, but I can see why they didn’t.  Framing Dr. Manhattan was an elegant solution.  It wasn’t the optimal one, but like I said, that would have involved acid.

Anyway.  It’ll be interesting to see how the movie does this weekend.  The smart money is saying it won’t have staying power, in spite of David Hayter’s desperate plea for the faithful to get in there and do their duty to Moore and country.  I know I’ll be back in that theater, though.  This one rocked.

Those immortal words, flung in abuse by a protestor on Wall Street last fall, also constitute the title of Dan Hind’s essay on the economic crisis. Hind, the author of a book on our use/abuse of the Enlightenment, seeks to get to the root causes of the accelerating economic downturn, and finds them in the dismantling of the Bretton Woods agreement, which allowed the U.S. to run up massive debts even as the rich became disproportionately richer—and the overall system became ever more unstable amidst the orgy of profit-taking green-lighted at the very highest levels of the political/economic elite, all at the expense of the Average Worker.  This is the kind of explanation you’re unlikely to see much of among the elite’s Tame Intellectuals (as Hind so aptly calls them), who are charged with continuing to proclaim their Faith in the Free Markets, as well as “let’s not blame the system for a few bad apples”, but it’s one of the more compelling arguments I’ve read thus far on what we’re facing.

It also gets at one of the things I thought about a lot while writing MIRRORED HEAVENS:  the notion that our civilization is heading rapidly toward some kind of mega-discontinuity/overhaul out of which something new will emerge, for good or ill.  Again, our Tame Intellectuals don’t help us here—they’ve encouraged us to believe in our current Way of Life as the culmination of everything that went down before (see, Fukuyama, Francis). But imho science fiction is all about this discontinuity, whether it comes in a month, in a decade, or in a century. It’s about somehow unshackling our minds from the tyranny of the now—that mindset that literally can’t envision anything else. We’ve got a long way to go here; preoccupied with its own petty infighting, SF is largely absent from serious debate on the causes or ramifications of our current crisis. One hopes this will change as the situation worsens (as it assuredly will); now, more than ever, we need to take the long view.

One of the agonizing/tense things about being a new writer is the Desperate Need to Secure Blurbs (aka Promotional Quotes).

One of the weird things about being a not-so-new-as-you-used-to-be writer is People Actually Asking YOU for Blurbs. Yesterday a manuscript showed up on my door from Random House; a book that Bantam is bringing out next year, and they want ME to take a look at it. That’s really bizarre. Excuse me while I go blow my mind now.

My novel The Mirrored Heavens is available now at all fine bookstores (and probably a few crappy ones too).

“It’s no game serving down in the city”: Richard Morgan had a really interesting post last week on Suvudu.com, regarding the essentially simplistic nature of Lord of the Rings, and the flashes of tantalizing complexity we nonetheless see from time to time beneath that surface. Inevitably, he ran into all the usual trouble from the legions of Tolkien fans who can’t stand the idea that the books might be anything less than perfect.  Which is something that Morgan may even have anticipated:  die-hard fantasy readers are a notoriously excitable bunch, so what better way to promote your own epic fantasy than to start lobbing stinkbombs at the Big Enchilada?  I’m guessing THE STEEL REMAINS sales are up this week. . . .

Still, putting aside all vitriol and speculation, I think Morgan’s fundamental point is an absolutely valid one—and it made me check out the orc captains’ dialogue that he cites at the end of TWO TOWERS.  He’s right; it’s fascinating—four pages of sheer brilliance utterly at odds with the overall tone of the work—and it makes one wonder what the series would have been like had the whole project been shot through with that kind of world-weariness and complexity.  My honest guess is that (Morgan’s hopes aside) it probably would have been a lesser book, as I don’t think that’s where Tolkien’s heart was at.  Ultimately, we need fairy tales, and he provided us with what I would continue to maintain is one of our greatest.

As for all the crap it spawned, I’ll save that for another post.

As I continue to flail away at mine, I’m thinking about trilogies 24/7 these days. Dan Meth (great name) posted on the subject recently, assessing twenty-one Hollywood trilogies, and arguing that the second movie is often the best (e.g., EMPIRE STRIKES BACK), and the third is usually the worst (e.g., TERMINATOR 3). I pretty much agree with his ratings, with the following exceptions:

—Spiderman 2 was overrated.

—the Matrix sequels were good-not-great-but-certainly-not-putrid. I’m not the first to note that the second disappeared up its own philosophical arsehole, but the third made up for a lot of lost ground, and worked for me as a finale.

—I haven’t seen Die Hard 3 yet, but I fully intend to.

—Alien 3 is worth a second look. Though I sure wish they had gone with William Gibson’s version.

My novel MIRRORED HEAVENS is now available in mass-market at Amazon.

My lovely and talented agent, Jenny Rappaport, has told me that I absolutely HAVE to post on my blog that I’m eligible for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and that MIRRORED HEAVENS is eligible for a Hugo. I feel a little uncomfortable mentioning this, but I unswervingly follow Jenny’s advice in all things related to the literary business, and she has asked me to post this twice now, so there you have it. And hey, the nomination forms are here.

My own recommendation:  by all means nominate me for a Campbell, but for the Hugo, I’d recommend either ANATHEM or LITTLE BROTHER.  However, with this display of modesty and restraint (and, er, realism), I’m really just buying myself the right to shamelessly pimp the sequel BURNING SKIES, which you really ought to be thinking about for next year’s Hugo, even though you haven’t read it yet because it’s not due out for another few months.  I’d say it’s my masterpiece, but if that’s really the case, then I’ve got a real problem, as the third book has to be even better.  Did I mention that last book’s three hundred pages behind schedule?  I am so fucked.

Oh, and nominate John Joseph Adams for Best Editor, Short Form, because the guy has launched a new golden age of SF anthologies and is, yanno, the Slush GOD.

Spartacus here, back for the final day of my week of guest-blogging. Dave’s pitiful cries from the bedroom are growing faint, and I think I’ll have to open the door shortly if I want more food (I suppose I could eat him, but this would be a short-term solution).

So.  What’s in the inbox? <rummage> Aha, a post from Robert Thompson of Fantasy Book Critic. In his year-end round-up, he was rash enough to call MIRRORED HEAVENS a “smart, intense and engaging futuristic thriller that effectively combined cyberpunk, military science fiction and espionage.” Huh, not bad. Maybe Williams isn’t the ignoramus that he looks like when he’s failing to cater to my every need.

Anyway, I’ll conclude with MY year-end round-up, a little late, but what the heck.  My goals for 2009:

#5:  Keep my balls.

#4:  Catch at least one of those goddamn birds in that nearby tree

#3:  Turn all of my non-mouse toys into mouse toys.

#2:  Grow to tiger-like proportions so that I will be able to deal with all humans as they deserve.

#1:  Eat so much catnip I’ll think I actually know how to type.

Mirrored Heavens is available in mass-market paperback from Amazon.

So MIRRORED HEAVENS is now available in mass-market, which (as I learnt comparatively recently) is what you call the paperbacks that comprise 90% of all books out there, and 100% of those you’d see in airports or drug stores. It’s several dollars cheaper than the trade paperback that got released last summer—clocking in at $6.99, not bad for a recession—and contains special bonus material, to wit:

-map of the world of the 2110.  Though in the spirit of full disclosure, you can get one in full color on this website.)

-glossary.  Everything you ever wanted to know about the terminology of the early 22nd century.

-one set of dossiers.  Now these are the crown-jewels.  The back-cover says these are “agent dossiers”, but they’re also dossiers on the spymaster/handlers, as well as on the Inner Cabinet:  i.e., the rulers of the United States.  Want to know when Claire Haskell was born?  Want to know what Jason Marlowe’s bosses say behind his back?  There’s only one way to find out. For those of you who thought you knew what was going on, these are worth checking out.

And apparently the book’s almost sold out at Amazon, so I’m sending folks to Barnes and Noble.  Spartacus aka Wonderbeast may yet be able to get in on the Perpetual Dinner Plan.

UPDATE:  Book is back in stock at Amazon!

Ok, the mass-market of MIRRORED HEAVENS gets released tomorrow, and that means it’s Shameless Self-Promotion/mega-pimpage time. Events are going to be going down all week, so watch this space. . .

And I’m going to start off by introducing my partner in this marketing endeavor, Spartacus the Wonderbeast. He may be only five months old, but he is a marketing expert, and has been signed on at Chez Williams specifically to help me sell this paperback. In fact, his continuing to be supplied with unlimited amounts of chicken and turkey directly depends on Bantam moving thousands of copies of this book. But he’s not worried in the slightest, and is right now investigating a certain mouse-like toy that has rolled under the desk. Stay tuned for further updates. . .