Robert Paul "Tad" Williams (born March 13, 1957) is an American fantasy and science fictionwriter. He is the author of the multivolume Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, Otherland series, Shadowmarch series, and The Bobby Dollar series, as well as the standalone novels Tailchaser's Song and The War of the Flowers. Most recently, Williams published three novels in his series The Last King of Osten Ard, with the final novel The Navigator's Children being published in 2024.[3] More than 17 million copies of Williams' works have been sold.[4]
Williams is collaborating on a series of young-adult books with his wife, Deborah Beale, called The Ordinary Farm Adventures. The first two books in the series are The Dragons of Ordinary Farm and The Secrets of Ordinary Farm. The in-progress third book is under the current title The Heirs of Ordinary Farm and does not have a release date yet.[3]
Early life and career
Robert Paul "Tad" Williams was born in San Jose, California, on March 14, 1957.[5][6][7] He grew up in Palo Alto, the town that grew up around Stanford University. He attended Palo Alto Senior High School.[8] His family was close, and he and his brothers were always encouraged in their creativity.[9] His mother gave him the nickname "Tad" after the young characters in Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo.[10] The semi-autobiographical character Pogo Cashman, who appears in some of his stories, is a reference to the nickname.[11]
Williams also worked for Apple, developing an interest in interactive multi-media. He and his colleague Andrew Harris created a company, Telemorphix, in order to produce it. The result was "M. Jack Steckel's 21st Century Vaudeville", which was broadcast on San Francisco Bay Area local TV in 1992 and 1993.[13][14][15]
In his mid twenties, he turned to writing and submitted the manuscript of his novel Tailchaser's Song to DAW Books.[9] To get his publishers to look at his first manuscript he spun a story about needing a replacement copy because his had been destroyed. It worked.[18] DAW Books liked it and published it, beginning a long association that continues to this day. Williams continued working various jobs for a few more years, including three years from 1987 to 1990 as a technical writer at Apple Computer's Knowledge Engineering Department, taking problem-solving field material from engineers and turning it into research articles[19] (which led, in part, to the Otherland books), before making fiction writing his full-time career.[12]
Writing and influences
Writing long stories was an early hallmark for Williams. "I remember specifically one 'folktale' assignment when I was thirteen that was supposed to be three pages, and I wound up writing a seventeen-page sword-and-sorcery epic with illustrations, etc."[1] His first attempt at professional writing was "a rather awful science-fiction screenplay called The Sad Machines that I've never shown to anyone outside my family, I think. The only interesting thing about it now is that its main character, Ishmael Parks, was a definite precursor to Simon in the Osten Ard books."[1][20]
The biggest single influence on me was reading The Lord of the Rings when I was about eleven.[22] I think it was the idea of created worlds and imaginary history that grabbed me. I was also very influenced by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's early Marvel Comics and by Dickens. And later, Gravity's Rainbow knocked my socks off and made me want to be a grown-up writer. Art, theatre and music are a whole different set of influences. Jason and the Argonauts, The Tin Drum, and Performance all got into my brain, just for instance.[23]
Williams has also had an influence on other authors in his genre. His Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series was one of the works that inspired George R. R. Martin to write A Song of Ice and Fire. "I read Tad and was impressed by him, but the imitators that followed—well, fantasy got a bad rep for being very formulaic and ritual. And I read The Dragonbone Chair and said, 'My god, they can do something with this form,' and it's Tad doing it. It's one of my favorite fantasy series."[28][29] Martin incorporated a nod to Williams in A Game of Thrones with "House Willum": The only members of the house mentioned are Lord Willum and his two sons, Josua and Elyas, a reference to the royal brothers in The Dragonbone Chair.[30]
Williams and his wife and partner Deborah Beale live in Northern California with their two children and "far more cats, dogs, turtles, pet ants and banana slugs than they can count."[9]
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