Walter Jon Williams (born 15 October 1953) is an American writer, primarily of science fiction.
Several of Williams' novels have a distinct cyberpunk feel to them, notably Hardwired (also an homage to Roger Zelazny's novel Damnation Alley) and Voice of the Whirlwind. However, he has explored a number of different styles and genres, including humorous sf (e.g., the Majistral series), interstellar empires and warfare (Dread Empire's Fall series), alternate history (Wall, Stone, Craft), science fantasy (Metropolitan and City on Fire), disaster thriller (The Rift), and historical adventure (Privateers and Gentlemen series).
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Urban fantasy, cyberpunk. Some time ago they were considered as the new frontiers in sf. What has happened since then?
Science fiction has evolved. The worldview of cyberpunk, which was of a future that was multicultural and multileveled, with the same technology being used in radically different way by different strata of people, has been absorbed into mainstream SF. The ideas are there, but they're being applied more broadly.
How does a sf writer move in between all of the streams that underground- and mainstream culture and the book market generate every day?
Writers have barely advanced into the paleolithic era where swift cultural change is concerned. We still have to sit at the keyboard, day after day, and work at what we do. Commitment to our work can't change because something in the culture has changed--- we still have to finish the work to get paid, and it's still years after that before it sees print.
If you want cutting-edge culture, you don't read a book, you watch video or games.
In you last works you seem to be more interested in some topics of classical sf instead of pioneer literature. Is this your own choice, or does this happen because the market wants something specifically "old fashioned"?
The science fiction market in the US is at present saturated with nostalgia. Perhaps this is because science fiction readers are older and prefer the sort of stories they read when they were young. Perhaps it's because reality has killed off so many beloved science fiction ideas. (Look at the film 2001 if you want to see where we thought the future was going: we build wheel-shaped space stations and lunar colonies, send huge ships to the outer planets, the Cold War lasts forever, and computers are huge, omniscient machines that we can talk to as if they were people.)
The market will accept radical work, but only from young unknowns who can be published cheaply, then discarded if their work fails to find an audience. Middle-aged writers like myself are just told to shut up and write our novels.
My next work, Implied Spaces, will be a radical view of the future, but I had to go outside the mainstream to find a publisher.
If you could imagine yourself writing the ideal sf novel, which would be its topic?
It wouldn't be a novel, but a cross-media platform. There would be text, and also video, graphic novels, manga, radio, and installments in magazines. Strangers would leave messages on your telephone, or walk up to you on the street and hand you a coded message.
I worked on a project like this in 2005, much of it archived at lastcallpoker.com.
How do you imagine the future of sf? Will it still explore the farthest frontiers of our possibilities, or will it become a sort of crossover, a mix of fantasy, sf, thriller and catastophistic literature?
Science fiction has conquered the world. We have cellphones, PDAs, computers on our desks, high-speed internet, game platforms with more computing power than existed in the entire world in 1950.
Science fiction as a literature is on the verge of becoming as irrelevant as the Western. The world has passed it by. Science fiction writers are going to have to come up with a radically new reason for people to read their work.
Social engagement and science fiction: China Miéville's steampunk fantasy shows that a relationship is still possible. What is your own meaning?
Science fiction is an ideal vehicle for socially engaged fiction, but it has to find an audience, and the message needs to be something more relevant than stale Libertarianism or Marxist nostalgia.
You wrote also a Privateers and Gentlemen series. Would you imagine yourself writing for instance an alternate history trilogy?
Possibly. I've written alternate history, but only as short fiction. My own aesthetic for alternate history holds that shorter forms are superior, because you can maintain a delicate interplay between the real and alternate worlds that can cause a resonance in the reader. At longer length, alternate history threatens to turn into a long list of how things are different alongside a long list of how things are the same, all mixed with pages and pages of historical trivia, and that bores me.
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What are you working to at the moment?
A new novel, Implied Spaces, that I hope will push SF's current tropes as far as they can go.
