Tad Williams

I first met Tad Williams at the American Booksellers Association Convention in San Francisco in 1985. We were launching the first DAW hardcover list, and spearheading it with Tad's first novel, Tailchaser's Song. He had come to the ABA to meet me, his first editor, and to sign his bound galleys. At the time, Tad really didn't have the slightest idea how special his debut was, or that most first novelists didn't get the kind of treatment he was getting, but as he and his wife waltzed around our booth to unheard music, it was clear that he was very, very happy.

Later, in my hotel room, I asked him what he planned to write next. He discussed the possibility of writing an elephant book, or perhaps an alternate history. Then he mentioned this other book ... a really big book—something he had always wanted to write. It would be his ode to Tolkien, to Mervyn Peake, to all the great fantasy writers who had influenced his life. He didn't feel experienced enough yet, but he knew it was something he eventually would have to do. Concerned with the continued commerciality of his career, I convinced him to try writing this other, "bigger" novel. I don't think either one of us ever imagined just how big it would turn out to be.

It took Tad three years to perfect his craft sufficiently to publish The Dragonbone Chair, the first volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, and it would be an additional five years until we published the third and concluding volume, the massive To Green Angel Tower, which spent five weeks on The New York Times and the London Times best-seller lists, It was during the writing of this 3,OOO page trilogy that Tad evolved into one of the finest writers I have ever read.

Now Tad writes whatever he wants. And he gets better and better.

His recently completed science fiction quartet, Other/and, is a true masterwork.

Although Tad is one of the smartest, most literate, and most talented men I know, he's also just . . . Tad. Gregarious, interesting, warm, humorous, unpretentious, and interested in editorial input—in many ways he's still the same person who danced to that unheard music.

—BW