Certainly one problem was the level of invention required. Metropolitan took place on an entirely invented world, and I had to decide how everything looked and worked. The buildings, the telephones headsets, not handsets , the cars powered by hydrogen , the subway systems both pneumatic and tracked , the elevators hydraulic , the computers analog or mechanical, nothing digital , data storage on big dictaphone belts.
Not just television, but movies are carried by cable— there are no broadcast media. Having to create all this undoubtedly slowed down the actual writing. So did working on the class, political, and philosophical stances adopted by the various characters.
I write about power. In fact a write about power a lot. And Metropolitan is probably my most overt meditation on the nature of power— plasm, after all, is a realized metaphor for pure power.
The Byronic adventurer Constantine, paraphrasing Spinoza, wishes freedom for himself in the same degree he wishes it for others. Or so he says, anyway. His sometime lover Sorya, paraphrasing Nietzsche, is all about the Will to Power, and cares nothing for the lower orders.
Aiah, our heroine, is very much a part of the lower orders, and must learn the ways of sorcery and power in order to fulfill her own, considerably more modest, ambitions. It all took a long time to put this together, and by the time I had, I was running into trouble. I had hundreds of pages of manuscript, and no end in sight. It was right there in my outline, a very detailed outline that turned out to be of no help whatsoever in the actual writing.
I decided it was time to bring Metropolitan to an end and write a big To Be Continued on the whole enterprise. I found what I thought to be a satisfactory ending, wrote it, and prepared to start on the next book, which would carry on the story from the same outline as the first. After the delivery, a lot of Really Awful Stuff happened, which I will detail in a further essay. So here I had written what I considered to be an exemplary high fantasy, full of magic and mystery, but what did my readers see?
They saw science fiction. Readers were convinced that plasm was some kind of advanced nanotechnology. I wanted to tear out my hair.
Readers totally obsessed about the Shield. And furthermore, they were really angry at me for not explaining it, and for making this a book about magic instead of a book about Solving the Problem of the Shield.
What was happening was that readers were reading the books with science fiction protocols instead of fantasy protocols. Fantasy is about cool magical stuff. Science fiction is about solving technical problems. Actually that would be a pretty cool book. Though I suspect JG Ballard has already written it.
Dragons, for example, are part of the Furniture of Fantasy. Flying cars are part of the Furniture of Science Fiction. So what happened with this book is that my megalomaniacal attempt to rewrite the rules of fantasy succeeded in confusing everybody and convincing a significant percentage of the readership that I completely suck.
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Los Angeles Public Library. Metropolitan Walter Jon Williams. Set on future Earth or near earth maybe a different world line or colony of earth Where Plasm a sort of semi magical energy is metered and sold to wealthy Sorcerers. Never read anything but excellent by this author and Metropolitan is no exception. Williams understands that science fiction can breathe life into language.
Ever the expert storyteller, Williams provides more than enough suspense. Walter Jon Williams. Only registered users can write reviews. Please, log in or register. The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled. Buy Ebooks. All Books. Baen Community.
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