New Tad Williams novella

You can read Three Lilies And Three Leopards, a new novella by bestselling author Tad Williams, in Subterranean: Winter 2012.

Here's what Williams had to say regarding the novella:

I must have discovered Poul Anderson when I first began haunting used book stores and buying my own books. All I remember is that his fantasy hit me like a sledge hammer, particularly the grit and realism. I also was knocked out—and the best example is Three Hearts and Three Lions—by his idea of taking one of these magical, fairy-tale worlds and trying to figure out how it actually WORKED. This has carried over into my own work, and is one of the reason that I often think of myself as being a “hard fantasy” writer. Because of Anderson’s influence, I try to make even the craziest stuff feel as though it could really happen in a universe with rules. Later on I was hit equally hard by Tau Zero, which convinced me that science (or at least fictional science) could be as exciting as magic any old time. I’m sure that at some subconscious level Anderson’s versatility also convinced me never to get pinned down as a writer, not to keep retreating to familiar territory but to follow an idea wherever it led without concern for genre boundaries.

(I’m sure a few of my long-suffering editors are now cursing Mr. Anderson’s illustrious name for this important contribution to my waywardness.)

In later years I read a great deal more of his work and loved it, and doubtless internalized a great deal of it to the influence of my own work, but I will forever remember my breathless first response to things like the “boiler explosion” in Three Hearts and the way time itself turns widdershins in Tau Zero. More than any other writer, I think he opened me up to how facts make fantasy more believable, and since belief is at the core of what we writers do, that was a gift beyond price. Thank you, Poul.

You can read Three Lilies And Three Leopards here.