A Fall In Autumn by Michael G. Williams- Part 1
On May 28, 2019 by JayeQ&A With Michael G. Williams
Editor’s note, with my apologies to Michael G. Williams. I created a placeholder for this post, and then wound up having emergency surgery before *finishing* the post. A lot of things fell by the wayside in the aftermath, and I’m honestly still not at 100%. This is the first post, where I share details about the book. Tomorrow I’ll post my review of this amazing book.
What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them?
I really wanted to talk about the particularly surreal moment we’re in as queer people. I keep talking about this, but it’s so central to what I was driving at with the character of Valerius that I find I can’t stop. J
I grew up in an exceptionally isolated community, steeped in a particularly hostile kind of evangelical fundamentalism. I escaped that place in search of somewhere I could relax a little only to find myself in a future where, on the one hand, straight people fill sports bars to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race and, on the other, my own state legislature wastes the citizenry’s time and money passing anti-trans “bathroom bills” and trying to undo my own marriage to another man. I just really didn’t expect to be stereotyped on both sides at once: as a raging menace, and as an on-call shopping companion.
Valerius is what his society calls an Artisanal Human, or an “Artie”: his parents made him without the advent of genetic engineering. Almost everyone in his society has been quite literally designed from the chromosomes up, either to perform some specific job or to be one of the elites who enjoy total physical and mental superiority. It’s a society that is, in theory, egalitarian, but in which the divides around social and economic power are exceedingly stark. Socially, being an Artie is supposed to put Valerius somewhere in the middle: some people want to put him on a pedestal as being an example of “pure” humanity, but others find him an embarrassing throwback to a barbaric time (specifically, our time – we’re the ancients of their legend and lore). Valerius escaped the genetic preserve where he grew up and made his way to Autumn, last of the great flying Cities and one of the biggest metropoles of his time. He has never quite gotten over finding that in wider society he is simultaneously fetishized and reviled.
I feel like that describes the queer communities pretty well at the moment, especially for those of us who are of a more activist bent. We really don’t know what reaction we’re going to get from the other people in our lives, but we know for sure we’re going to get one. It’s a wild time. I wanted to make that relatable to the reader without getting on a soapbox about it. I wanted to invite them into that deeply universal experience of feeling like an outsider looking in – because I think basically all of us feel that ourselves, regardless of our identity or presentation – and use that to get them thinking about the characteristic of Valerius that does not distinguish him particularly from the people in his own time but does distinguish him in ours: his queerness.
I think I succeeded. The reaction by queer readers has been strong. Most love it. A few hate it. Either way, I’m provoking a response and that tells me I am successfully speaking to something we are experiencing – and that some of us would rather not think about that. I count it as a win!
What was the weirdest thing you had to Google for your story?
Oh, that’s definitely the stuff on research into genetic memory and the way information gets passed down and “knowledge” gets activated by genetic expression. There’s a great article over at Scientific American from 2015 about this, and it opens with several fascinating examples: musicians who knew the rules of music from infancy, and a sculptor who has never had a lesson in his life but can reproduce perfectly lifelike representations of an animal after one glance. There is a ton of information locked away in our genes. We call it “instinct” or “talent” or “luck,” but it came to us from somewhere and it doesn’t have to be that sort of exceptional example to count. In the world of Valerius’ time, “school” is, for most people, just time-release genetic memory, and strictly controlled. I loved reading about that stuff. It tells us two really fascinating things: more of us is handed down from our past than we might think, and we’re not as in control of our own fates as we might wish. I can’t think of two notions more suited to a science fiction detective story. J
What character gave you fits and fought against you? Did that character cause trouble because you weren’t listening and missed something important about them?
The character of Solim. He’s a priest of a religion that considers Arties to be “pure” humans in a regressive, oppressive way and works to keep them disadvantaged in order to “preserve” them. They’ve gotten laws passed preventing Arties from accessing most medical care, for instance. Valerius has a deep hatred for that religion, but I needed Solim to be someone to whom Valerius might willingly return for information or advice. It would have been easy to go for some trivializing portrayal of him as a bumpkin or as an authoritarian on a power trip. I needed something subtler and more human and humane than that: I needed wisdom and certainty and I also needed him to be confident in a set of privileged beliefs the main character knows first-hand are damaging to everyone else. That was a real challenge. I hadn’t expected to struggle with his character as much as I did, and the resolution of his storyline surprised me even as I was writing it.
Who has been your favorite character to write and why?
In A Fall in Autumn it was definitely Valerius. I really adore him as a character. I like his sass, I like his determination, I like the way he can’t let something go when doing so would obviously be the smarter idea. I love how willing he is to take a dumb risk if he thinks it will get him a shot at the truth. As a kid (and as an adult) I was a huge fan of The Rockford Files and I worked to incorporate some of Jim Rockford’s mixture of ferocious tenacity and consistent empathy into Valerius. He’s bitter about some things, but he’s mostly at peace with his lot in life. If nothing else, none of the people who tried to keep him down have convinced him to give up. He may hide that resolve behind a façade of cynical snark, but that resolve wouldn’t be possible without a nice, wide streak of optimism down the middle of his character. Optimism like that is an act of bravery. That made me fall in love with him.
Out of all my books, a close second would be The Bull’s Eye from Deal with the Devil (the third book of The Withrow Chronicles). She’s retired from Special Forces and fallen backwards into becoming a vigilante superhero. She’s smart, she’s strong, she’s exceptionally determined, and she’s in no way a supernatural but she can keep up with those who are. I loved writing her because she chose to be exceptional in order to survive the traumas she faced. In the Withrow books, each vampire has their own reasons for becoming a monster but rarely did they do so as an expression of inner strength: quite the opposite, as they turned to vampirism in order to find a strength they (a) believed they needed and (b) believed they could never otherwise have. The Bull’s Eye gets to stand beside that as a mirror image of it: she has much in common with the vampires of those books but in just as many ways she’s taken their defining characteristics and turned them inside out.
What was the first book that made you cry?
Dracula, which is far and away my favorite novel of all time. I read it for the first time in 7th grade (over a teacher’s objections!). When Van Helsing joins them I started to feel like everything was going to work out for Lucy. When the men who love her – and love each other, having become blood brothers to protect her rather than rivals to compete over her – have to go with Van Helsing to their tomb, oh, my gods. That is a terrifying and heart-wrenching scene, and it works because the emotional bonds there are so meaningful and so out in the open. I absolutely wept for Lucy and for the others who knew her. It gets me every time, decades later.
What are you working on now, and when can we expect it?
I’ve just signed a deal for 4 more books in the world of A Fall in Autumn and will be writing the sequel over the summer. I can’t wait! I expect the second book, to be titled New Life in Autumn, will be out a year from now.
Later this year I have several other works, already finished and coming out from Falstaff Books:
Nobody Gets Out Alive will be coming out sometime soon, probably over the summer. It’s the fifth and final(-ish) book of The Withrow Chronicles, my suburban vampire series about a guy who became a vampire in the 1940’s and has declared himself the boss of all of North Carolina’s blood-drinkers. The series is a ridiculously fun sequence of genre mashups – vampires and zombies, vampires and superheroes, vampires and spy thrillers, vampires and war, vampires and their witch frienemies – telling a story that gets increasingly complex as Withrow slowly but surely learns the world of the supernatural is much bigger than he thought.
I also have the four-novella San Francisco urban fantasy series, SERVANT/SOVEREIGN. It starts with Through the Doors of Oblivion, and it’s about some of the most evocative moments in San Francisco’s history – such as the 1906 earthquake and fire – and witches and demons and time travel and real estate scams. I’m just exceptionally proud of it, and I get to really focus on the features of San Francisco I most adore, which are not necessarily the parts of the city they try to highlight for tourists. I don’t know exactly when that one is due out, either, but it’s made it through the content edits and the copyeditor and it’s now with the proofreader, so it’s getting close!
And, last but not least, I’ve reached the rights-reversion point on a bunch of short stories I sold years ago so I’m possibly going to reclaim those rights and produce an anthology of short stories and nonfiction essays I’ve written for various venues. That’s a maybe, though. We’ll see.
Thank you so much for having me – I really appreciate your and your readers’ time and attention. I hope you enjoy A Fall in Autumn and I would love to hear from you about it!
You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads.
Folks who sign up for my monthly newsletter get a free short story and can read the ongoing first draft of a story set in the world of A Fall in Autumn but in our time rather than 12,000 years from now. Give it a shot! I keep marketing to a minimum and try to focus on rewarding your interest with new content.
And thanks again!
About A Fall In Autumn
WELCOME TO THE LAST OF THE GREAT FLYING CITIES
It’s 9172, YE (Year of the Empire), and the future has forgotten its past.
Soaring miles over the Earth, Autumn, the sole surviving flying city, is filled to the brim with the manifold forms of humankind: from Human Plus “floor models” to the oppressed and disfranchised underclasses doing their dirty work and every imaginable variation between.
Valerius Bakhoum is a washed-up private eye and street hustler scraping by in Autumn. Late on his rent, fetishized and reviled for his imperfect genetics, stuck in the quicksand of his own heritage, Valerius is trying desperately to wrap up his too-short life when a mythical relic of humanity’s fog-shrouded past walks in and hires him to do one last job. What starts out as Valerius just taking a stranger’s money quickly turns into the biggest and most dangerous mystery he’s ever tried to crack – and Valerius is running out of time to solve it.
Now Autumn’s abandoned history – and the monsters and heroes that adorn it – are emerging from the shadows to threaten the few remaining things Valerius holds dear. Can the burned-out detective navigate the labyrinth of lies and maze of blind faith around him to save the City of Autumn from its greatest myth and deadliest threat?
Excerpt
The sun was over the trees at the southeastern edge of the sloped opening in the forest when I awoke. The sun woke me, actually: its rays on my face, the flicker of shadow and light as it played across my closed eyes. I was half dressed: my shoes off, my feet bare, and my coat spread over me in lieu of a blanket. My shirt was somewhere, probably. I wasn’t wearing it, anyway, and my eyes hadn’t opened yet, but I could feel it nearby the way you can sense an old dog by your chair or a former lover on the opposite side of an otherwise perfectly nice party.
My back curled against something firm and supporting and I felt gentle fingers stroke the tufts of silvery black at my temples. Hematite, a man told me once. I would always love him a little for saying that. My hair there wasn’t yet gray but no longer black and when wet it looked like hematite, and he said it like that meant something deep and significant and mystical I didn’t understand. Having someone’s fingers run through it felt good, though. It felt like a happy memory, like something I didn’t expect would happen much anymore if it ever really happened in the first place.
That simple touch was a comfort to me. It’s the most minor thing and, for that reason, the most missed when it’s gone. I don’t go long stretches without being touched, but it had been a while between caresses. This was that: a caress, and more; not exactly sexual but not exactly platonic. It was that happy in-between we call intimate. I made myself vulnerable to other men, and they themselves to me, more times than I can count in my too-short life. It didn’t always work out, though, that my usual flavor of street trade would show basic human kindness in return for mine.
None of that mattered, though. Those guys were long gone. Right that second, someone ran his fingers through my half-asleep hair, intimate and kind and caressing. I felt vulnerable and that was okay. For a few moments I wasn’t dying and I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t lonely and I wasn’t alone. The sun felt good, and the breeze through the branches sounded like Gaia herself telling me to go back to sleep. I thought for a moment I might be okay with dying fairly soon if I got to wake up like this every morning for the rest of my life.
“Okay,” I groaned. I didn’t move and I didn’t open my eyes because I wasn’t quite ready for the moment to go away even as I lifted the pin to pop its balloon. “You want something. So tell me what it is. Because if I say yes – if – I may not have much time to hold up my end of the bargain.” My voice dispelled all the magic of the moment, but his fingers were still at my temple, resting there, ready to go back to what we shared moments before. I rolled over and looked up at Alejandro, his purple hair down over half his face as he leaned on one elbow. I didn’t kiss him, but I did put one hand to his jaw and brush his cheek with my thumb. I wondered if he could feel that – really feel it, like skin feels it. “Let’s not pussyfoot around this. You want me to do something. The whole story about the angel and thinking someone was trying to kill you was bullshit, but there was something there, something worth chasing, so let’s have the truth now and get on with things.” I tried to smile at him. His expression was completely blank.
With the hand he used to brush my temples, he laid a fingertip behind my ear, cupping my face with barely a single point of contact. He still didn’t smile, but his eyes searched my face, my own eyes, for something. It occurred to me the correct phrasing might be to say he searched my eyes for someone. I assumed he’d been alive long enough to know a hell of a lot of people, and I would bet a nickel he looked for one of them in me. There are a hundred romantic stories about golems: meat sacks like me throwing ourselves at a golem out of infatuation with their embodiment of agelessness.
If he’d been there before, heard a hundred thousand of us wail about mortality and still willing to hear number one hundred thousand one, he must have a lot of love for humankind. No, I thought, more than that: he must have loved the hell out of one of us at some point. Maybe he was waiting for that guy to walk back into his life, reemerging from the vast but finite pool of genetic factors we possess as a species. I wondered if I simply seemed close enough to that long-lost lover to pass muster for a night.
I also wondered what made a golem want to get laid in the first place: ever the detective, after all.
“I really did see an angel in Splendor,” Alejandro said. He still wasn’t smiling. If anything, he had the muted seriousness, the understated gravitas, I’d long since come to recognize as the posture of someone telling the truth at long last. I wondered how long it had been. “I swear it to you. I swear it.” He surprised me, then, because he didn’t cry, golems don’t have tear ducts, but his eyelids quivered with the autonomic response to strong emotion. He still hadn’t moved at all, and we were shielded from the breeze so that his hair hung straight down like a perfectly still and settled curtain across half the stage of his face. “And I believe it would try to kill me if it knew I were here.”
Buy Links (gimme gimme)
Publisher: http://falstaffbooks.com/catalog/a-fall-in-autumn/
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MDXTT1W/
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1793066280/
Amazon CAN: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07MDXTT1W/
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Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43452627-a-fall-in-autumn
Author Bio
Michael G. Williams writes wry horror, urban fantasy, and science fiction: stories of monsters, macabre humor, and subverted expectations. He is the author of three series for Falstaff Books: The Withrow Chronicles, including Perishables (2012 Laine Cunningham Award), Tooth & Nail, Deal with the Devil, Attempted Immortality, and Nobody Gets Out Alive; a new series in The Shadow Council Archives featuring one of San Francisco’s most beloved figures, SERVANT/SOVEREIGN; and the science fiction noir A Fall in Autumn. Michael also writes short stories and contributes to tabletop RPG development. Michael strives to present the humor and humanity at the heart of horror and mystery with stories of outcasts and loners finding their people.
Michael is also an avid podcaster, activist, reader, runner, and gaymer, and is a brother in St. Anthony Hall and Mu Beta Psi. He lives in Durham, NC, with his husband, two cats, two dogs, and more and better friends than he probably deserves.
Author Website: http://www.michaelgwilliams-author.com
Author Facebook (Personal): https://www.facebook.com/mcmanlypants
Author Facebook (Author Page): https://www.facebook.com/MichaelGWilliamsAuthor/
Author Twitter: https://twitter.com/mcmanlypants
Author Instagram: https://instagram.com/mcmanlypants
Author Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6429992.Michael_G_Williams
Author Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Michael-G.-Williams/e/B001KIYBBU/
Giveaway
Michael is giving away an eBook copy of “Perishables,” book one of The Withrow Chronicles, with this post:
Everybody hates their Homeowner’s Association, and nobody likes a zombie apocalypse. Put the two together, and Withrow Surrett is having a truly craptastic night.
To enter, click here.
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