Why Dirty Streets of Heaven Writer Tad Williams Isn't Going to Hell ... Probably

Photo: Deborah Beale

These days, Tad Williams is a best-selling writer, but once he was a struggling author waiting to hear back from a publisher on his first novel. That's when he hatched a devilish scheme to force the editors to take a look at his book — he asked them to send back a copy of his manuscript, explaining that his copies had been destroyed in a flood.

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"I was also hoping like hell that they didn't know that basically California was in the middle of an eight-year drought, and that there's almost no such thing as basements in California," says Williams in this week's episode of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

The publisher ended up buying the book, and is still Williams' publisher 30 years later. He became good friends with editor Betsy Wollheim and her husband, Peter, who'd been the one to laboriously photocopy the 500-page manuscript. It was years before Williams finally fessed up.

"To Peter's great credit, and probably the thing that will keep me out of hell for this one, he immediately forgave me and laughed and thought it was a really good idea," says Williams.

Read our complete interview with Tad Williams below, in which he discusses his new novel, The Dirty Streets of Heaven, a noir mystery about an earth-bound angel who gets caught up in a plot involving missing souls. Or listen to the interview in Episode 69 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), which also features a panel discussion between hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley and guest geek Genevieve Valentine about angels and heaven in fantasy and science fiction.

Wired: Tell us about your new book The Dirty Streets of Heaven. What's it about?

Tad Williams: The initial idea was about the similar nature between the standard version of heaven versus hell — the classic, Western, Judeo-Christian idea that has developed — and the way that the Cold War was actually run, where the whole thing was sort of happening under the surface and all of the struggle was to an extent not noticed by most people most of the time.

The main character, Bobby Dollar, is an earth-bound angel who's part of the process of earthly souls being judged after the people die. But then things begin to get stranger, and other odd things happen in the Cold War between heaven and hell, and he winds up in a lot deeper than he had expected. So on one level it's a fantasy — it's about angels, it's about demons, it's about all that stuff. On another level, it's also very much, I think, similar to a crime novel in its characters and approach.

Wired: When you're writing a book where the protagonist works for God, if God is all-powerful, is it a challenge then to create problems for your protagonist?

Williams: Well, one of the interesting things about the book, I think, is that how the universe really works is not necessarily apparent to the minions down at the bottom end, of which our main character is one. Nobody he knows has ever met God, just as an example. The heavenly bureaucracy is huge and complicated, and the people at the bottom have only the dimmest idea of where their orders are coming from.

Wired: I've always wondered why the forces of hell would show up at Armageddon if they know they're going to lose. But in your book, you suggest that they think they're going to win.

Williams: Yeah. I think Bobby actually says something to the effect of that they think that's all just PR and that they have a perfectly good chance to win, and since they sort of represent the chaos side of things — I don't know how well you know Michael Moorcock's cosmology of law and chaos. It wasn't intentional — though I'm a big Moorcock fan — but the way it worked out as I was thinking these things through is that heaven winds up being sort of like Ultimate Law in Moorcock's version of things, which is something that doesn't change. It's very static. It's all about the same frequency of reward and existence, and it just keeps going on and on and on and on.

Hell is much more dynamic, because the — and this is the main character's presumption, I tend not to step in as the narrator in this, because it's being told by the main character — but the main character's presumption is that hell has to be varied, otherwise punishment is no longer effective, because it becomes familiar. So hell has to be something where your punishment surprises you, and part of your punishment is that there is no getting used to things because you never know what will happen next. That's a very simplified version, but that's one of the main differences. So hell is quite dynamic and changing. It's very feudal. It's very much about "whoever has the power makes the rules." In heaven that's true also, but you don't know who made the rules. The rules have all been made and they're not changing.

Wired: I really enjoyed the angel and demon names in the book. To what extent are those drawn from folklore and to what extent did you just make them up?

Williams: A lot of them come from traditional folklore — as I'm sure you know, a lot of angel names are in fact the names of religious figures or deities and things like that that were supplanted by Christianity, in most cases. Both the demons and the angels. And then some of them I have in fact made up.

Wired: What about the demon names like "Grasswax" and "Howlingfell"?

Williams: In a lot of cases I am taking things like that — the names of the common order of demons — I'm sort of inventing a pseudo-medieval sort of name, like the kinds of things that used to come up in witch trials. You know, where the women would admit the devil had sent them a familiar named such and such, and they always had these kind of odd, little, strangely domestic names that didn't really sound very dramatically devilish, but clearly this had become the common currency at the time for what demon servants would be called.

An example just off the top my head would be, say, Lovecraft's "Brown Jenkin." That was probably also based on these medieval stories where they were named things like "Creeper" or "Black Pat," or just these very prosaic names. So that's where I got that, but as I said a lot of the names are actually invented, and I have to do that in part just because I tend to have so many names in even a very short book like this that I work very carefully to keep them from being too similar-sounding.

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Geek's Guide to the Galaxy 19 Sep, 2012

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