New Release Blog Tour — A Fall in Autumn; by Michael G. Williams
Michael G. Williams has a new queer sci fi book out: 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?
A Fall in Autumn Buy Links
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.
Enter via Rafflecopter:
Direct Link: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/b60e8d4765/?
Excerpt
This excerpt comes from the second chapter of the book. To set this up, I’ll note that Valerius is a private eye in the far future. In his time, androids are referred to as “golems” and they’re considered to be sort of living saints: they embody the best of a former age, and they tend to wrap themselves in mystery in a way Valerius finds at least a little off-putting.
Valerius has awakened bruised and battered after getting beaten up by his last client. Alejandro – who is a golem – found him after and helped get him on his feet. Valerius then returned home, passed out, and had to hide from his landlady the next morning because he’s perpetually late on his rent.
I let out my breath and sat up, pulled on trousers, and stretched to the sound of a hundred popping joints. Whatever kept the landlady at bay was good enough, even if that meant hiding and holding my breath. I cared far less about paying her rent than where I would get food or smokes—oh wait, I’d quit smoking—or a cup of coffee.
Coffee, I thought. The memory of the stuff was almost enough to wake me. I ran out of Buenos Dias Blend the day before, and I didn’t have a penny to spend on more. I inspected a bottle of Old Indefatigable on top of the filing cabinet. Whiskey in a coffee cup wouldn’t be anything new, and neither would whiskey first thing in the morning, but something about whiskey from a coffee cup first thing in the morning seemed unacceptably perverse.
I lifted the bottle and put my hand on the stopper, but there was a second knock, one much quieter and more reserved. It sounded an awful lot like a customer’s knock: the sort of knock that said they were sorry for bothering me but sorrier for having a problem in the first place, and still not as sorry as they would be to pay. I put the bottle back on the file stand and nudged the button to unlock the door.
Alejandro opened it and stepped inside as quietly as a cat in a bassinet, then closed it behind him with a click the baby would have slept through. Normally, the hinges squeaked and the door took jiggling to get closed. I’d always heard a golem’s senses were way beyond ours, but I had no idea. I blinked and set down my coffee mug, still empty of whiskey or coffee or anything, and nodded. “Well.” I tried not to look surprised. I probably failed. “Okay.”
Whereas it had been dark and dramatic a few days ago, Alejandro’s skin was now an off-white with hints of gray where an egg’s shell might have shades of beige or tan. His hair changed to a deep reddish purple. I had assumed golems were fixed in their appearance, and in that moment, it occurred to me to wonder why I ever assumed that in the first place. No reason they can’t swap things around like any Plus.
Taking in his choices of colors, my mind kicked around words like “eggplant” and “burgundy” before deciding they fell short. The golem’s hair was pulled back and tied into a neat ponytail. It hung so that it hit the middle of his back exactly between where his shoulder blades would have been if he were a living man. He stood maybe two meters tall, maybe taller, easily several centimeters taller than I am, so I had to look up a little to meet his eyes. It had a sobering effect: he seemed instantly superior in the social hierarchy.
I reminded myself everything about a golem is literally by design. If he was tall enough to make most people look up to him, it could only be a deliberate choice, almost certainly meant to convey authority—one I found, ironically, a little off-putting.
Alejandro had good cheekbones, a pair of pale and expressive lips, eyebrows that jutted at a barely noticeable obtuse angle over his eyes, and a prominent Adam’s apple. I thought that was an unusual touch of mimicry for something otherwise obviously constructed. Why bother with the laryngeal prominence if anyone could tell he was made of some kind of cellulose and bioplas? The various design choices taken together suggested ambivalence: maybe a team expressing in their work some internal conflict about how human he should or shouldn’t be, or maybe a Doc Frankenstein somewhere who was never quite at peace with the idea of his or her creation.
My initial over-analysis of his design and execution bothered me in the way I was always bothered by my detective’s reflex of seeing motives behind every detail. But, I also knew a part of what bothered me about him was what bothered me about the idea of golems in general: no one knows who made them or where they came from. All anybody knows is they’re ancient. Sometimes they’re very kind, and sometimes they’re assholes, and sometimes they’re just sort of there, dissociated and distant in a way some people read as snobbery, and regardless of what they’re like socially, absolutely none of them will admit their origins. They’ve been asked plenty of times, of course, and the urban legend goes that once in a while one of them will open up enough to say she or he doesn’t know whence they came. I never liked that answer. It’s the sort of non-answer politicians give when they want to make you feel like they answered your question. It’s a deflection. I hate people who play that sort of game.
The fact Alejandro was drop-dead gorgeous—as walking, talking kewpie dolls go—didn’t help me get over my prejudices. If anything, it made me wary. The most dangerous thing in the world is a good marketing campaign, and he looked like a doozy.
“I hope you don’t mind I’m here.” He murmured it with a small smile that seemed genuinely apologetic rather than the cocky sort of ironic I would have expected from some biological Casanova. “I was concerned about you.”
I arched an eyebrow. Neither of us moved. I stood between the cabinets and my desk, Alejandro right inside the door, maybe five meters away. A little sunlight slid down the slats in the still-closed blinds in my window, and I still stood barefoot in dingy denim trousers and no shirt. “You figured out who I am.” I pointed a thumb at the handset on my desk. “You could have called.” I picked the cup back up.
Perverse or no, I was going to fill it with whiskey.
Partly I love this scene because it’s the moment Alejandro becomes Valerius’ client, which is the engine driving the rest of the book. But partly I love this scene because it’s sort of the last gasp of the old Valerius, before he hears Alejandro’s story, before everything changes for him. It’s the last time we see a version of Valerius that truly believes he’s all washed up and wrung out. He doesn’t think there’s any reason left to try – at anything, really – and that nihilism is eating him alive. I realized as I wrote the book that Valerius hated himself for all sorts of reasons before Alejandro came along, and though this isn’t a romance, it’s certainly a deep and meaningful relationship that develops into a lifeline for Valerius, a way to imagine a future for himself. (And, for various reasons, that’s strongly bittersweet.)
Valerius can be a jerk to people, and meeting Alejandro doesn’t “fix” him, but it does shift his perspective. It creates an opportunity for Valerius to re-learn a little more empathy, and to step back from the edge of the abyss of his own problems and get some perspective on them. Any detective story is ultimately about someone who feels empathy for others, because that’s their secret to figuring out the mystery. But at this point in his life, Valerius’ empathy has kind of dried up. The only way to learn empathy – or to re-learn it – is often to receive it from others, and that happens for Valerius in this book at exactly the time when he needs it most. This story becomes a way for Valerius to feel like he can still make a difference in the world, still have purpose, no matter what else he has weighing on him or how much time he might or might not have left.
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!
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.
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