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Tad Williams The War of the FlowersA Bold New Fantasy Novel Complete in One VolumeTheo Vilmos' life is about to take a real turn for the worse.Not that it was ever that great--spending the last decade of hislife as a singer in a succession of not terribly succesfulNorthern California rock bands isn't exactly a dream come true. But what can Theo do? When his girlfriend Cat gets pregnant, itseems like it's time to give his irresponsible dreams and settledown. Until now, Theo has always skated through life--getting byon good looks and charm but short on accomplishments, neverquite fitting in. The only pace that he's ever felt trulyright, the only world to which he's ever really belonged, isonstage, enveloped in music, singing his heart out. But isn'tthat a pretty immature way for a thirty-year-old to feel? NowCat is pregnant and things are going to change big time. Theowill be forced to change, too. So maybe this is a goodthing---just what he needs.But, as Theo discovers, he hasn't hit botoom yet, not by a longshot. He soon finds himself alone, heartbroken, and plagued bya recurring nightmare--and he can't shake the feeling that thesebad things are happening to him for a reason. When he comesacross a mysterious old letter from his grandmother's brother, aman named Eamonn Dowd, and with it the key to a safe depositbox, he decies to investigate. What he finds is an oldhandwriten book.Seeking solace and escape in a cabin in the woods, Theo beginsto read his great-uncle's book and quickly becomes mesmerized. Dowd writes of another world--the world of Faerie--but it isnothing like the familiar fairyland of childhood stories.Caught up in the book's compelling tale, Theo begins to hearstrange sounds and experience old fears. Then one night, allhis fears manifest when a horrifying *thing* tries to breakthrough his front door--a terrible hunting-spirit in the body ofa dead man.Terrified and trapped, Theo is saved only by the intervention ofa tiny, foul-mouthed, winged sprite named Applecore, whotransports him through a surreal portal into the realms ofFaerie. But this fairyland is even darker and more bizarrelymodern than Eammonn Dowd had described, similar to the mortalworld and yet dangerously different, and although he can'timagine why, there are creatures in it who intend Theo Vilmosserious harm.Chased by corpselike cave trolls and the undead spirit which hadpursued him from his own world, at the mercy of immortal beingswhose personal and political affiliations are bafflinglyunclear, and with only the reluctant sprite Applecore for aguide, Theo begings a journey that will lead him from thepalace-towers of the most powerful and treacherous of the fairfolk to the camps of rebel goblins and other places beyond hisimagining, on a search for the the meaning of his life--beforethose who seek him can cut it mercilessly short.

From BooklistWilliams' latest is unsurprisingly large but is billed as a single-volume work, which is pretty flabbergasting coming from a writer addicted to series of massive tomes. The story begins with the fairly conventional device of a mundane (i.e., a person from our world) stumbling into Faerie. Marginal California rocker Theo Vilmos has just lost his pregnant girlfriend when he discovers an old, handwritten book in a rural cottage. The gritty and even rather grim faerie world to which it leads him is hardly a refuge from reality; indeed, it is so full of depressing details that those who are already somewhat down should consider reading the book only in bite-size chunks. The war of the title is one of numerous factions fighting among themselves, and with it, Williams darkly satirizes every sort and condition of politics, ideology, religion, and other human foibles, much as he did in the Otherland saga. Reader and hero alike remain in some confusion for some while, because Theo's Faerie guide, an obnoxious entity named Applecore, seems to have an agenda of his own and certainly has a stevedore's tongue. Williams has a supremely powerful, if not altogether disciplined, imagination, so that, like Theo, readers may feel they are encountering much that is dreary and dull on the way to the good parts. Roland GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Tad Williams: The War of the FlowersContents:ProloguePART ONE: GOODNIGHT NOBODY1 Clouds2 The Primrose Maiden3 Descent4 The Hungry Thing5 Book6 A Corruption of Moonlight7 Woods8 Runaway Capacitor9 VisitorsPART TWO: LAST EXIT TO FAIRYLAND10: Larkspur´s Land11 A Disturbance in The Forcing Shed12 The Hollyhock Chest13 A Change in the Weather14 Penumbra Station15 The Plains of Great Rowan16 Poppy17 The Hothouse18 Sidwalks of New Erewhon19 A Holiday Visit20 Among the Creepers21 In Thornapple House22 Status Quo Ante23 The Shadow on the TowerPART THREE: FLOWER WAR24 The Bus Stop on Pentacle Street25 A Million Sparks26 Losing a Friend27 Button´s Bridge28 Goblin Jazz Bandwagon29 The Hole in the Story30 Family Matters31 In the Bloom Years32 Trendy Fungus33 The Last Breath They TookPART FOUR: THE LOST CHILD34 Interlude with Van Gogh Stars35 A Sort of Reunion36 Changelings37 The Ebony Box38 The Broken Stick39 Stepchild40 Strawflower Square41 The CathedralPART FIVE: FAIRYTALE ENDING42 Farewell Feast43 The Limit of MagicIndex of People, Places ,and Things

From Publishers WeeklyTravel into another dimension is a popular fantasy ploy, but rarely accomplished with such humor, terror and even logic as in this stand-alone by bestseller Williams (Tailchaser's Song, etc.). After losing his girlfriend, Theo Vilmos, a singer in a humdrum northern California rock band, finds in his late mother's remote cabin an amazing if incomplete manuscript left by his eccentric great-uncle, Eamonn Dowd, about a fairy world purportedly visited by its author. Unsurprisingly, Faerie turns out to be a real place. Applecore, a short-tempered, red-haired sprite, abruptly appears before Theo just as a horrifying monster starts banging on the door. At Applecore's command, Theo swoops her up and pops through "the Gate" into a magical realm that proves initially beguiling, later strange and finally deadly. Ironically, Faerie is a distorted image of our own world, ruled by cruel fairy tyrants. The powerful classes, each named for a flower, wage war against each other, using colossal dragons as the equivalents of nuclear bombs. Theo discovers love as well as unsuspected secrets of his own birth and family. Williams's imagination is boundless, and if this big book could have been shorter, it could just as easily have been longer. The incorrigible Applecore continually delights, as in her comment on a famous J.M. Barrie character: "`If you believe in fairies, clap your hands'? If you believe in fairies, kiss my rosy pink arse is more like it."

Rating: 9/10 (Ratings explained)Reviewer: Harriet KlausnerReviewMinor league California rocker Theo Vilmos feels he is at the bottom of the food chain when matters turn worse when he loses his pregnant girlfriend. Thirty, alone, and his music going nowhere, Theo feels down. He decides to get away to relook the direction of his life that seems to be in free fall. At his mother?s remote cabin, Theo finds an ancient looking tome handwritten by his weird Uncle Eamon about another realm, that of Faerie. Soon Theo is shocked to learn Faerie exists when the sprite Applecore arrives at his abode. She escorts the reluctant musician through the gate to a magical land that quickly seems quite dismal to the visitor. War appears everywhere so much so that Theo feels his home planet seems relatively peaceful. While Theo begins to learn secrets about his gene pool, he falls in love, but this is a land in which life is not precious so he must show caution to survive especially when bombardier dragons attack. This stand-alone fantasy is a great satirizing of current conditions on planet earth as seen through a looking glass mirror. The story line is extremely dark and grim yet often humorous as the plot shreds anything and everything of proud filled boasts about our compassionate great society. Theo is a fine character who serves as the center of the myriad of subplots, but it is the cantankerous, nasty Applecore who steals the show with her tinkering and editing of words of wisdom. A tad wordy, perhaps, but fans of Tad Williams, which probably includes Jonathan Swift, will appreciate this cutting faerie tale.

Tad Williams Interview with Iain EmsleyTad Williams has been instrumental in recharging the batteries of Fantasy. His latest novel, War of the Flowers, takes the reader to a very different Faerieland from the one commonly presented. SFRevu: Growing up, when did you first get interested in SF/Fantasy?TW: I was interested in Fantasy in the broadest meaning from the very beginning, from the Milne books and Wind in the Willows before I could read to myself to Bradbury and Tolkien, (both of whom I read by the time I was nine or so.)  In fact, I had to make a conscious effort to try other kinds of books as well, since there was so much SF and Fantasy around for a young reader to discover and it would have been easy to read nothing else.SFRevu:  What do you read these days?TW: You name it, but an awful lot of non-fiction.  I still read SF and F, but I read other modern authors at least as much, plus some other genre work, notably crime fiction in a kind of snackish sort of way.SFRevu:  Were you a writer as a child?    That is, did you make up your own stories?TW: I've always been a storyteller, as opposed to a writer, which came late.  I wanted to be a comic book artist for a long time, and would write and draw comics.  I was a songwriter.  I did parodies of things to amuse my friends.  But the idea of actually writing a book didn't occur to me until I was in my mid-twenties.SFRevu:  Why do you write genre?   Do you feel a stronger affinity for one genre or another?TW: Well, part of it was that I felt like I had a good understanding of the SF&F genre when I began ? that I would be a better judge of whether I was doing decent work than starting in some less familiar area.  Since then, there's been the important fact of having a paying audience; something only a fool would turn his back on too blithely. But also I enjoy the challenge of genre, namely, being able to write as good and as "literary" a work as I wish as long as every five pages or so one of my characters almost gets eaten by a giant bug or something.  Having to do both things at the same time ? that's the challenge.I like both genres, and in fact most of my favourite writers growing up ? Sturgeon, Bradbury, Moorcock, Le Guin, Leiber, Zelazny, Dick ? didn't really hew to a very solid line between the two.SFRevu:  Who is your ideal reader?TW: I think most writers' ideal reader would be themselves.  I have a theory that you can't really write for anyone else without pandering or over-reaching.  You write the book you'd really like to read, and then you hope that there are enough people reasonably like you to buy it so you don't have to go live in the gutter and eat things other people throw away.SFRevu:  How do you write? Do you plan out your books before you start? Do you write every day?TW: I have to do some planning, especially with multi-volume stories (where you otherwise have the weird problem of having published the first part of your story and so you can't change it just about the time you realize you screwed it up.)  And I do further little mini-outlines along the way, but those are mostly about pacing.  I try to write most days, but I also respect my instincts at this point.  Some days it's just not there and you're better off answering mail or tormenting the pets.SFRevu:  How did your first book sale come about?TW: I wrote Tailchaser?s Song (a fantasy about cats) and sent it to one well-known publisher who sent it back in, approximately, seventeen seconds.  The next one on my list was DAW Books, and they bought it. The rest is, if not history, a very important part of my life.SFRevu:  What's your most popular book? Why?TW: Couldn't say, although I think what I'm best-known for overall would be Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (sometimes known as The Dragonbone Chair books) but it's different in different markets.  In Germany, which has become very important for me, it's probably Otherland.  In general, though, I think the nature of epic-fantasy readers is such ? the median age, hunger for material, etc. ? that those books get passed around and recommended a lot.  We'll see if that happens with the upcoming Shadowmarch books, which is the first time I've returned to that area.SFRevu:  Of your own books, do you have a favourite?    Was it because of the idea, the characters, your life situation while you wrote it, the way it turned out, something else?TW: As I often say in public (and in private when I'm boring my family and friends) a writer's favourite book is always the one being worked on.  This carries over to other fields, which is why you see lots of old bands grumbling that the audiences don't want to hear their new rock opera based on Finnegan's Wake, but just keep screaming for their 1973 chart-toppers instead.  I sympathize deeply (with both sides.)  Whatever's done, that's old news.  I love and am proud of the books I've written, but I'm done writing them, and I'm much more engaged with the new work.SFRevu:  What other writers do you feel you have something in common with?TW: In our own field, I would have to say I feel a certain affinity with Dan Simmons, Orson Scott Card, Greg Bear, Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, and Connie Willis, just to name a few, although Card and Bear are more known as SF writers, and Willis more as a short-story writer, but I like to think that what I have in common with them is that I have a certain large scope to my ideas and writing, and that I'd rather try new things than simply become the owner of a franchise.  (The only reason I started writing epic fantasy again was because Shadowmarch started out as an attempt to write a serial novel online.)SFRevu:  What does Fantasy offer that Science Fiction can't? Why is gaining popularity among readers?TW: These things go in waves.  There was a time when SF was the highly commercial genre, and covered the full spectrum between what might be called "starter fiction", sometimes termed space opera, and the literary end ? in other words, you could start reading it at the fairly undiscerning age of eight or nine and keep moving to more and more ambitious work until you were reading essentially literary novels (a la Malzberg or Delany or Le Guin or whoever) that were nevertheless part of the SF genre.  Nowadays ? and by the way, this is all guesswork on my part, since I don't know the actual statistics ? that role, at least in the "starter fiction" area, seems to have been largely usurped by Fantasy.  Young readers tend to come in reading stuff based on RPGs and television shows and movies, the sort of cartoon-y end of the genre, and then may move on to either writers like (I hope) me and George Martin, or may cross sideways into the similarly ambitious SF writers, but they're not finding as much stuff aimed at their level at the beginning in SF these days, just  because there isn't the commercial ecosystem to support it.(This grand theory is ameliorated slightly by things like Star Trek and Star Wars books, which do fill that function for some beginning readers.)SFRevu:  How do you feel about the future? What makes you the most hopeful and the most fearful?TW: Do you mean the real future or the future of my genre?  If you mean the real world's future, I believe human beings are essentially creative and resilient and, in the words of George Eliot, there is a "growing good", however hard to see it might be in the short term. If we don't do anything drastically stupid, we will improve things and solve many of the problems that plague us now.  However, the current government of the US (along with its more jingoistic, short-sighted supporters) worries me, and that kind of live-for-today, screw-the-next-generation approach angers me: I don't believe we're creating a more peaceful world, rather the opposite.  I suppose if you have to live in the Roman Empire it's better to be inside it than outside it, but I never said I wanted to live in the Roman Empire.SFRevu:  Does writing have a role in shaping people's worldview?TW: Ideas certainly have a role, but, unfortunately, bad ideas work for that just as well as good ones.  It's the stickiness of the idea that matters, in conjunction with the importance of what it addresses. (Thus, the bad idea of Holocaust Denial has more painful social impact than the equally stupid idea of Moonwalk Denial, since the former gives aid and comfort to racists as opposed to just ordinary cranks.)  I think the Meme Theory has a lot to say for itself, since the shifting balance of political philosophy in the world today seems to ride on a series of fairly simple thoughts ? Allah Wants Jihad! or Peace Through Strength! or Violence is Always Wrong! ? that people absorb almost at a cellular level, and which are not easily dislodged thereafter.SFRevu:  What are you currently working on?TW: Now that The War of the Flowers is finished, I'm working on a pair of projects with my wife, Deborah Beale ? a young-reader book called The Dragons of Ordinary Farm and an animal fiction about raccoons entitled "Urchin's Luck".  And of course I'm in the process of editing and re-shaping the first online year of Shadowmarch into the first volume of the book version.SFRevu:  How do you view the current trend in genre fiction for a more Urban or Industrial setting? Was the return to Faerie a direct break from the Futurism of Otherland?TW: Well, maybe, but you may have noticed it was a pretty modernistic version of Faerie (which in fact was the initial appeal of the idea for me.)  I think in general that SF&F is a big enough entity now (commercially and otherwise) that there's an evolutionary pressure to move away from the centre and to find new niches.  Since the centre is so clotted with epic fantasy just now, there will be a trend to find new forms (or at least recently-underexploited forms.)  If that goes on long enough, twenty years from now someone will write a big three-volume fantasy with castles and magic and someone else will ask, "Is this part of a new trend away from single-volume, self-pitying fantasy poem-fiction (or whatever the current genre mainstream might be)?"SFRevu:  You have a reputation for asking difficult questions of the Fantasy genre and exploring different perspectives within the genre. How and why did you come around to asking these questions?TW: As I mentioned answering another question, I write the books I want to read, more or less.  So I guess I'm just doing the obvious thing, which is trying to figure out what I want in a book that will evoke the genre I love without insulting my intelligence.  Then I try to write that book.  I think the only thing that separates me from many, many other ambitious writers is that I've done a lot of my work at a critically-reviled end of the genre ? but that's also the part of the genre with the largest readership, so I have a large potential audience for my small subversions.SFRevu:  Was there a sense that you had to write a single volume as a change from series? Did you want to take a break from the long series?TW: Every time I finish a multi-volume story, I say, "Never again!"  My joke is that after I finished Memory, Sorrow & Thorn, I told my friends that if I ever started another one of those long things, they should shoot me.  So there I was writing Otherland, and I used to point out, "Obviously, they're either not very good friends or not very good shots."  No, something has to compel me to start it before I'll give up years of my life on one project (after that, finding out how the story ends is compulsion enough.)  With Otherland I really liked the initial idea ? couldn't get it out of my head.  With Shadowmarch I wanted to do a project online, but decided after year that I would beggar and cripple myself if I went on (because I had to write other books at the same time to make up for the lack of online income.)  But once I'd started, I couldn't even think of leaving the story unfinished: that's like deserting your comrades under fire, both the readers and the characters.  And when I finish Shadowmarch, I'm sure an agonized cry will lift to the heavens, "Won't someone stop me before I multi-volume again?"SFRevu:  How did you come to the idea of having the Flowers as the leaders of Faerie? Did you want to explore the idea of democracy in what is traditionally a monarchy? Was this a subtle comment upon the current idea of monarchies in Fantasy?TW: I think the concept of Flowers as ruling families came primarily from the Victorian fairy-tale and its obsession with charming little garden-related fairies, in comparison to earlier and more robust folk-tales in which nature bigger and scarier, and so are the fairies themselves.  (In my book there's mention of an earlier and less effete generation of fairies, the "Tree People", whom the modern day Flowers have supplanted.)In fact, the political ideas in The War of the Flowers are all over the shop, because I didn't have any specific agenda.  Oddly, while one of the horrors of the story is something that echoes the 9/11 attacks and almost kills the protagonist (something that was already planned for the book before the actual events of 9/11/01), the heroic resistance is more akin to a mullah and his followers ? how's that for both sides of the fence?  But, yes, there is a fairly strong anti-oligarchic feeling in the book, and it couldn't help but be informed by current politics.  I'm living in a country that talks about using aggressive military force to save the world for democracy and whatnot, but our last election was between two scions of what have to be called family dynasties ? Gore is the son of a senator, Bush the son of a president and grandson of a senator (a senator who actively aided the Nazis until they declared war on America, by the way, and who had assets seized for trading with the enemy long after war was declared) ? in which the election itself was handed to the man who had fewer votes by the US Supreme Court, because of the votes of two members who should have recused themselves for their obvious political ties to the administration to whom they gave the election. And we're complaining about Iran?SFRevu:  You have an intriguing idea in the comparison between Story and Music when Theo joins in the goblin group. Can you expand on this? Do you see a similarity between the idea of Story and musical groups where there are a range of voices and talents that combine to create a whole?TW: I think I hid one of my bigger ideas in Otherland ? namely, that Story is more than a convenience or a grab-bag of information, that Story is a form that helps to define the very nature of consciousness.  Music is slightly different, and operates at a different part of the wavefront between the conscious and the subconscious ? the information it contains is evocative at a pre-linguistic level.Actually, I'm not sure I can give this question the answer it deserves in less than several pages, since it's about stuff that interests me a lot.  Suffice to say, there's a lot in my work about Story, and music is a big part of my life too, and when they get mixed together there's always quite a bit of interesting metaconscious activity going on.SFRevu:  Are the shifting boundaries of the domains a reflection on the multi-verse? Is this a throwback to Moorcock? Is Theo's journey a development upon the traditional quest as utilized by Tolkien?TW: I would say that at the level of intent, I was more interested in walking a line between two powerful but conflicting needs in fantasy fiction.Epic fantasy as a whole is pleasurable to its readers in large part because it names and enumerates the fantastical.  Almost everybody who loves Tolkien's Middle-Earth loves it because of the completeness of the invention, the detailed history, the sense that you could go to any part of the scenery and discover more scenery behind it, not just the paint-pots, wires, and wooden flats of a backstage area (whereas in bad epic fantasy, it's hard to ignore that stuff.)  But the glories of another main branch of fantasy fiction is ineffability.  When the character in the famous M. R. James ghost story blows an old whistle and something comes, what's so effective is that we never quite know what that something is.  It's different, it's mystical, it's very, very frightening.  And in most fairy-fiction, it's the idea of beauties and terrors we can't quite grasp that makes us hungry for more.So I was trying to reconcile those two irreconcilables, limitless detail and limitless mystery in The War of the Flowers (In fact, this is true for most of my fiction, but was set out as a puzzle in particularly cogent form while working on this book.)  Thus, while trying to create a believable, modern, working fairyland, I also wanted to keep Mystery alive.  The slipperiness of geography was one of the places I decided I needed Mystery to trump the equally powerful allure of making the world-building blueprints available to the public.Tad Williams was talking to Iain Emlsey

Le héros de la semaine m'a convaincu, qui plus est comme j'accroche généralement bien à Williams, pourquoi ne pas relancer la machine une nouvelle fois.

A propos, la fée Applecore est-elle du même genre que noptre amie la fée Lacyon avec ses écarts de langages et autre?

PROLOGUEA single flower, a hellebore, stood in a vase of volcanic glass in the middle of the huge desk, glowing almost radioactively white in the pool of a small, artful spotlight. In other great houses the image of such a deceptively fragile-looking bloom would have been embroidered on a banner covering most of the wall behind the seat of power, but there was no need for such things here. No one could reach the innermost chambers of this monstrous bone-colored building and not know where they were and who ruled in this place.In the mortal world the hellebore is sometimes called the Christmas Rose because of an old tale that says it sprouted where a little girl who had no gift for the Christ Child wept into the snow outside the stable in Bethlehem. Both snow and the flower itself were unlikely to have been found in the Holy Land in those days, but that has never hurt the story's popularity.In Greece of the old myths, Melampus of Pylos used hellebore to save the daughters of the king of Argos from a Dionysian madness that had set them running naked through the city, weeping and screaming and laughing.There are many stories about hellebore. Most of them have tears in them.The Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles was no stranger to silence  -- in fact, he swam in it like a fish. He stared at the spotlit flower, letting his thoughts wander down some of the darker tracks of his labyrinthine mind, and waited, patient as stone, for the figure behind the desk to speak. The pause was a long one.The person on the other side of the desk, who had apparently been pursuing some internal quarry of his own, stirred at last. Slowly, almost lazily, he extended an arm to touch the flower on his desk. His spidersilk suit whispered so faintly only a bat or the creature sitting across from him could hear. His long finger, only a little less white than the flower, touched a petal and made it quiver.There were no windows here in the heart of the building, but the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles knew that it was raining hard outside, the drops spattering and hissing on the pavement, coach tires spitting. Here the air was as still as if he and his host sat inside a velvet-lined jewel casket.The shape in the beautiful, shimmering blue-black suit gently prodded the flower again. "War is coming," he said at last. His voice was deep and musical. Mortal women who had only heard him speak, waking to discover him warm and invisible in their rooms in the middle of the night, had fallen so deeply in love with that voice that they had foresworn all human suitors, giving up the chance of sunlit happiness forever in the futile hope he would return to them, would let them live again that one delirious midnight hour."War is coming," agreed the Remover."The child of whom we spoke before. It must not live."A long breath  -- was it a sigh? "It will not.""You will receive the usual fee."The Remover nodded, distracted by his own thoughts. He had very little fear that anyone, even this most powerful personage, would neglect to pay him. With war coming they would need him again. He was the specialist of specialists, totally discreet and terrifyingly effective. He also made a very bad enemy."Now?" he asked."As soon as you can. If you wait too long, someone might notice. Also we don't want the risk. The Clover Effect is still not perfectly understood. You might not get a second chance."The Remover stood. "I have never yet needed such a thing."He was gone from the inner room so quickly he might have been a shadow flitting across the dark walls. The master of the House of Hellebore could see much that others could not, but even he had trouble marking the exact progress of the Remover's self-deletion.It would not be good to have to guard against that one, he thought to himself. He must be kept sweet, or he must become ashes in the Well of Forgetting. Either way, he must never again work for one of the other houses. The master of the house stroked the pale flower on his desk again, considering.Another curiosity of the hellebore is that its bloom can be frozen solid in the deepest winter snows, but when the ice melts away, dripping from the petals like tears, the flower beneath is still alive, still supple. Hellebore is strong and patient.The tall, lean figure in the spidersilk suit pressed a button on the side of his desk and spoke into the air. The winds of Faerie carried his words to all those who needed to hear them, throughout the great city and all across the troubled land, summoning his allies and tributaries to the first council of the next war of the Flowers.Copyright © 2003 by Tad Williams

(oui, je sais Gillossen, d'abord Lightstone selon toi...)