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Robert Paul "Tad" Williams (born 14 March 1957 in San Jose, California) is an American writer. He is the international bestselling fantasy and science fiction author of the multivolume ''Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn'' series, ''Otherland'' series, and ''Shadowmarch'' series as well as the standalone novels ''Tailchaser's Song'', ''The War of the Flowers'', ''Caliban's Hour'', and ''Child of an Ancient City''. Most recently, Williams published ''The Bobby Dollar'' series. His short fiction and essays have been published in anthologies and collected in ''Rite: Short Work'' and ''A Stark and Wormy Knight''. Cumulatively, over 17 million copies of Williams' works have been sold.〔Lealos, Shawn S. (2011). "Exclusive art released from upcoming 'Tailchaser's Song' animated adaptation".〕 Williams’ work in comics includes a six issue mini-series for DC Comics called ''The Next''. He also wrote ''Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis'' for DC starting with issue #50 and ending with issue #57. Other comic work includes ''Mirrorworld: Rain'' and ''The Helmet of Fate: Ibis the Invincible #1'' (DC). Williams is collaborating on a series of young-adult books with his wife, Deborah Beale, called ''The Ordinary Farm Adventures''. The first two books in the series are ''The Dragons of Ordinary Farm'' and ''The Secrets of Ordinary Farm''. The third installment is currently being written. He also announced via his blog a new trilogy ''The Last King of Osten Ard'', which is a sequel trilogy to his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series. It takes place 30 years after the original trilogy.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.tadwilliams.com/2014/04/tad-returns-to-osten-ard-with-the-last-king-of-osten-ard/ )〕 == Early life and career == Robert Paul “Tad” Williams was born in San Jose, California on March 14, 1957.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/williams_tad )〕 He grew up in Palo Alto, the town that grew up around Stanford University. He attended Palo Alto Senior High School. His family was close, and he and his brothers were always encouraged in their creativity. His mother gave him the nickname “Tad” after the young characters in Walt Kelly’s comic strip ''Pogo'' The semi-autobiographical character Pogo Cashman, who appears in some of his stories, is a reference to the nickname. The author’s bio that appears on Williams’s books says that Tad has “held more jobs than any sane person should admit to.”〔 “I was in a band, I did theater, I was an artist, I did cartooning and illustration, and, you know, many, many things—radio, I did radio for 10 years. Because all of these things were so very, very financially unsuccessful, I always had to have another job. Unlike everybody else I knew, I did not go to university after school, so I was working many jobs… I delivered newspapers, I folded burritos in a little Mexican fast food place, I sold shoes, I was the branch manager of a financial institution, I drew military manuals on how to properly sweep out a Chinook 47 helicopter, I just did many, many things for about five, six, seven years after I was first out of high school.”〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIVH9YRaSdI&feature=youtu.be )〕 When he was in his mid twenties, he became frustrated and turned to writing as a career. “Always in the back of my mind, though, I was determined to do something creative that would actually make me money so I could stop doing horrible things for a paycheck. Ambition is like Tinkerbell—when you stop believing, it dies. So I kept at my various projects, with writing becoming a larger and larger focus. When I received the letter from DAW that they were going to buy my novel ''Tailchaser's Song'', I was excited and relieved—somehow, the idea that my published books might totally fail to sell never occurred to me that first day, although it was and always is a possibility.”〔 Williams took a creative but unorthodox approach to getting his publishers to look at his first manuscript: he spun a story about needing a replacement copy because his had been destroyed. It worked. DAW Books liked it and published it, beginning a long association and friendship that continues to this day. “''Tailchaser'' was my first book, in every possible way—first I ever wrote, first I had published—so it will always be close to my heart. I still marvel sometimes at all the places that imaginary cat has traveled—far more than I’ll ever get to, probably.” Williams continued working various jobs for a few more years, including three years at Apple Computer in the late 80s to early 90s (which led, in part, to the ''Otherland'' books), before making writing his full-time career.〔 Music. “The band was called ‘Idiot’ and I still regret that we fell apart just when we were all finally out of school and might have done something. There was a lot of creativity there, a lot of talent—several of the members are still professionally making music—but most of all, there was no one else like us. We were our own weird animal… We wrote songs about bowling and voles and luxury camper vans and the end of the world. We were a little ahead of our time. It was fun.”〔 Idiot’s band members—Andrew Lawrence Jackson, vocals and rhythm guitar; Rick Cuevas, lead and rhythm guitar; Tom Sanders, Bass; Patrick Coyne, drums; and Tad Williams, vocals—held a Reunion Concert in 1997 that Williams commemorates in “IDIOT: A Brief History of a Band.”〔 Radio and Television. Tad worked for KFJC, a college radio station. As an occasional DJ and station music director, he played whatever music the community working at KFJC thought cool, weird and interesting from the late 1970s to 80s. KFJC—Foothill College radio station—was a home to punk/new wave music, one of the first of its kind in California. From 1979 to 1990, Tad hosted a talk show called “One Step Beyond.”〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3058300155/williams-tad-1957-robert.html )〕 His interests on the show were politics with an emphasis on the covert and clandestine: this was the time of the Iran-Contra scandals/hearings. “Valley Vision” was a TV series concept, a show about a local TV station.〔 A pilot was shot featuring several people who would go on to become Bay Area acting alumni, including Greg Proops, Mike McShane, Joan Mankin, Marga Gomez and several members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.liquidradioplayers.com/guests/ )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.tadwilliams.com/2012/08/fly-little-gimcracks/ )〕 Theater. For ten years Tad worked in community and professional theatre in the college town of Palo Alto. He began at the Palo Alto Children’s Theatre then progressed to TheatreWorks, Palo Alto’s long-established professional theatre company. Tad acted and sang in many productions, as well as writing and working with make-up and wardrobe. Apple. Tad worked at Apple from 1987 to 1990, his last job before he took up full-time writing. He worked as a technical writer in Apple’s Knowledge Engineering Department, taking problem-solving field material from engineers and turning it into research articles.〔〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.bookwormblues.net/2012/09/19/author-interview-tad-williams/ )〕 Interactive Multi-Media. While at Apple Tad developed an interest in interactive multi-media, and he and his colleague Andrew Harris created a company, Telemorphix, in order to produce it. The result was “M. Jack Steckel's 21st Century Vaudeville,” which was broadcast on San Francisco Bay Area local TV in 1992 and 1993.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.digitaltimewarp.com/Links.html )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.itvdictionary.com/interactive_television_enhanced_tv_etv_itv_shows.html )〕 People at the station and viewers were asked to provide images of themselves, which were then animated primarily at the mouth: viewers phoned in to the show and could then be these characters. The action was a mix of improvisational performance and storylines which Tad created (along with secondary, non-interactive characters.) M. Jack Steckel himself—the host—was played by Andrew Harris. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tad Williams」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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