Walter Jon Williams is a prolific American writer of science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories who is best known for his 1986 novel, Hardwired, a cyberpunk work. However, Williams refuses to be stereotyped; his twenty novels and short story collections range from historical fiction to alternate history, from hard science fiction to fantasy. With his 1999 novel The Rift, Williams presents readers with a disaster tale on the grand scale, positing an 8.9 earthquake in America's heartland. For Williams, it is purely a matter of the "furniture" of fiction that determines such categories; otherwise it is all writing to him. "Furniture," he explained to Jayme Lynn Blaschke in an interview for Interzone, "trumps category. If a book has dragons in it, then it's fantasy. . . . If a book has flying cars and computers in it, then it's SF."

Williams delights in standing such categories on their heads; thus with his...