Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Otherland Robert Paul "Tad" Williams (born March 13, 1957) is an American fantasy and science fiction writer.

Williams is collaborating on a series of young-adult books with his wife, Deborah Beale, called The Ordinary Farm Adventures.

[11] Before becoming a full time fiction author Williams held many jobs including delivering newspapers, food service, DJ and station music director for college radio station KFJC, shoe sales, branch manager of a financial institution, writing for the TheatreWorks company and drawing military manuals.

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.

Williams continued working various jobs for a few more years, including three years from 1987 to 1990 as a technical writer at Apple Computer's Knowledge Engineering Department, taking problem-solving field material from engineers and turning it into research articles[19] (which led, in part, to the Otherland books), before making fiction writing his full-time career.

"I remember specifically one 'folktale' assignment when I was thirteen that was supposed to be three pages, and I wound up writing a seventeen-page sword-and-sorcery epic with illustrations, etc.

[23]A long list of authors have influenced and inspired Williams's work: Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Barbara Tuchman, Philip K. Dick, Ruth Rendell, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Jane Austen, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Patrick O'Brian, Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), A.

A. Milne, J. J. Norwich, Stephen Jay Gould, John Updike, Thomas Berger, Raymond Chandler, William Shakespeare, and James Thurber.

His Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series was one of the works that inspired George R. R. Martin to write A Song of Ice and Fire.

[32][33][34] Williams and his wife and partner Deborah Beale live in Northern California with their two children and "far more cats, dogs, turtles, pet ants and banana slugs than they can count.