Sean Williams is an Australian science fiction and fantasy author. He has contributed to Star Wars Legends (including parts of New Jedi Order, and the novelisations of The Force Unleashed and The Force Unleashed 2). His own works include the Evergence trilogy (co-written with Shane Dix), the Books of the Change trilogy, the Changeling trilogy, and the standalone novel The Resurrected Man, among others.
Works with their own trope pages include:
- The Force Unleashed series
- New Jedi Order series: Force Heretic trilogy, co-written with Shane Dix
- Spirit Animals series: Blood Ties, co-written with Garth Nix
Other works provide examples of:
- An Astral Projection, Not a Ghost: Adi's ghost in the Changeling trilogy.
- Brain Uploading: One of the spin-offs of the teleporter technology in The Resurrected Man.
- Colour-Coded Timestop: In the Astropolis series, the subjective passage of time can be altered by most individuals through a process called overclocking. When a character is overclocking to move at an accelerated rate, the spectrum of light becomes red-shifted for that person (and blue-shifted if they choose to slow down their subjective perception of time too).
- Destructive Teleportation: The consequences of a particular teleportation system, called "d-mat", are explored in depth in the novel The Resurrected Man, the short stories collected in A View Before Dying, and the YA Twinmaker series. It is a destructive teleportation system, where the original is scanned to create data called a "pattern", which is used to create an exact copy of the person in another location. Everything about the person is the same, down to their thoughts, feelings, and memories, so that those who come out of the booth believe themselves to be the same person who stepped in it. The Resurrected Man is the origin of the phrase "Murdering Twinmaker", which in the novel is both a nickname for the teleporter and the nickname for a serial killer who uses the data in the sending teleporter to create his own copies, which he murders for pleasure.
- Eldritch Abomination: In The Books of the Cataclysm, the Big Bad is Yod, a tree-like god or eldritch abomination that inspired the myth of Yggdrasil the World Tree. Yod has almost completely consumed the universe and it is only in one single time-stream that Yod hasn't totally devoured the cosmos.
- False Friend: Ros's friend Escher in the Changeling trilogy.
- Fantastic Noir: The Resurrected Man is a noir detective novel in a future world with teleporters and artificial intelligences.
- Golem: Several appear in the Changeling trilogy.
- Grand Theft Me: The villain of the second book in the Changeling trilogy.
- I Know Your True Name: The power of true names is a recurring concern in the Changeling trilogy.
- Lightspeed Leapfrog: In "On the Road to Tarsus", a group of colonists is sent by long-range teleportation to the planet Tarsus, thirty light years from Earth, which means the teleporter signal will take thirty years to get there. While it's still en route, someone back on Earth invents FTL communication, cutting the journey to a matter of days and allowing another group of colonists to be sent and the colony established years ahead of schedule. As the story closes, the planet is preparing itself for the imminent arrival of the original colonists-to-be.
- Non-Human Non-Binary: In The Resurrected Man, one of the supporting characters is an AI, who doesn't identify as having a gender and is referred to using a distinct set of pronouns.
- Science Fantasy: The Books of the Cataclysm series takes place 4000 years into our future. The end of the world had been averted in contemporary times, when the world had unmasqued and hero twins altered reality so that an Eldritch Abomination, Yod, couldn't destroy the cosmos. But the only way they could achieve this was to pick a time-line where they were able to imprison Yod. The result is a mish-mash world where remnant modern technology is adjacent with magic.
- Space Opera: The Evergence trilogy.
- Subspace Ansible: In the "d-mat" stories, the creation of one of these opens up the possibility of practical interstellar travel. (The teleporter signal had previously been limited by the speed of light, meaning that even a trip to a nearby solar system would take several years each way.) This is most prominently a plot point in "The Road to Tarsus".
- Time Stands Still: The Astropolis series features both this trope and its inversion, of a sort, with the advent of Overclocking. Most individuals have the ability to alter their relative perception of time, meaning that their relative movement etc will increase as well. This means that a person perceiving time normally would see only blurs moving around them as people overclocked in the same room. (The inversion is that the overclocking can run the opposite way: a person who reduces their "tempo", or a normal "tempo" from the perspective of an overclocking person, will be perceived to be moving incredibly slowly, if not at all, although they are in fact simply operating at a much lower relative speed.) However, moving when overclocking is extremely damaging to the body; bones can be broken by bumping into a wall, or landing badly, and the friction of movement can ignite clothes and materials. Light becomes red- or blue-shifted, too, so this one is actually pretty realistic, relatively speaking.
- True Sight: In the Changeling trilogy, Adi gains this after she dies and is revived, being able to see through illusions and see spirits.
- Twinmaker: The "d-mat" teleporter system featured in various novels and short stories works by breaking the person who steps into it down into little bits of data called a "pattern" and then using the pattern to create an exact copy of the person in another location. Normally the original is destroyed and a single copy is created, but there's at least one story where the safeguards are circumvented and the end result is multiple copies of one of the characters.
- When Trees Attack: In The Books of the Cataclysm, the Big Bad is Yod, a tree-like god or Eldritch Abomination that inspired the myth of Yggdrasil the World Tree.
