Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 119

Fustilarian

Over on another Social Network, I was rejoicing that I’d written a sentence containing the phrase “fustilarian bellygods.” This occasioned a deal of speculation about what my sentence actually was. I declined to answer, because I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of imagination that was going on. And I thought I’d stimulate imagination here, by initiating another contest. Write a sentence— or more than one, if you like— containing the phrase “fustilarian bellygods.” And of the various entries...

Contest!

The first person to identify the object in the photo will win free downloads of all 11 Philip K Dick Award-nominated novels, now available at StoryBundle. This thing looks like you might find it at IKEA, but you’d be wrong.

Charting My Course

SS Mark Twain

Here I am, age five or so, charting the course into my future as I pilot the SS Mark Twain past the dangerous shoals of Walt Disney’s Adventureland. I still have my pilot’s certificate. I don’t remember the natty little jacket at all.

Peakéd Oil

I’m currently paying $2.09 per gallon of gasoline, which is the lowest I’ve paid in a very, very long time— and which may, if you adjust for inflation, be the lowest gasoline priceever. Ten years ago, people were saying that we’d met, or even passed, Peak Oil, wherein the supply was just going to go down and down, and the price up and up. But now new technologies, including fracking, have resulted in a gusher of new oil spraying onto the market. The result is energy prices falling off a cliff...

Nite 2

I saw fewer new acts the second night of Globalquerque, but that’s because some of the first night’s performers returned. I’ll skip over those and get straight to the folks I hadn’t seen before.

Tony Duncan is one of the talented Duncan brothers, all hoop dancers, and has won the World Champion Hoop Dancer award five times. I didn’t actually see him dance at Globalquerque, he played the flute and also shared the stage with a storyteller, but the hoop dancing is awesomely cool and that’s the...

First Night of the Festival

More music from Globalquerque, New Mexico’s annual celebration of music from all over the world. There were three stages going on at once, so I didn’t see everybody, and for several of the bands I only saw a few minutes. Here are some of the highlights.

Cimmarón was advertised as a cowboy band from Colombia, but they seem a lot more than that. It’s a band where you can hear jazz and flamenco and Andalusia and more. And they still wear cowboy hats.

EastRiver Ensemblewas formed from Chinese m...

A Band of One

I’ve been frantically busy and with little time for posting. I’ve spent the last two nights at Globalquerque, the annual festival of world music, and will post more on that when I have a few free hours But in the meantime here’s a video of Maarja Nuut, who I saw the other night. She’s an Estonian folk singer who plays solo. Except that she brought a band with her. Except that her band is her. Entirely her. She carries electronic gear I’ve seen used by other performers, in which she can reco...

Big Bundle, Big Books, Big Savings

So StoryBundle has a deal for you. They’ve bundled six novels, each of them nominated for the Philip K Dick Award, and by Elizabeth Hand, Pat Murphy, K.W. Jeter, Gwyneth Jones, Lisa Mason, and Kathy Koja. These ebooks are completely free of DRM and can be read on any device. And the best part is:you decide what you want to pay. It’s entirely up to you. Also, you get to decide how much of that payment goes to the authors, and how much to support StoryBundle. Plus, you can give 10% to charity....

Why I Am Not a Farmer

EPSON scanner image

Here I am, age 14, on a hot, humid, miserable July day, helping my Uncle Monty make hay. Or: Why I never joined the Future Farmers of America.

Dragging It Out

Dish Network gave me a free premium channel the other week, and so I watchedThe Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part I. Which was a kind of masterpiece, because in a film over two hours long nothing really happened. What’s going on is that the success of theTwilight films, in which the final volume of the trilogy was broken up into two separate films, has created a new paradigm— Two movies! Twice the money! I haven’t read the book on which the film was based, and so I don’t know how closely the act...