Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 121
August 20, 2015
In the Giving Vein
Trail of lit bulbs and Red shoe
It’s not enough that I’ve dropped the price ofAngel Station to 99 cents. No! I’m far more generous than that! I want you all to be happy, so I’ve now dropped the price of my Nebula-winning “Daddy’s World” to zero. Yes, it’s free! Download it on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Kobo, iBook, Smashwords, and/or Google Play!
August 19, 2015
News From the Marketplace
Okay, news from the marketplace issupposed to be both good and bad. While theideal of the marketplace, as Adam Smith remarked, is to increase the world’s store of happiness (by permitting deals that both buyer and seller can be pleased with), the reality is that the market also creates winners and losers. e.g.: Amazon. Amazon has always maintained an uncompromising Darwinian approach to its business. It treats its market environment as a zero-sum game: they’re not interested in increasing any...
August 15, 2015
Cthulhu Cave
When I was in the Black Hills a few days ago, I paid a visit to the Jewel Caves, which is the third largest cave system in the world, with more than 177 miles of rooms, corridors, and . . . terror? While I saw only a tiny portion of the cave, what I did see was disturbing.
Not only did passing through the cave entrance resemble a journey through the epiglottis of a vast, cyclopean subterranean creature, but a great number of the cave formations suggested tentacled beings, or an acrodont with...
August 14, 2015
Reviews Too Late: The Bone Clocks
As a writer, your first success is your Fate. You can write any damn thing you want until you actually succeed at something. If your first successful novel is science fiction, then you’re a science fiction writer pretty much forever, and that’s sort of that. People will break your bones with baseball bats to keep you in your designated straightjacket. To become anything else requires a complete reinvention, which is a lot of work and trouble and probably won’t work anyway. And— as I discovere...
August 12, 2015
August 10, 2015
Ride the Now! (For only 99 Cents!)
For a mere 99 cents, you can now purchase my novelAngel Station at Amazon, Google Play, iBooks, Kobo, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble. It’ll be available at Flipkart as soon as the word gets to India, preferably soon, As always, ebooks I publish myself are DRM free. The sale will run through the 23rd, but Ubu sez you might as well click the links and pick it up now. If you’re unfamiliar with the novel, check out the essay I wrote about it, or stay tuned for the cover copy: ORPHANS OF DEEP SPAC...
Bad Lands
Heading West again, by easy stages, and have viewed Badlands National Park. The geological layers are so regular that the terrain looks crosshatched. I’m currently in the Black Hills, hoping to strike gold.
August 6, 2015
Brisk
The weather got a bitbrisk this morning as I went for a sail on the good sloopAmicus,out of Knife River. Half the passengers got seasick, but I was in the other half. The boat was bounding about so much that half my photos are of the sea, the sky, or the sails. I couldn’t keep anything in frame long enough to snap a picture. I did get soaked and very, very cold, but I had a great time anyway. Thanks to skipper Mark and mate Dan for a good time. South of us there was a big fogbank stretching o...
August 5, 2015
Another Meteor
The US Patent Office has approved Airbus’ application for Concord 2.0,an “ultra-rapid air vehicle and related method for aerial locomotion”. In other words, a commercial aircraft capable of reaching 100,000 feet, after which the ramjets will kick in and the vehicle will approach Mach 4.5. The 2.0 will take off vertically, like the space shuttle, and passengers will be in hammocklike webbing for the trip. (Paris to New York, one hour.) Airbus says the designfeatures “concepts and ideas in a ve...
August 4, 2015
Behold the Mighty Meteor!
Behold theSS Meteor, at 119 years old the sole surviving whaleback freighter, and now in Superior, WI, moored in, um, mud apparently. (I actually took these pictures a couple weeks ago, but haven’t got around to looking at them till now.) My interest in anachronistic technology led me to view this glorious Victorian creation, which actually served on the Great Lakes from 1896 until 1969. The whaleback ships were invented by uncanny Gaelic engineer Alexander MacDougal, who built them on his ow...
