Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 139

I Am At Bubonicon

I am at Bubonicon 46, New Mexico’s longest-lasting science fiction convention. (It’s lasted nearly as long as I have.)
So I’ll be in Albuquerque for the weekend, hanging out with convention mascot Perry Rodent (pictured right), and therefore not posting for a while.
If you’re in the Greater New Mexico area, please come by the convention and say howdy.

I Haz a Newsletter

So now I’ve got a newsletter, to which I urge you to subscribe. Because though the same announcements will probably appear here, the newsletter will turn up in your inboxinstantly, and you won’t have to even turn on your browser.
I promise not to send you a whole lot of crappy spam. Or even non-crappy spam (if such a thing exists). I’ll only exercise my Awesome Newsletter Powers when I have an actual announcement.
Technology goeth on apace. And I goeth with it.

Double Vision

Two covers for the Italian translation of my story “Reincarnation Day,” by the artist Tiziano Cremonini.

I’m sure you’ve all read the story so many times that you’re practically memorized it, but if it’s somehow escaped your attention, it’s about a society in which children raised in a virtual environment are incarnated in physical bodies only when they reach adulthood.

Which cover do you like best? (Click for a larger image.)
(And the story, by the way, is available in theGreen Leopard Plague e...

Three Beautiful Words

Creationist Ken Hamm believes that all aliens are going to hell, because they haven’t met Jesus personally or something.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has something to say about that.

Amazonia

Amazon has admitted to a second quarter loss of $126 million. Which is not a lot on revenues of over $19 billion, but nevertheless it’s bad news for Hachette and any other Amazon suppliers, because it means Amazon is going to be squeezing every last little penny out of their suppliers, and coming up with every-more-ingenious “services” they can charge their suppliers for.
Amazon’s announced that they’ll lose even more money in the third quarter, but that doesn’t mean that Amazon’s doing badly....

News From the Doughnut

New details from the Doughnut, which is to say the second-largest European public building project of all time, which is to say the Cheltenham headquarters of GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA.
(I should admit that these details are more than a week old, I just haven’t had a chance to comment till now. And the details themselves are older than that, they’ve just been released recently. Got that? Right then, carry on.)
GCHQ has these listening stations in places like Ascension Island and C...

Stuff On The Market

So here we have Gaby Moreno, Hugh Laurie, and the rest of the Copper Bottom Band performing “The Weed Smoker’s Dream” with the original lyrics. Hugh Laurie does some fooling about after the song is over. The video is amateur and pretty well looks it.
Originally recorded by the Harlem Hamfats in 1936, the song with cleaned-up lyrics and a new title (“Why Don’t You Do Right”) later became a big hit for Lil Green (with a guitar solo by Big Bill Broonzy). When Peggy Lee was later singing with the...

Rewriting

Hear the agonized cries of the science fiction writers who, on release of a new paper by Stephen Hawking, must now revise the fundamentals of their future world.

Virtual Tee

We’re down to the last 24 hours of Toolbox, and Nancy’s been busy on her collection of Great Moments of Critique. Which I am now going to steal.
Some of these, maybe, depend heavily on context.
“You need to get more involved with the characters who are dead.”

“I didn’t know we were in Hell–I thought it was a recycling plant in Denver.”

“I loved the extra ears.”

“There is too much slurping.”

“Where are the bikers and crackheads?”
“I don’t want to read too much about aliens munching fingers.”
“I have p...

Plot Array

The most valuable card used in breaking the plot of your next work.