Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 155

A Concise History of My Weekend So Far

The following scene takes place at the Greenport Maritime Museum on the North Fork of Long Island.
A: We’re closed.
Q: The Greenport Maritime Museum is closed during the Greenport Maritime Festival?
A: We’re closed.
Q: Where are the tall ships? There are supposed to be tall ships!
A: They only come once every four years.
Q: But there are tall ships on your web site! There’s a tall ship on the cover of the free program book that you’re distributing to everyone! The official schedule has ship tours a...

The Future May Smell Like Skunk

So the Skunk Works has announced a workable fusion-powered generator by 2017, with a mass industrial rollout by 2027, each unit small enough to sit on a truck and powerful enough to provide electricity for a city of 50-100 thousand people.
The Skunk Works, being a highly secret division of Lockheed responsible for technological breakthroughs such as the U-2, SR-71, and F-117 Nighthawk, is not exactly being open about their design, which has led to a certain amount of paranoia, including specul...

Physics Glam

So here’s McGill physics grad student Timothy Blaise with his a capella masterwork, a cover of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” featuring Feynmann diagrams, string theory, and Sock Puppet Einstein.
Because can never have too much Sock Puppet Einstein!

[via David Axler]

Leaping to the Fore

Since the weather report promised sun, I’ve gone up to the Ski Valley for some face time with Mother Nature. But the weather report was a trifle, um, optimistic, and my nature time has been kinda drowned out in a fairly literal way.
I’ve been indoors a lot.
I don’t have much to report, so please enjoy this pole-dancing video.
Since pole-dancing videos aren’t exactly common in this space, allow me to introduce it properly. The dancer is recent Taos Toolbox grad Ken Kao, writer, parkour enthusiast...

As Long As We’re Talking About Literature . . .

It’s 25 jokes only book nerds will understand.

[via Gardner]

Spare Parts

So I’ve just finished Never Let Me Go,a science fiction novel from Kazui Ishiguro, the British author of Remains of the Day, etc.
A heavy-duty literary author attempting a theme common in genre fiction deserves, I thought, a browse. After all, Timethought this was the best novel of 2005.
I’m not going to make the usual complaint that Ishiguro has “reinvented the wheel” by using a rather hackneyed science fiction trope under the impression that he was the first to think of it, primarily because...

North America, and the World!

The publisher has reverted my rights, so I’m happy to announce that my ebook of Implied Spacesis now available throughout the world via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
iBooks, Kobo, Sony, etc. will follow shortly, as soon as Smashwords finishes their “review,” which has been pending for a while now. (If your life’s ambition has always been to proofread for Smashwords, my guess is that this is a good time to apply.)
Enjoy!

Mediated

One thing that most struck me about Worldcon was how much personal interaction has become mediated, if not dominated, by social media.
I frequently found myself in a group of people who were looking at email, checking their twitter feed, browsing Facebook, and sharing cute cat pictures and amusing Youtube videos, all while trying to maintain face-to-face contact at the same time.
It seems that the conversational paradigm has shifted, and not for the better.
Do you know why I hang with my friends...

Grand Master

Frederik Pohl died yesterday, at the age of 93, just hours after he made a final post on his excellent blog. You might say he went down writing, an inspiration we can all take to heart.
The news came as the San Antonio Worldcon was into its last hours, which left us little time to react, reflect, and mourn.
I think I first came to appreciate Pohl’s talents not as a writer, but an editor. His long term at Galaxyand If produced a tremendous amount of good fiction which I consumed in my youth. And...

To the Alamo!

I’m off to San Antonio, home of the Alamo. Where it will be 99 degrees in the shade and 85% humidity, which would normally make me really grumpy, except that I’ll be at Worldcon, so I won’t care.
In the meantime, please enjoy this video. Fortunately this comes from Japan, where sadism in the name of entertainment is perfectly okay, and accepted, and the victim doesn’t sue his tormentors naked, as would surely happen on this side of the water.