Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 156

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.

On To Helsinki!

So there are three cities bidding to host the 2015 Worldcon, and one of them is Helsinki. And I totally want the Worldcon to go there.
Because why? Because Helsinki is cool. (In this case, sort of literally.)
Helsinki is a beautiful modern city, it’s in a gorgeous setting in the Baltic, it’s within easy reach of other cool places (Turku, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Copenhagen), and it’s in Finland, the home of my ancestors, which you utterly want to visit.
But, I hear you splutter, Helsinki is ou...

Bubonicon, Worldcon Schedule

This coming weekend is Bubonicon, the yearly science fiction convention in Albuquerque. The following weekend is LoneStarCon in San Antonio, the annual Worldcon. I will be attending both, doing readings, signings, panels, and other appearances.
Here’s my schedule, so if you happen to be attending either convention, you’ll be able to find me.
Friday, August 23
5pm, panel onMUTANT MADNESS: EXTRAORDINARY GENES RUNWILD
8:30PM, panel:THERE IS SUPERSTITION:CREATING BELIEFS
9:30pm, panel:MECHANICS OF TIM...

What happens when a 3D print job goes wrong? Sometimes it...

What happens when a 3D print job goes wrong? Sometimes it’s fractal art.
Check it out.

Photo credit: JBFromOz

Droughtland

The ecosystem I’m living in is slowly dying. Climate change is just killing it.
We’re in a drought that’s lasted since the early 1990s, with the respite of a few wet years around the turn of the millennium. (While I’m aware that every dryer-than-normal year isn’t necessarily, officially a “drought,” the cumulative impacts of many dryer-than-normal years can be very discouraging, not to mention devastating.)
This year there was a diminished snowpack in the mountains, and my own area had maybe a...

Last Century’s Millennium

Here we find an amusing video from the 1930s predicting fashions for the Year 2000.
You might find it pretty silly, but these predictions were a lot more on the money than the ones that said we’d get flying cars.
(And love those cantilever heels!)

Year Two

It’s been a little over two years since I started publishing my backlist in ebook format, so I thought I’d update you all on how the indie-pub revolution has been going from my perspective. (For the first year of this experiment, see this article which I wrote about it.)
Firstly, almost all the novels are now available, the one exception being The Rift,which I’m hoping will be up some time in September. (There’s something about a 280,000-word novel that requires a lotof attention.)
Ebook sales...