Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 158

Let’s All Be Spies!

Sadly, it appears that Barack Obama is intent on spending the considerable political capital he won in the 2012 election on maintaing the total information state.
Oh well. Personally I’d hoped for something better.
With so much attention being paid to Snowden’s revelations of NSA spying on, well, everybody— revelations that weren’t particularly revelatory to anyone who had been paying attention— virtually no attention has been paid to the administration’s Insider Threat Program, which proposes...

Triumph of the Deep State

Egypt’s Deep State is back in charge of the country, which may not be such a surprise— but what’s different is the enormous degree of popular support. Demonstrations in the millionsaimed at the overthrow of the democratically-elected Morsi government. How could the Old Guard resist?
Not that the demonstrators precisely wantedthe generals back. And the generals are promising not to stay— we’ll have a revised constitution and new elections later in the year, and in the meantime civilians are ost...

WordPress 911!

I have spiffed up my page of ebook links, which I now recommend to you all as a model of clarity and attractiveness. I added thumbnails of the covers of all the books, just to make it all the prettier.
My original problem in attempting this was that the thumbnails tended to pile up and over and around each other, a phenomenon all you old HTML coders will doubtless recognize. No matter how many empty lines I added, WordPress wasn’t interested in adding any more white space around the illos.
Fort...

Pitch Meeting

Thanks to Eric D Snider and his eerie command of the NSA archives, we now have a complete transcript of the pitch meeting for the new Lone Ranger movie.
Let’s listen as the geniuses at Disney work their magic.

DISNEY EXEC. #2:What’s your concept for it? A faithful recreation of the classic character just as people remember him wouldn’t work, obviously.

DISNEY EXEC. #3:That never works.

DISNEY EXEC. #1:Not that we’ve ever tried it.

DISNEY EXEC. #3:Well, it doesn’t take a genius to see that when peo...

Cemetery Ridge

150 years ago today George Pickett sent his division of Virginians up Cemetery Ridge and did his part to extinguish the very cause for which he was fighting. The Gettysburg battlefield is the single bloodiest patch of ground in the U.S., and features what is often called “the high water mark of the Confederacy.” (I think the high water mark was actually left a year earlier, when the South advanced on all fronts and were rebuffed at Antietam, Perryville, Shiloh, Pea Ridge, and Pigeon’s Ranch h...

Blind Taste

I like a good glass of wine now and again. I tend to buy moderately-priced wines, neither cheap nor dear. And I’m finding support for my position in dozens of tests that seem to show that the art and science of wine tasting is, for the most part, utter delusion.
A2008 paperinThe Journal of Wine Economics, for example, found that when consumers are unaware of a wine’s price, they “on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less [than cheap ones].” Experts do not fare much better. The study...

Toolbox Cleans House

Congratulations to Taos Toolbox graduate Saladin Ahmed, whose Throne of the Crescent Moonjust won a Locus Award!
And congratulations as well to Nancy Kress, my co-instructor, whose “After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall” just took the novella award.
We are Taos Toolbox, and we live in the Province of Awesome!

Enter Mr. Depp

Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman are making one of them post-holocaust flicks in my neighborhood. Parts of downtown Belen have been grimed and gritted up to look suitably battered by time and ill fortune— not that some parts of the downtown didn’t look like that to begin with.
When photography begins on Monday, it’s going to be hard to travel in that area.
Here we see a building partly into its conversion. Belen’s old railroad hotel is getting a new porch. (The hotel, by the way, is owned, or at...

Two Centimeters Forward, One Centimeter Back

This week has been full of really insignificant achievement.
Time after time, I’ve started to accomplish some trivial task, only to have it takehours out of my day and prevent me from doing the stuff I actually want to do. Like write.
And then yesterday, just as I was buckling down to a job I knewwould take hours, the air conditioner quit working on a day with a record high temperature. So I ended up sleeping in an air-conditioned motel, and nothing of any significance was accomplished.
Today I...

New Wind

New Mexico author Emily Mah Tippets has done an interview with New Mexico writer Sally Gwylan, and is also giving away a free copy of Sally’s new book, A Wind Out of Canaan. It’s a gutsy, beautifully written story that starts with child hobos in the Great Depression, and leads to alternate worlds, questions of sexual identity, and finding one’s place in the world.
Or, if you don’t like the odds of winning the drawing for Sally’s book, you can get it free on Amazon, if you buy it in the next 24...