Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 158

Tea Time

British author Guy Walters recently had what (for me) would be an incredibly successful signing, in which he spoke to 800 people and sold no less than sixty hardback books! And then he added up his expenses (driving 250 miles and spending two nights away from home), considered his compensation (a few gift bottles of wine, some royalties which, if paid at all, would be delayed for years) and realized the whole business had cost him money.
Over the past five years, every writer I know has been t...

Commodities

So Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s House of All That’s Evil, has figured out a way to magically lift money from all our pockets.
It turns out that while Congress was busy passing all 875 bewildering pages of the Dodd-Frank Act to better regulate our financial titans, they also loosened some regulations, and big banks are now allowed to trade in commodities.
So what did Goldman do? Corner the market in aluminum, that’s what.
Before Goldman bought Metro International three years ago, warehouse custom...

Rejoice If You Live Across the Water!

Right now, my novel Implied Spaceshasn’t been available, in English, in most English-speaking countries. That’s because Night Shade bought the rights only for North America, and the rest of you were left out in the cold.
Until . . . realsoon now.
Very shortly, I will be making an Implied Spacesebook available outside North America. Rejoice, O Brits! Halloo, O Kiwis! Let the wild rumpus begin, O Australia!
Here’s Version 1 of the cover.

Ado

All these big summer blockbusters on offer, and the only pictures I’ve seen in the last few months were small-to-middlin’.
Last year I wondered what Joss Whedon’s post-Avengersproject would be, now that he’s the most important man in Tinseltown. Little did I know that he’d already shot the movie while he was doing post-production on The Avengers, and that it would be a small black-and-white adaptation ofMuch Ado About Nothing, starring mostly veterans of Mr. Whedon’s past projects.
It’s a delib...

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...