Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 167

You Are Herein Invited . . .

. . . to give me a damn literary award. Fuck yeah!
It’s the season for nominations for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. And I’ve been reading on other folks’ blogs where they’ve been listing their eligible works, just in case, y’know, their readers were confused or something.
Well the heck with that! What I’m going to assume is that you wantto give me an award, because that’s what all right-thinking readers do. I’m just going to make it easy for you.
Fortunately it’s easier this year than most,...

For Your (nearly free) Enjoyment

As a sort of belated holiday gift, I’ve made my Nebula-winning story “Daddy’s World” available free at Smashwords.
It’s $0.99 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I wanted to give it away free, but they insisted I had to charge something.
Either way, it’s a bargain. Enjoy!

Filth-Spattered Wretch That You Are

You are such an accursed, ungrateful wretch that you will not give a child into training for the maintenance of the gifts of God. You have everything, all of it free of charge; yet you show not a particle of gratitude. Instead you let God’s kingdom and the salvation of people’s souls go to ruin; you even help to destroy them. Ought not God to be angry over this? Ought not famine to come? Ought not pestilence, flu, and syphilis find us out? Ought not blind, fierce, and savage tyrants come to p...

Reviews Too Late: Freeing the Slaves

Carrie Vaughn suggested on her blog that someone could do a combined review of Lincoln and Django Unchained.
Happy to oblige, Carrie.
In brief,Lincolnis a glossy, reverent, beautifully acted dramatization of Lincoln’s attempts to pass the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Django Unchained, on the other hand,is a Tarantino film.
I think that sums it up pretty well, don’t you?
But yah, okay, you want more. Fine. Here ya go.
Lincolnis another of Spielberg’s beautifully-constructed historical f...

For Your Hand-Helds

The Fall and Winter issues of Subterranean Magazine, including my story “The Boolean Gate,” are now available for free download in Epub and Mobi formats.
You may now enjoy my Twain/Tesla saga on the electronic reader of your choice.
Carry on.

Cheap Louis

This blog gets a lot of spam, but WordPress is exceptionally good about catching it, and so—- luckily— you don’t have to read it. But Ido, because I’m reasonably conscientious about this blog, and I want to make certain that none of you get shut out unfairly.
Most of the spam is simply that, spam, but there’s one persistent spammer who— to all appearances— actually seems to be reading my posts and trying to respond in a way that will persuade me to give him access. (I assume he actually has a...

Uncensored!

For the first time in history, our friends in Turkey have pretty well done away with censorship of books and other reading material. Back in July, parliament passed a law that would free all banned works, provided that no court chose to uphold the ban in the meantime. Apparently no court did, so 23,000 banned works can now be legally made available for the first time. Turks, read your hearts out!
Turkey had no actual national censorship board, instead having a variety of state organs that coul...

Dumb Ol’ Facts Anyway

When I was writing about this kind of thing back in the Eighties, I recall being denounced to my face on a panel at a science fiction convention, by s writer who claimed that the mind-machine interface was just dumb fantasy, because it wasn’t Supported By The Facts— any electrode inserted in the brain would be eaten, or dissolved. Or something.
The audience was urged to avoid stupid fantasy literature like Hardwired, and to read the author’s Real He-Man SF, Complete With Facts.
I don’t recall e...

Decades in the Making!

I can quite legitimately say that my new novella, “The Boolean Gate,” was twenty years (or more) in the making. Not that I was writing it for twenty years, but that I was certainly thinking about it for all that time. And I knew all the important bits of the plot for all that time.
Why did it take twenty years? I can best explain by paraphrasing the words of Al Swearengen: “The time was not right.”
To begin with, short fiction is an indulgence. As I have all too frequently written, I probably l...

Your New Year Resolution

If you want to be a writer, here’s a New Year resolution for you.
“This year I’m going to become a real writer, and to that end, I’m going to apply to Taos Toolbox.”