Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 168

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.”

Dive Odyssey (Part Two)

Coral Sea memories,continued. Organized by topic.
Breathing.
Always one of those things we divers have to take seriously.
It has to be admitted, right off, that my air consumption sort of sucks. I use up a tank of air quicker than I should— not crucially, horribly, but quickly enough so that it bothers me.
It’s hard to say why, except that it started on my previous dive trip, to Pelau. At the time I was suffering from an undiagnosed case of acid reflux, so I’d figured my pulmonary efficiency was...

Dive Odyssey (Part One)

I was looking through the photos of my dive trip and thought this picture was one of my better efforts It shows how colorful and diverse underwater life can be, and it was taken at a shallow enough depth that the color flash. Most of my photos tend to be on the blue and green end of the spectrum, because the further underwater you go, the less color you get— the reds disappear first, and then the yellows, and before long all you’ve got is blue. You need to shine a light on something before it...

Tamale Season

I haven’t been posting much the last few days, but that’s because I’ve been having Holiday Fun, which mainly involves meeting with friends, then eating and drinking too much.

Plus of course there’s all the maintenance I needed to do around the house when I was traveling, and now need to do now that I’m back.

And then there was the Annual Holiday Plumbing Emergency, in which I have to try to get a plumber to turn up in the holiday season when they all have many better things to do. (This happens...

The Sequel

History has itssequels, just like the movies.

And like the movies, the sequels tend to get worse and worse.

Take, for example, the Spanish Armada(s).

Bloated (But Pleasing)

I saw The Hobbittoday in all its 48fps glory, which shows considerable restraint considering the hype I endured all those weeks Down Under. An example of which I offer you here, the safety video I sat through on each of my Air New Zealand flights. It was funny the first time.

I was prepared to go into the theater and roll my eyes a lot, since Peter Jackson has turned one children’s book into three whole films— that’s on the order of two minutes of screen time per printed page. Jackson is a dir...

Ho Ho Ho

Behold! It is the special Walter Jon Williams issue of Subterranean Magazine, which features not only my classic story “Surfacing” but my new novella “The Boolean Gate,” which you can now read for free.

(Which means that you don’t absolutely haveto shell out the $38 for the signed, limited edition, though of course you ought, not only because it’s a collectible sure to rise in value but because t would make an absolutely wonderful holiday gift for that special someone, especially someone inte...