Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 17

Mere Days

You have only two days remaining to download the Take No Prisoners Bundle of thirteen novels, including my own Metropolitan.

Pay $5 to download four books, or at least $20 to unlock an additional nine novels.

Details, including descriptions of all thirteen novels, are to be found here.

Darkly

The artist Dark Crayon, who last year did a fine cover for the Czech edition of Hardwired, now provides this cover for Voice of the Whirlwind‘s Czech edition. The title has been shortened to Whirlwind, which is appropriate, I think, for all it loses the Biblical reference.

Unspam

So today some Russian spambot dropped 257 spam into random topics on this blog. (How do I know the spammers were Russian? Many of the spam were in Cyrillic.) Fortunately WordPress puts posts from strangers into a single “pending” file, so I was able to spend half an hour or so dealing with them.

What saddened me was that the pending file also included some perfectly legitimate responses to my posts, which for some reason were never shown to me for approval. Many of these were condolences ...

Ancient Eyes

This is a photo of a reconstruction of a Neanderthal boy. Hair and eye color were derived from DNA found in the boy’s jaw. You can’t tell from the photo, but the jaw is quite small.

The exhibit didn’t tell me how old the boy was when he died, or if any of his other bones were recovered, or how old the bones are, other than that they were found in “sabbie a ghiaie di alluvioni.”

The first thing that struck me about the face is its humanity. We are both homo sapiens, and our ki...

William’s Brain

Monreale Cathedral— more formally Cattedrale di Santa Maria Nuova di Monreale; Duomo di Monreale— is a look into the mind of King William the Good, who built the place. I can see why a life of war and conquest didn’t suit him. This colossal building is a fantasia, a kind of theme park tour of William’s brain.

Supposedly, while on a hunting trip, William II fell asleep under a carob tree, and had a dream in which the Virgin suggested he build a church on the site. Knowing that sugge...

Rock the Bosporus

Ayçe Sicimoǧlu rocks out on a classic. Feel free to give it a listen.

Bundle Time!

The Science Fiction Writers of America have put out another novelbundle, and I am once more included!

This time it’s fantasy. There’s something about fantasy that never fails to thrill readers of all ages and backgrounds. Stories filled with magical creatures, wizards, romance, and adventures, both big and small, continue to cast spells over our collective imaginations. In SFWA’s Take No Prisoners StoryBundle, there’s plenty of adventure, magic, unlikely heroes, and otherworldly creatur...

Rain in the Opera

The Duomo in Palermo was built at the command of William II the Good.

(William was the son of William I the Bad. Father William doesn’t seem to have been particularly bad, as medieval monarchs go. He seems to have acquired his monicker because he had a tendency to promote competent commoners over the heads of the local nobility, who viewed royal offices as their hereditary right.

(William II, on the other hand, seems to have earned his nickname. He was much less bellicose than his ...

In A Parallel World Near Yours

Lots of stuff going on in the world of Wild Cards. A new original anthology, Pairing Up, has been published here in the US. I’m not in it, but these guys are:

“Trudy of the Apes”   KEVIN ANDREW MURPHY
“Cyrano d’Escargot”  CHRISTOPHER ROWE
“In the Forests of the Night”   MARKO KLOOS
“The Wounded Heart”    MELINDA M. SNODGRASS
“Echoes From A Canyon Wall”    BRADLEY DENTON
“The Long Goodbye”   WALTON SIMONS
“What’s Your Sign?”   GWENDA BOND & PETER NEWMAN
“The Wolf and the Butterfly”   DAVID ANT...

Loving Couple

From the National Museum in Reggio Calabria, a rare double burial dating from either the Paleolithic or Mesolithic, or maybe the boundary between the two.

The two were buried in a cave. The man’s left arm is around the woman’s shoulders, and the woman rests her head on the man’s shoulder. I can imagine the two were in love.

Details were lacking, such as how old the couple were when they died and whether they died at the same time, or a later burial was added to the first.

Still...