Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 17

Screaming Oppie

I finally saw Oppenheimer, and it’s an absolute achievement of a film. It’s not to be enjoyed— there’s very little joy in the movie— it’s to be experienced. A terrific script, an absolutely great ensemble of first-rate actors, and it’s surprisingly faithful to the history. Lots of special effects, but none are CGI, they’re old fashioned effects you have to film with an actual camera, which has the effect of making them seem a lot more authentic than pictures created by a computer.

The fi...

I Am At Bubonicon

Bubonicon, New Mexico’s finest SF convention, is in progress, and so am I. Come by and say howdy.

My schedule:

Friday

Reading, 5pm, Cimmaron

Panel, 6:30pm, Salon A-D: Time’s Making Changes

Saturday

Panel, 11 am, Salon E: Alternative History

Signing, 4:25pm, Salon A-E.

Sunday

Panel, 12:30pm, Salon E: Writing in the Near Future

Injure. Heal. Repeat.

I’ve been having a frustrating time with one leg injury after another. I’m guessing it began three years ago, when hip replacement surgery resulted in a tilted pelvis, which resulted in my right leg seeming longer than my left. Also, because my spine wanted my head to remain atop my torso instead of pointing to one side, I also got scoliosis. This resulted, for whatever reason, in chronic pain in my legs.

After three years of physical therapy, chiropractic, spinal injections, massage, t...

Time Off

I’ve spent the last four days at a cabin in the Sacramento Mountains, a property shouldered up against the Mescalero Apache reservation (who, contrary to standard practice, managed to get some very good land out of the American government). The cabin is about 100 years old, and is owned by the extended family of Louy, our lovely host. Her great-grandfather used to drive a buckboard to the cabin with his family and a whole summer’s worth of supplies, then leave his family to their summer while...

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.