Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 172

The Tern Schooner

Behold! The Tern Schooner, the latest in the ebook reissues of my old sailing series, is now available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
The book was originally published by Dell as The Yankee, in the same month and from the same publisher as The Yankee by Dana Fuller Ross. (Because Dell was just a fiasco in constant motion, that’s why, fascinating to watch if it wasn’t your career being made to walk the plank.)
I know I said I’d release Cat Island next, but once I got into the book,...

Quizzical

Wow, we have only a single winner for the Boolean Gate quiz. Congratulations, Steve Halter! Email me your address, and a signed copy of the uncorrected proofs will soon be winging their way to you.
Here are the questions and answers:
1. Who are the three historical figures depicted on the cover?
Mark Twain, JP Morgan, and Nikola Tesla.
2. What the hell is a Boolean Gate, anyway?
I’ll defer to Ralf’s technical explanation for how it all works, but what I was aiming at was that logic gates in comput...

Boolean Quiz

Lo! It is the cover of The Boolean Gate, my new novella from Subterranean Press, available now for pre-order in a signed, limited edition!
You can also pre-order it at Amazon and divers other places, I believe.
The price is a mere $38. But if you’re short a few dollars, don’t despair! I have a few copies of the uncorrected proofs lying around, and I’ll be happy to send copies to the first three people to give the correct answers to the quiz below.
Now, the proofs do not have the handsome J.K. Po...

Taos Toolbox 2013!

I’m happy to announce that the next Taos Toolbox, the master class for science fiction and fantasy, will take place July 28-August 10, 2013, at Taos Ski Valley.
Teaching will be Nancy Kress, Walter Jon Williams, and special lecturer Melinda Snodgrass.
The application period begins December 1. Mark your calendars!
(and special thanks to Toolbox grad Rich Baldwin for the nifty new Toolbox logo!)

Golden Clouds

I’ve spent a few days up the mountain looking at scenery like this, an aspen grove up above 10,000 feet, where the autumn leaves look like golden clouds sitting just beneath the rim of the sky.
I would have been uploading pictures all along, but I forgot the cable that connects my camera to the outside world.
Oops.

I Am In My Happy Place

I’m up on top of a mountain, surrounded by aspens that have turned a brilliant gold, and breathing air that tastes like champagne. (Well actually it tastes more like pine, but you know what I mean.)
Posts may be scarce for the next few days.

Echo Deco

Here’s a photo of Chicago’s NBC building taken at Worldcon a month or so ago.
With its vertical lines, symmetry, setbacks, towering mast, and flying buttresses (!!!), the building is a clear example of Art Deco.
Except that this building dates from the wrong era. Art Deco was created in the 1920s and died (as an architectural style) with the Great Depression, when no one could afford to build skyscrapers any more. As an industrial design movement, Deco died with the end of World War II.
This bui...

Magic

I’m sure some of you know that I used to be a stage magician. Not a particularly brilliant one, it must be admitted, but I did get up in front of numerous audiences and did an actual act in which things dis-apparated and re-apparated and odd shiny objects floated through the air. (In fact, I once sliced Teresa Nielsen-Hayden in half with a Black & Decker saber saw. She claimed she survived because she wrote “STET” on her abdomen.)
I don’t do stage magic any longer, because I realized that I co...

Out Of The Past: Ambassador of Progress

I thought I’d talk about Ambassador of Progress, my first science fiction novel, which (as I mentioned in an earlier post) is newly available in ebook form via Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords. (Plus iBooks and Kobo and Baker and Taylor and other places for which I have no actual links.)
The most remarkable thing about Ambprog, as I’ve always thought of it, is that it was an accident. I wrote the proposal more or less by accident, it sold after a series of ridiculous accidents, and once...

Three Stages. No Waiting.

This past weekend was the annual Globalquerque music festival, with sixteen bands playing on three stages over two nights. As usual, I missed a lot of music by virtue of the fact that I was at one stage and not another. Which is disappointing, but since I was generally hearing good sounds wherever I was, it wasn’t as disappointing as it could have been.
My absolute favorite band was one that was putting on its first concert ever— in fact, two of the band members hadn’t met the other two until...