Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 181

Avengers (Disassembled)

I haven’t seen the Avengers movie yet. But I know how I want it to end.
How I want it to end is not with the 35-minute action scene that I know is actually there, the kind where CGI goes toe-to-toe with CGI, and CGI wins. I’ve seen enough of those for a lifetime. Those sorts of scenes just make me long for the days when Bogie would just shoot Major Strasser, and Major Strasser would slump to the floor, and that would be that.
So here’s my ending for The Avengers.
(LOKI and THE AVENGERS meet for...

Easter Inland?

It’s Choose Your Own Caption Day!

Marginal

Being at the Secret Site last week, along with some remarks from friend of the blog Ralf, have set me thinking about life on the margins.
Those folks on that mesa-top pueblo lived there for several generations at least, and got by. They planted crops with a digging stick, and they had to irrigate them with water carried in clay pots from a spring, but they got by. They made tools, looked after their domestic turkeys and dogs, caught game— there were elk tracks all around, and back in bygone da...

City on Fire Goes Live!

City on Fire has gone live on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
Congratulations to B&N, which actually made the book available before Amazon did. Good work, O brick-and-mortar dinosaur!
And though you can buy the book from Smashwords, it won’t be sent to any of the Smashwords affiliates (like Kobo and iBooks) for some time. My last four ebooks are still awaiting approval over there, and currently it’s running 3-4 weeks. If any of you Bay Area residents would like a job proofreading for Sm...

Mystery Pix, Solved!

DorjePismo was right, the Mystery Picture was a Native American structure, or what’s left of one.
In fact it was probably a kiva, an underground ceremonial structure. At any rate, it was the largest room in the small, mesa-top pueblo.
I won’t say where we were, except that we were roughly in the Four Corners area. The reason I’m being so coy is that this particular pueblo is known only to a very few people, and has never been excavated. It’s very remote, perched on top of a mesa, and contains m...

City on Fire, Cover 1.0

Here’s my first go at a cover for City on Fire. I couldn’t find a piece of art as broody and awesome as that of Metropolitan, but then I don’t get that lucky every time.

Crowd reSource

You can all go to war now. You don’t even have to be of military age. All you need is a Internet connection, and if you’re reading this, you’ve already got one of those.
Just pick what side you want to be on, figure out what you have to contribute, and get busy.
Technology Review recently documented several of the people who contributed to last year’s Libyan revolution.
. . . It’s a mid-April night in 2011, and Twawa’s men are frightened. Lightly armed and hidden only by trees, they are a stone’...

Mystery Pix

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I was out of town this week in a location so remote that I had access neither to Internet nor phone.
Here’s a picture of one of the places I visited.
My question for you all is, What is this?
“It’s a piece of southwestern countryside” is a perfectly accurate answer, but it would be an incomplete one.
There’s something else in this photo. Can you guess what it is?
I’ll reveal the answer in a future post, but in the meantime you are all free to speculate.

Native Language (a flashback)

I’m wrapped up in projects, including getting City on Fire ready for ebook release, so I thought I’d offer an essay I originally posted seven years ago, in which I discuss my native language, and why I don’t know what it is. –wjw
My native language isn’t English.
The problem is, I don’t know what language my native language actually is.
I was raised in a household where Finnish was spoken, but I never learned more than a few words, so I’m reasonably certain my native language isn’t Finnish. I h...

Today Is Tregillis Day

I thought I’d give a shout-out to my friend Ian Tregillis, whose fine first novel Bitter Seeds has just been released in mass-market paperback.
This is Book One of the Milkweed Triptych, the very name of which will tell you that there are two more books somewhere in the pipe. (The next, The Coldest War, will be available in July.)
I’m hoping this series gets some traction, because it’s been lost somewhere in the Tor Abyss. The hardback came out two years ago. Who’s in charge over there?
But what...