Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 19

Reunion

Taos Toolbox 2023 started tonight, and Nancy Kress and I met our 18 new colleagues whose work will be our work for the next two weeks.

But that’s not who we see in this photograph. This is the class for 2022, or most of it. Because they’re having a reunion right now, just as the next year’s class starts, and they were kind enough to drive down from their mountain digs in Truchas to invite Nancy and me to lunch.

You gotta say, this group really bonded, and they’re still working to ...

Stream Away

“Everything became big tech — the Amazon model of ‘We don’t actually have to make money; we just have to show shareholder growth.’ Everyone said, ‘Great. That seems like the thing to do.’ Which essentially was like, ‘Let’s all commit ritual suicide. Let’s take one of the truly successful money-printing inventions in the history of the modern world — which was the carriage system with cable television — and let’s just end it and reinvent ourselves as tech companies, where we pour billions down t...

O Splendor!

Tonight’s little piece of heaven: a Chilean sea bass filet baked with a pesto crust, and served up with a beurre blanc sauce.

Kanteles

Five kanteles! Four players! Lots of gorgeous harmony!

Tonight’s diversion was Kardemimmit (“Cardamom,” I think), a four-girl ensemble from Finland. They began playing together around the age of 10, when the head of their music academy suggested they start a band, and now 23 years later they come to New Mexico. (Doubtless the highlight of their career.)

A kantele is a Finnish folk instrument “belonging to the southeast Baltic box zither family,” which I’m sure tells you a lot. T...

Akragas

Temple of Hera (allegedly)

Leaving the Bougainville in the harbor of Porto Empedocle, we headed up the hill to Agrigento, which in its heyday was known as Akragas, after one of the rivers that ran past the town. In Akragas’ glory years in the 5th Century BCE, the city gobbled its neighbors, controlled the middle section of Sicily, held the Carthaginians at bay thanks to an alliance with Syracuse, and was stinking rich. It was one of the leading cities of Greater Greece, the Greek-settled a...

Price Rise Coming

On June 20, Amazon is raising the fees they charge for putting books in print. Which means that, if I want to continue making my pittance on print books, I’ll have to raise my retail price on the four books I have in print from Amazon: Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, Angel Station, and Investments (plus the Stickpin).

I should make it clear that these are books in print, not ebooks. Ebook prices will stay the same.

You have only a few days to buy these books at their current pri...

Ponant

So there came the morning when Kathy tested positive for COVID, followed by a frantic hour that separated us for nearly two weeks. I went off on the trip without her, and she was condemned to days and days of coughing, confinement, and hotel food.

My digs were rather more posh, and the food more varied. I was croggled when I first saw Le Bougainville, because I expected a much smaller boat, only a bit larger than the Callisto that took us into the Aegean last year. I’d been misled b...

Deity

A local goddess relaxes before her temple.

Gastronomy

There are a surprisingly large number of Michelin-starred restaurants on Malta. Despite my devotion to gastronomy, I’d never eaten at a restaurant with a Michelin star, and I thought it was about time I did. So even though I knew that Kathy and I were going to be facing a week of very large and probably very tasty meals on the boat, I decided to make the experiment.

Of the various restaurants available, I picked Ion, because its rivals featured Mediterranean cuisine, while Ion showcas...

Launch Day!

A new audiobook launches today!

The Praxis Triad consists of all the short fiction from my Praxis series, read by the dulcet Stefan Rudnicki. Because the stories were published by different publishers they’ll never be together in print, but here they are together in audio format.

And Impersonations isn’t even short fiction— technically, at over 50,000 words, it’s a novel. So you get a novel, plus two stories, for the cost of three stories.

It’s a bargain! Find it wherever fine...