Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 19

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...

The Beginning of History

Ħaġar Qim

So now we get to the chief reason I wanted to go to Malta in the first place: to view the gigantic stone monuments found on the island.

There is nothing like them anywhere else. They were built out of the local limestone roughly 3500-2500 BCE— before the Pyramids, before Stonehenge. They are right smack at the beginning of history. Until the recent discovery of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, these were believed to be the oldest freestanding monuments in the world.

I have a deep fa...

Innovator

A monument to the inventor of the minidress.

Co-Cathedral

A sight of St. John’s cathedral in Valetta is enough to sear the eyes right out of your skull. The style adopted for the interior was Go-For-Baroque, with enough gold, marble, and brilliant color to rival a fever dream of John of Patmos (as opposed to John the Baptist, for whom the cathedral is actually named).

St. John’s is also a co-cathedral, which was a new term for me. When Valetta was built in the late 1500s along with its new cathedral, Malta already had a cathedral in Mdina, t...

Behind the Walls

Superyacht Bastion

First, an update. Kathy’s finally come home after 13 days in COVID jail in a hotel room in Malta. And I’ve got a cold, which tests insist isn’t COVID, so two cheers for me.

But enough of the depressing stuff. Let’s talk about the good things.

We spent a few days on Malta before Kathy fell ill, and we had a chance to scout around. Valetta is a walled city, with a profusion of gates, bastions, and forts made of pale limestone that turns gold in the setting sun. ...