Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 196

Reviews Too Late: Max Manus (2008)

Fearful, apparently, that American audiences might not know that Max Manus was a celebrated Norwegian resistance fighter, the American release is subtitled MAN OF WAR, so everyone will think the film is about a race horse.Max Manus was the most expensive film ever made in Norway, and is based on Max's two autobiographical works, It Usually Ends Well, and It Gets Serious.Max had an adventurous life, leaving sch0ol at 15 to sail to South America.  The film picks up his life in 1939, after he...

Doom Plus. Gloom Plus.

Last week I linked to a BBC video interview with Alessio Rastani, a trader who predicted that, well, Europe is well and truly fucked, and the rest of us with it, and that he and a lot of other people were prepared to make a lot of money off Europe's misery.  The response from the Powers That Be was immediate: Rastani wasn't a real trader, Rastani was one of the Yes Men, Rastani was just a showoff wanting TV time, yadda yadda.Okay, fine.  Here's Dr. Robert Shapiro, advisor to the IMF and...

Prayers on the Wind

I got a little weary of copy-editing entire novels, so I decided to make my Nebula-nominated novelette, Prayers on the Wind, available for your reading pleasure.  You may download it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.It's only 99 cents!  What have you got to lose?The story was written at the request of the writer Lewis Shiner, who was putting together an anthology in response to a brand new fiction category— military SF.The Eighties were very kind to subgenres.  Although there had...

Reviews Too Late: 13 Assassins

13 Assassins is a terrific film, but only if you're the sort of person who enjoys films that end with an excruciating 40-minute bloodbath in which a couple hundred people are sliced, decapitated, shot, disemboweled, stabbed, run through, blown up, buried under collapsing buildings, and trampled by a herd of stampeding cattle that have been set on fire!There's a certain awesome genius in that last, isn't there?13 Assassins is a remake of a 1963 film which I haven't seen, the remake directed...

Ebook Updates!

The Hardwired ebook is now available for your reading pleasure on Kindle, Nook, and via Smashwords.

Smashwords will distribute to all you Sony Reader, iPad, and Kobo users, though it may take some weeks for this to appear in all catalogs.(The formatting problems mentioned in an earlier post have all been resolved.  Download with a free heart!)If you prefer print, the Night Shade trade paperback is still widely available.Days of Atonement is now available on Kobo, Apple, Diesel, and...

Hardwired Available! (But Cursed) Crowdsourcing Plea Follows

So the Hardwired ebook is available for Nook and Kindle.  Two cheers!But the file is in some strange way cursed.  The text in the Kindle file may . . . for some readers . . . have an extra-wide left margin, which looks a little odd but in no way impairs readability.  For other readers, there's no problem at all.  Go figure.If this sort of thing bothers you, the best thing to do is download the Nook file, then convert it to Kindle format with this handy Epub to Kindle converter, which y0u can ...

No Money Changed Hands

I would like to salaam in the direction of author Jo Walton, who has once again defied Internet tradition by committing another unsolicited act of total niceness.   In other words, she wrote another discerning essay for Tor.com about my work, in this case Metropolitan and City on Fire.Honestly, I'm not paying this woman.I'll let you read the essay (or not) on your own, but I would like to quote just one line:   This is a world where when you're caught up in a revolution your grandmother...

Market Value? What Market Value?

Wondering why you may not have heard of hacking collective Anonymous for a while? Because, as it appears, the ad hoc organization has been busy assembling Anonymous Analytics, a public equity research entity (and we venture to guess focused mostly on the short side) whose motto is "Acquiring information through unconventional means" and follows up with "You should have expected us."Anonymous is certainly off to a terrific start in their new venture, releasing a highly detailed report on ...

Truth To The Powerless

Here we see a video of trader Alessio Rastani telling startled BBC interviewers that the world economic system is going to collapse, that millions will lose their money, and Goldman Sachs will rule the world (if it doesn't already).
Why is he telling saying this in public?  Because nothing we do matters, that's why. All the important decisions have already been made.
Maybe we should all start preparing our pitchforks and torches.
(Via Zero Hedge.)

"Flying Pigs Now Ice-Skate in Hell," says Physicist.

A fundamental pillar of physics – that nothing can go faster than the speed of light – appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic particle that has apparently made a giant end run around Albert Einstein's theories.Scientists at the world's largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos travelling faster than light. That's something that according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity – the famous E (equals) mc2 equation – just doesn't happen . . . CERN now...