Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 197

Global Groove

It's September in New Mexico, and that means Globalquerque, our yearly festival of music where hardly anybody sings in English.There were three stages with bands rotating on and off all the time, which means that wherever you are, you're missing two-thirds of the music.   This also means that however much fun you are having, you're always nagged by the suspicion that you might be having a better time if you were somewhere else.In addition to the music, there are booths huckstering local arts ...

Muscular Academics

The web site of Trinity College, Dublin, has been vastly improved by the presence of a new English professor, one Conan T. Barbarian, Ph.D.  (I could have sworn his middle initial was D.)According to the professor's biography: Dr Conan T. Barbarian was ripped from his mother's womb on the corpse-strewn battlefields of his war-torn homeland, Cimmeria, and has been preparing for academic life ever since . . . He completed his PhD, entitled "To Hear The Lamentation of Their Women:...

Heavy Lifting

"Today, NASA revealed its plans for the new heavy-lift launch system intended to carry large payloads—including, perhaps, missions to send humans beyond Earth orbit.

"The NASA authorization bill that Congress passed nearly a year ago demanded not only that NASA build a new heavy-lift rocket, but also that the new system use space shuttle components. The new program, called the Space Launch System, didn't disappoint in that regard. Its first stage and boosters will be similar to the...

SETI Discovers Tatooine . . .

 

"The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet — a planet orbiting two stars — 200 light-years from Earth. 

"Unlike Star Wars' Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of...

What's Next

I've been working to get an ebook version of Hardwired up and available for your digitized pleasure.Here's the first draft of the cover.  (It's a classic, if you ask me.)  And of course I couldn't resist the Zelazny quote, because, y'know, if you've got a Zelazny blurb, you really want to use it.This is maybe the first of my ebook covers that could pass muster as the cover of a real book.  The reason is that ebook covers don't need anything other than the title and the author's name, whereas ...

Procurement

When I wrote my one and only Star Wars book,  I gave some thought to the Empire's military procurement procedure, something I suspect had not actually been done before.  I put my thoughts into the mouth of Han Solo, as he contemplates the Empire's response to the invasion of a bunch of blue meanies called the Yuuzhan Vong:"What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine.  They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or...

Reviews Too Late: Treme

I would most likely have a deeply embarrassing fanboy moment if I ever met David Simon.  I'd babble and drop whatever I had in my hand and maybe do a Snoopy Dance.  I would almost certainly drool.  And the reason is that David Simon is such a damn good writer.And of course David Simon created The Wire, which is the Best Dramatic Television Series Ever, and which ran for five whole years and only got more brilliant from one season to the next.Because I don't have HBO I wasn't able to watch...

Ghosts

I think it was when ABC News started broadcasting messages from the 9/11 dead that I made up my mind.  I won't be watching the news on the tenth anniversary, or watching or listening to any of the ten-year commemorations.ABC is, after all, one of the country's premiere news organizations, but apparently they can't tell the difference between a tribute to the martyred dead and an episode of Syfy's Ghost Hunters.The fall of the Towers was a tragedy that radically changed this country and the...

Well Whinge

 

We've had two days of clouds and rain, and that's lowered the temperature enough so that this was the first day since May, maybe, when we haven't had to turn on the AC.I hope that the rain is raising the water table.  We live in the country, and that means our water comes from a well.  Even at the best of times the water is hard, and we use a water softener to make it something we actually want to wash our stuff in.  Except that this year's been so dry that the water table's gone down, and o...

A Day Without Email . . .

 

. . . is like a day without being bitten on the hand by a chihuahua.In other words, a day without something that is vaguely painful and annoying but not in any way harmful or dangerous.For some technical reason, never quite deciphered, I couldn't log onto the Internet from my Atlanta hotel, and I went five days without being able to access my email.  When I got home and was able to look at my four hundred-odd messages, there wasn't a single one that required an answer.But that doesn't mean I...