Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 2

Blue World

Another day, another glacier. This is the Dawes Glacier at the end of the Endicott Arm, as viewed from our catamaran.

The weather has been phenomenally good, sunny and in the sixties or the low seventies. The locals tell us how lucky we are not to have Nature hurl buckets of frigid water at our head every twelve seconds.

We continue to defy the odds,

Hubbard

Once we were in Seattle, it seemed only sensible to keep heading northwest, so here we are in Alaska, viewing the Hubbard Glacier from a catamaran. The glacier is 76 miles long and 7 miles wide as it enters Disenchantment Bay. The ice wall is 17 storeys high and extends a further 200 feet under the water.

(Disenchantmenr Bay, by the way, was named by the Spanish explorer Alessandro Malespina in 1722, when he discovered that his promising route to the Northwest Passage was blocked by a ...

IT’S ALIVE!

Another Menace from Beyond Time and Space

This is maybe 5 meters tall. From the Chihuly Museum.

What the Whole World Will Look Like after Cthulhu Wins the War

Chihuli Museum, Seattle

Momentum

I’ll be heading to Worldcon tomorrow, and afterwards enjoy a couple weeks’ vacation. This was all planned months ago, without knowing I was going to be trying to finish Heaven in Flames around this time.

I finished the penultimate chapter last week, and then decided not to write the finale right away, but go back to the beginning and do a final polish first, hoping to get some momentum before jumping into the last chapter. Now I’ll be away from the novel for over three weeks, and I’ll lose a...

I Invent the Influencer

Every so often I realize that I’ve predicted the future in one of my stories, which is what SF writers are ideally supposed to do, for all that we do it accidentally. (If we actually try to predict the future, we end up looking stupid when we fail.)

I was signing The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories for a friend, and found myself idly turning pages to remind myself what stories were in it. I lit upon a story called “Pinocchio,” originally published in Jonathan Strahan’s The Starry R...

Skulls, Flags, Space

A couple weeks ago I was on a Zoom panel with several colleagues. It seems the Center for Space Crime, Piracy, and Governance thought that science fiction writers might be useful in contributing to their ongoing discussions. James Cambias was enlisted to wrangle Allen Steele, Geoff Landis, Laura Montgomery, and My Ownself onto the panel, and on we went.

Each of the panelists was very well-informed in regard to their specialties, and I enjoyed the hell out of the event.

Here’s the link!

Heaven in Flames Watch

July 24, 2025

I was rolling along on a new scene when I remembered I was making a Zoom presentation in the morning, and I needed to get my notes in order.

So I put my notes in order. Made the presentation. Had a good time.

And now it’s back to the novel.

July 25

I had a hard time building a rhythm last night.

Lots of false starts, lots of second-guessing.

But once my protagonist started talking the whole scene took off. So maybe I don’t need so much description of the act...

Day by Day, Play by Play

[July 19]

I’m pleased to report that I I have only a few scenes to write in my long-delayed project, “Heaven in Flames,” the third book in my Metropolitan sequence.

It’s taken me three and a half years to get this far. This is by far the longest amount of time I’ve ever taken to write a single work. That’s crazy.

Though the last years have been full of distractions, I’ve written practically every day, slogging through the subplots I left unresolved in “City on Fire.” Much of what I wro...