Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 202

Albuquerque Comic Expo

 

I'll be at Albuquerque Comic Expo this weekend.  I'm not entirely certain when I'll be available to meet y'all, but I know for sure I'll be there on Saturday afternoon.
Since, along with me, the event features only minor figures like Stan Lee, Marina Sirtis, Nicholas Brendon, LeVar Burton, and Len Wein, I'm sure I'll have the fans all to myself.

House of Shards Available!

Okay, whatever technical problem existed has now been resolved, and House of Shards is now available in its Kindle edition.
Enjoy!

Maijstral At Last!

Okay, kiddies, the ebook versions of the Maijstral books are online!The Kindle editions of The Crown Jewels may be found hereabouts, and Rock of Ages over in this direction.(For some reason the middle book, House of Shards, is held up "for review" at Amazon, and has been for days now.   Which to me indicates some kind of problem with the machinery, and I'm trying to find an actual human being to find out what's wrong.)All my Nook editions— which does include House of Shards— may be found on...

Maijstral (Comedy is Hard)

I thought I'd write down some thoughts on the Maijstral books, in anticipation of their imminent release in e-formats.(And first of all, the matter of pronunciation.  I pronounce it My-STRAHL.  You are, however, welcome to pronounce the protagonist's name any way you like.  I'll know who you're talking about.)I wrote these books pretty much accidentally.  It wasn't part of any plan.  I had just finished Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind, both of which would become Tor hardbacks.  Neither o...

Dad's Day

So here it is Father's Day.  And here's my dad, a picture taken on a fishing trip before I was born.What to say about the man who nurtured me, supported me, worked hard to keep food on the table, kept me out of trouble, and helped to knock down Hitler?My dad wasn't a hard guy to know, and he wasn't a hard father to have.  He wasn't a tyrant or a dictator, and he was willing to let me be myself even if neither of us had a clue what that was, or would be.  He was gentle, he was caring, and he s...

Born to Fly

So I'm bummed by the death of Clarence Clemons last night, and I thought I'd post a tribute video.I found quite a number of videos of Clarence doing just his solo from "Jungleland," which is justly famous, but they were just the solo, and I hate cutting up a song.  So here's the whole E Street Band doing "Born to Run," with the frenetic Clemons solo in the middle of it, and the rest just shows Clarence being what he was, a member of a really great band.(Young folks may be shocked to discover ...

Farewell Fermor

I see from the papers that Patrick Leigh Fermor (DSO, OBE, COP, Chevalier Ordre des Arts et Lettres, etc.) has died, alas before I got a chance to track him down and share a bottle of ouzo with him.  (He couldn't wait, I suppose.  He was 96.)I have written elsewhere about his marvelous memoir A Time of Gifts and its sequel Between the Woods and Water , detailing the journey he took by foot across Europe in 1933.  It is at once a picture of a Europe that no longer exists, a meditation on time (...

Free At Last

Let it not be said that we are not living in a free and open society.  After all, the National Security Agency just declassified a 202-year-old book on cryptography.  (I didn't know the NSA was around 202 years ago to classify the book in the first place!)In addition to the cryptography text, the NSA declassified 50,000 pages of venerable documents once considered so sensitive that our national security would be compromised should they ever be made public.The document dump was "the first in...

Soon At An Ebook Store Near You . . .

Voila!  The cover for the upcoming ebook release of Rock of Ages.

The Critics are Unanimous! (Pretty Much . . . )

The latest Locus has not one but two reviews of Deep State.
(The book appeared four months ago, but what the hell, I'll take reviews where I find them.)
Fortunately, one of the reviews is available online. Check it out.