Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 215

Amazon Sez . . .

Amazon has announced that it's now selling more Kindle e-books than hardbacks, and that this is a huge milestone in the history of publishing. Several grains of salt need to be taken with this message. No raw numbers are provided, only a percentage (143 Kindle sales for every 100 hardback sales). It's not clear how many of the Kindle sales replace hardback sales, and how many replace paperback

A False-Color Image of Your Very Own

Behold a false-color image of Messier Object 27, better known as the Dumbbell Nebula. False-color images of astronomical objects are not unusual, of course, but what's unique about this one is that I created it my ownself, while noodling around on software the final day of LaunchPad. And the absolutely cool thing is that you can do this too, because the software is free for download, and is

Trapped With Astronomers in a Hot, Airless Room!

So I am back from Laramie, where I spent a week at LaunchPad, the workshop designed to cram as much astronomical knowledge into your skull as can possibly be accomplished without the use of a mallet. I filled an entire legal pad with notes. I wonder if, a year from now, any of it will be decipherable. I would have typed the notes into my laptop, except that my word processor doesn't do

Stellar Types

So I've been living and breathing astronomy for four whole days now, and it's producing conversations like this:ME: I've been observing the Wal-Mart parking lot, and I've noted twelve Class O supergiant vehicles, fifteen Class B giant vehicles, eight Class G vehicles, and nine Class M dwarf vehicles.CARRIE: What conclusion do you derive from your observations?ME: Big pickup trucks and Wal-Mart

In Wyoming

I am in Laramie, Wyoming, attending Launch Pad, which is an astronomy workshop for SF writers and other creative people, intended to give us sufficient astronomical knowledge so that our fiction won't embarrass the professionals.Hosting is writer/astronomer Mike Brotherton, ably assisted by astronomers Jim Verley and Kevin R. Grazier, who is the science advisor to Battlestar Galactica and Eureka.

Pawns of the Plutocrats

The Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA) has been sponsoring lectures for 250 years. But only recently have they been producing a series of brilliant animations of the lectures themselves, including this one illustrating a talk on the financial crisis by controversial anthropologist and geographer David Harvey.The analysis is frankly Marxist. I'm inclined to think he's

Shades of Porn

So I've watched a few episodes of Season Two of True Blood, and I'm beginning to sort out the whole idea of porn for girls and how it works.Porn for boys, for instance, works as follows:1. Pizza deliveryman rings doorbell.2. Beautiful woman in negligee answers.3. They have hot sex.Whereas porn for girls runs like this:1. Vampire rings doorbell.2. Beautiful woman in Daisy Dukes answers and

Write-a-Thon!

The Clarion Workshop is holding this year's Write-a-Thon even as I'm typing this. Writers will be beavering away for the next month, trying to write enough copy to trigger donations from their sponsors.You could be that sponsor! Support the Writers of the . . . well, I can't say Future, can I? That's another outfit. Support the Writers of Tomorrow! Pledge today!

Alien Cool

I think it was Joe Haldeman who said about creating aliens for science fiction: "If they're not at least as weird as the Japanese, the author has failed." Well, the Japanese have got even weirder.Cracked.com demonstrated this with a list of 6 Japanese Subcultures That are Insane (Even for Japan). Check out the Mountain Hags, the Male Host gigolos, the Yankiis, and the Visual Kei. Plus the

Hurrah for the Ground Observer Corps!

We had a pleasing holiday weekend, including a small gathering on the Fourth of July for a few friends. We served only patriotic American foods: hamburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, potato chips, macaroni salad . . . though it has to be admitted that we did have fruit salad in case anybody brought a Communist who couldn't eat red meat. Our friend Pat Rogers brought a completely evil version