Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 244

Gas Giant Smackdown!

A rogue object has collided with Jupiter!Wasn't this how Greg Bear's Forge of God started? Should we start saying goodbye to our loved ones now?

Northrop Builds a Horten

Northrop has built a replica of the world's first het-powered flying-wing stealth bomber, the Horten Ho 2-29. First built and tested in the air in March 1944, it was designed with a greater range and speed than any plane previously built and was the first aircraft to use the stealth technology now deployed by the U.S. in its B-2 bombers . . .The most important innovation was

Philosophers Needed: Apply NASA

. . . He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA's irreplaceable team of

And Speaking of Jack Vance . . . .

A new Dying Earth volume will be released any day now, a book that is not by Jack Vance but of Jack Vance.Songs of the Dying Earth is a collection of stories written in honor of Vance, by writers like Kage Baker, Tanith Lee, Mike Resnick, Dan Simmons, Robert Silverberg, and yours truly. It's a pretty nifty anthology, if I do say so myself. Or, as Library Journal put it in their starred review:

Corpse-Eating Robot

According to our friends at Fox News, a corpse-eating robot called EATR may roam the battlefields of the future . . . A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot —

And About Time, Too!

Me: "Why did you persist in writing hurlothrumbo romances of the footling sort favored by mooncalfs?" Him: "The question is nuncupatory. I grow weary of your importunities. Begone."The New York Times Magazine honors Jack Vance.

Queen of the Crapsellers

Flashing back now to April 12, when we came booming up from Bodrum to our base at Selcuk, on the way looking at places like Eurotas and Herakleia, then going in search of Apollo's temple at Didyma. Signage sent us astray. It turns out that Didyma is not precisely exactly quite the same city as the modern Turkish Didim, which is an overdeveloped seaside resort community. We drove through this

Cybugs

Okay, cool new DARPA thing . . . The military and spy world no doubt would love tiny, live camera-wielding versions of Predator drones that could fly undetected into places where no human could ever go to snoop on the enemy. Developing such robots has proven a challenge so far, with one major hurdle being inventing an energy source for the droids that is both low weight and high power. Still,

From Junkfood Science

I suppose we all remember the big story about how rhesus monkeys kept on a highly-restrictive diet lived longer than those who were allowed to nosh at will. Turns out that this is only true if you, well, ignore the monkeys that died. The lower mortality claimed among the monkeys on the calorie restricted diet were achieved only after eliminating 37% of the monkey deaths. They defined mortality

Mr. Brown

Charles N Brown of Locus died today.Charles was one of those science fiction people who will be very difficult to explain to future generations, a combination of gruff titan and mischievous elf. He began Locus as a one-page mimeographed newszine to support a worldcon bid, and then built it over the years into the premiere--- possibly only surviving--- print news magazine of the science fiction