Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 26

Crab Wise

Callisto has made a crabwise sideslip in order to avoid the 30+knot windstorm that’s about to crash into the Cyclades, and now we’re moored in Nauplion harbor in the Peloponnese. Any land excursions will occur safely on the mainland. So the only actual Cycladic island we visited was Santorini, as seen above. Spectacular but very much a victim of its own success, with no less than four cruise ships in the caldera (and this was a slow day. Normally it’s like eight).

I’m continually a...

He-e-e-re She Is!

Lively

Behold the mighty Callisto, on which we’ll be spending the next week or so, exploring the archaeological treasures of the Cyclades.

Weather promises fair for the next few days, after which the sea may get a little, um, lively. We may not be hitting the beach of Despotiko in the rubber boats after all, but at the very least we’ll have ourselves an adventure.

Dead Greeks

Today was a visit to the National Archaeological Museum, which I’ve visited on every trip to Greece. And here’s the golden death mask of a Mycenaean king, which Heinrich Schliemann decided belonged to Agamemnon. (Turns out Agamemnon lived four hundred years after this guy kicked the bucket)

Contemporary critics of Schliemann thought the mask looked too Teutonic, and accused Schliemann of forging the mask and making it look like himself. Let’s just agree to call them idiots.

Be ...

Cycladic Enigma

From the Museum of Cycladic Art, one of the thousands of marble effigies found across the islands, all made pretty much in this style. Most were found in graves, though so many were looted nobody knows where most of them were dug up. Most were doll-sized, but some (including this one) were nearly life-sized.

The Cycladic bronze age culture produced these for several hundred years. Nobody knows who these ladies were: they could be a goddess, images of someone dead, a conductor to the...

Portraits

Now here’s a Roman for you, the product of the merger of Roman portrait traditions with Greek painting and Egyptian funerary customs. Nothing seems to be known about the subject, save that (from the narrow white stripe on his tunic) he would seem to be a member of the Equestrian Order. This might have been an Egyptian funerary portrait, in which case the painting would be placed on or in the casket, or it might be a portrait of a living person. The point of origin for the pictures, if kn...

Room With A View

Hard to believe it’s been over forty years since I last enjoyed this view. I kinda missed it.

Shaping Up

Edward Willett and Shadowpaw Press, with help from Kickstarter, has released a perfectly enormous anthology that is well worth your time. The anthology features authors who have been interviewed on the Worldshapers podcast. Names include Griffin Barber, James Morrow, Jane Yolen, Cory Doctorow, F. Paul Wilson, and yours truly. Most stories are original. (Mine, “Send Them Flowers,” is not.)

Shapers of Worlds is available in electronic formats, paperback, and hardback. If you want to...

Reading Choices

The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts is having a virtual convention this weekend. I’m scheduled to do a reading on Sunday at 2pm, but the format restricts me to 15 minutes, or about 10 printed pages.

I tend to write long, and I have no 15-minute excerpts lying around. Some of you are very familiar with my oeuvre, and might know better than I what to read. Any ideas?

MBA in a Box

You can be the greatest writer in the world, but even if you are, you have to pay at least a little attention to the business side of publishing. A plan becomes necessary. Based on granular real-world experience, I have established a simple scheme for vertical intellectual property management. I have expedited distributed options, contracted strategic foundations, and generated international margin advisors. For every step in the publishing sphere I have implemented mission-critical charts,...