Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 45

Onward and Backward

Back in the days of my youth, optical astronomy was done with telescopes, and the sky recorded on dry glass plates.  Starting in the 1890s, millions of glass plates were viewed, then stored in archives of the world.  They’ve been largely ignored in the years since— there are so many, where do you start?  Yet it’s a scientific archive filled with undiscovered treasures.But lately a team from the University of Chicago and and the Kavali Institute has been scanning and digitizing the old plates, u...

Giza Cat

Behold our cat Mocha contemplating the Pyramids.Dish Network is for some reason devoting Channel 100 to a digital re-creation of Giza in the 1920s.  The camera never moves, and mostly nothing happens in the image, except that every so often a biplane might fly into the picture, circle the pyramids a couple times, and then fly off.  Or a felucca might sail down the Nile, very slowly.  Or the sun might set and the scene is bathed in sunset colors, and the stars will come out.  Or a leopard might ...

More Chat

I am interviewed by Mike Glyer in File 770.  This actually appeared last month but I didn’t see it till now.

Interestingly Various

Mr. Russell Letson has reviewed The Best of Walter Jon Williams.I’m a terribly modest fellow, as I’m sure you know, so I won’t quote the whole review, but only a couple salient excerpts.Exactly 30 years ago, this column’s lede was “Walter Jon Williams is an interest­ingly various writer….” The intervening decades have given me no reason to alter that opinion, variations on which I have been re­peating just about every time I write about a Williams title. So why should I break the chain now? ....

Rediscovered

I recently found an old pocket notebook with four carefully numbered entries.1.  Larod (?) not major (?)2. Lament3. Beast4. TuneThe first line is my best guess.  It might be “Earon not manor,” or any combination of the two possibilities.I’m guessing these aren’t updates on the status of my psyche, but notes for a story.  I wonder if I ever wrote the story— it doesn’t seem familiar, but then I’ve written a lot of stories, so it’s possible my memory has failed on this one.Or maybe it’s a st...

The Hogfather Approves

Instead of continuing in my normal course of cynicism and gloom, I thought I would celebrate the detectible and growing spirit of optimism in our world by showing this video of Hogmanay in Edinburgh.Since Hogmanay is what non-Gaels call “New Year’s Day,” I’m posting a few weeks late, but my friend Louy only sent me the video tonight, and better late than never.The narration is by David Tennant, Siobhan Redmond, and others.

 

Predictable

So after watching the US Capitol stormed by a hostile force for the first time since the War of 1812, and after hearing reporters bleating out their catchphrase, “Who could have predicted this? (usually employed when something happens that is completely predictable), I bethought myself of an article I first read in November of 2019, which opens thus:
In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. By 2020, experimental devices connected ...

The Frog. In the Pool.

The copyright of The Great Gatsby expired on the first of the year, so now it (and other classic works) have entered public domain.  Go forth and make your revisionist art, creators!  The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg are upon you!
But what no one expected was a groundswell of fans demanding a new Gatsby film starring the Muppets.  The narrator Nick Carraway, according to some, would be the only human actor in the movie.
Well, it couldn’t be worse than all the other film adaptations of the book, ri...

Doppelgänger

I’m working on The Restoration, which is the Praxis book following Fleet Elements, and lately I’ve been having a hard time with it.
Part of it has to do with how much less amusing it is to write about a great empire that’s tottering because of greed, mendacity, scapegoating, and stupidity when I’m actually living in a country that’s tottering because of greed, mendacity, scapegoating, and stupidity.
I had no intention of making this series quite so relevant.
Be that as it may, there were other p...

Time to Dance

2020 is over.   Let’s bury it and dance on its grave!