Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 5

The Toolbox Strikes Again

Shen Tao (Taos Toolbox ’23) has sold her first novel in a number of markets, mostly at auction. After workshopping The Poet Empress at Toolbox, she finished the book, went straight out and got an agent, and then started collecting advances. A seven-figure advance in the States, a six-figure advance in Britain, another six figures from Germany, some pre-empts in Italy and Spain, and no doubt more to come.

This sort of thing happens once in a career, if you’re very, very lucky. Though it ...

Sun Dog

Grand Canyon sunset, Feb. 2025. Small sun dog at right.

Cruising

Here’s a spotted eagle ray cruising over the reef in the Turks and/or Caicos, 2016.

Eagle rays are impressive, with their ten-foot wing span, but they don’t hang around for long. They’re both fast and shy, and if they see divers in their vicinity, they’re out of sight very quickly. They’re pelagic fishes, living in the deep ocean, and only hang around islands and reefs if they happen to run into them on their travels in the Big Blue.

This one zoomed past, giving us only a few se...

London Broil!

So what to do with a beef round roast? It’s tough, it’s very lean, and it can be kind of flavorless.

Yet roasts can be comfort food, and comfort is what I’d kind of like given recent events, which include freezing weather for the last week, and a tomorrow promised to remain below freezing all day.

So beef round? The traditional method is to braise the hell out of it, for a couple hours or so.

I decided to go another route. I marinated it overnight in a marinade of Worcesters...

Go ‘Pods!

A gorgeous nudibranch crawling along the reef at Siladen, Sulawesi (formerly known as Celebes).

Sulawesi is a paradise for nudibranchs, and apparently every other form of aquatic life. Nudibranchs are a type of gastropod, basically a snail that has got rid of its shell and survives by tasting really awful to predators. The colorful exterior is a warning of bad taste to follow.

There are hundreds of types of nudibranchs, all of them colorful and beautiful, many of them yet to be ...

Monstre!

French pro-Axis poster from the Second World War. Churchill smiles at a starving French family while surrounded by the slogan, “Monster, you make us suffer!”

Churchill looks more like a film comedian than a statesman, let alone a monstre.

The poster is intended to encourage the French public to forget that it was the Germans, not the British, who were confiscating food, fuel, and human beings.

From the Churchill War Rooms in Westminster. I doubt this poster hung here in Chu...

Long Ago

Mid-1960s, I think. I analyze the performance envelope of the P-38 fighter for the benefit of my mom’s friend Giulia Simola.

Immigrant

A Viking grave in a Scottish churchyard. (I don’t remember the name of the village, but it was very near Loch Lomond.)

The gravestone is carved so as to resemble an overturned boat— boat burials were still a thing.

The “viking funeral,” with the ship set on fire and pushed out to sea, is a creation of Hollywood, or maybe Victorian fictioneers. What they actually did was bury the whole ship with the corpse in it.

Here the deceased didn’t rate a whole ship, but he got a boat big ...

Holy

This photo is 50 years old! And sort of looks it. I and Photoshop have done our best.

This, from 1975, looks down from Delphi toward the Gulf of Corinth. I had come to Delphi at the command of a couple of major figures— one from the Bible, the other from science fiction.

Not that I wouldn’t have gone anyway. I was in the bus station in Athens waiting for the bus to Delphi when a stranger approached me. He had long light brown hair and a beard, wore a blanket over his shoulders, a...

Spin About

A reconstruction of the turret of the USS Monitor, open to allow a view of the mechanism and one of the two 11-inch guns. The turret was designed by American inventor Theodore Timby, and the rest of the ship by the Swedish-born John Ericsson.

A problem with the turret was that there was no brake— if the mechanism was engaged the turret would keep turning, one full turn in a little more than two minutes. There was no way for the gunners to see the target except by looking out through th...