Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 56

2020

2019 is over. While on balance it was a good year for me, it seems to have been a crapshow for the world in general. So happy 2020! (which will be worse) None of our friends were throwing New Year parties this year, so we decided to try something new and go to a party at a hotel. This was a Havana-themed party, with a buffet of Cuban delicacies, a mojito bar, a cigar tent, and a live band, plus we had a lovely suite to stay in and got a made-to-order breakfast on January 1. As it turned out,...

Gifts for Readers #9: Buffalo Dogs

The prolific Lawrence M. Schoen has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell, and six times for the Nebula Award. He is also a veteran of Taos Toolbox. In 2019 Lawrence publishedBuffalo Dogs, a prequel to his popular humorous adventure series about his interplanetary hypnotist, the Amazing Conroy. He’s the greatest hypnotist in known space. And it might cost him his life. The Arconi take two things seriously — absolute truth and their prize commodity: buffalo dogs. When one of...

Gifts for Readers #8: Boss Fight

Taos Toolbox veteran Josh Roseman published his story collectionBoss Fight in 2019. We all have battles to fight. Some of us rebel against the parasites in our heads; some of us face a choice between life and certain doom; some of us do magic when our parents say no; and some of us have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, toward acceptance of our past mistakes. In the pages of BOSS FIGHT, you’ll find people who do all of these things and more — like the engineers who fight the truths about...

Gifts for Readers #7: Miles Morales and Ms Marvel

Just because Xmas is over doesn’t mean you can’t still buy your favorite reader a gift or two, right? Saladin Ahmed’s novelThrone of the Crescent Moon, workshopped at Taos Toolbox, was nominated for just about every award in the field. Since then he’s made a lateral move into comics, and in 2019 started two series for Marvel: Ms. Marvel: Destined and Miles Morales: Spider-Man V.1: Straight Outta Brooklyn. Also during 2019, Saladin’s previous graphic novel,Abbott, was nominated a Hugo Award. ...

Newtonmass

Our celebration on Newtonmass Eve kept me busy, first preparing the roast beast and then eating it with half a dozen friends, after which I was too exhausted to do anything but nap and watch John Mulany’s extremely odd musical children’s special on Netflix, which is just the only sort of thing you’re capable of watching after too much prime rib, too much wine, and too many espresso. But whether your holiday celebration includes John Mulany or Isaac Newton or not, we wish you the very best of...

Gifts for Readers #6: The Vessel of Ra

Taos Toolbox veteran Catherine Schaff-Stump has had quite the year. Her complex 19th Century familial fantasy novelThe Vessel of Ra appeared along with its sequel The Pawn of Isis. Demonic beings in the form of Egyptian gods have attached themselves to the Klaereon family, and require a sacrifice of each generation: either the demon inhabits the victim for life, or the person would bind the demon and gain magical power. Of course there areother families with their own supernatural power and...

Happy Solstice!

From this day, things will only get better. Unless you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case things will get, at least, darker. Unless y0u’re of the view that things will only get worse, in which case I have to admit that you may have a point.

Gifts for Readers #5: Nosy Newfie Mysteries

I think you can fairly claim that a mystery-solving dog falls within the realm of speculative fiction, don’t you? Taos Toolbox veteran Aleksa Baxter has devoted an entire series to her detecting dog. Here’s the word on Book II, published earlier this year (there are three more): Now that the pesky matter of her grandpa’s “shotgun situation” is behind them, Maggie May Carver is ready to get on with settling down in Baker Valley, Colorado with her Newfie, Miss Fancypants.

Unfortunately, when...

Home of the Wakanda Ducks

The US Department of Agriculture has listed Wakanda on its web site as a free-trade partner. The department’s online tariff tracker hosted a detailed list of goods the two nations apparently traded, including ducks, donkeys and dairy cows. In the Marvel universe, Wakanda is the fictional East African home country of superhero Black Panther. The fictional country was removed soon from the list after US media first queried it, prompting jokes that the countries had started a trade war. Trade...

Gifts for Readers #4: Nemesis

Here’s Number Four in this year’s list of new books by veterans of Taos Toolbox, the master class in science fiction and fantasy. (And by the way, if youare a Toolbox vet, and have published something in 2019 that I don’t know about, feel free to drop me a line, okay?) Today’s works from Brian K. Lowe aren’t science fictionorfantasy, which shows that what we teach at Taos
Toolbox can apply to any kind of fiction. TheNemesis series can be described as science fiction-adjacent, though, since it...