Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 6

Bogiemas

Everyone have a merry Bogart’s Birthday!

Sand Spit

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Here I stand on a sand spit outside the town of Dalyan, in southern Turkey. The year is 2009.

To reach this beach, we had to hire a boat to take us from the town and through a mazelike passage between islands of tall, rustling reeds, an experience that led straight to the scenes in Quillifer where my protagonist is taking a small boat through the reed-maze outside his home city of Ethlebight.

Across the river is a path to the ancient Lycian city of Kaunos, now...

Santo Whatsisname

Here’s a mosaic of some saint or other, from St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. He was very high up in the church, on the inside of a dome I think, and I had to crank up the telephoto to capture him. The tesserae are in pretty good shape.

Though St. Mark’s is the iconic church in Venice, it’s a basilica, not a cathedral. The actual cathedral is another big church on another island, and I never got around to visiting it.

Though I don’t know which saint this might be, we can easily see hi...

Hoodoo

From 2006, taken from a balloon adrift over Cappadocia, in central Turkey. The terrain in Cappadocia is spectacular and craggy, featuring “fairy chimneys,” hoodoo spires, cliffs, hidden valleys, and signs of habitation going back thousands of years. The closest analog I’ve seen to this country are parts of the Colorado Plateau, like the Cedar Breaks— except that the hoodoo spires at the Cedar Breaks don’t have homes carved into them. There is at least one entire castle carved out of a bi...

Ironclad

Here I am in 1987 taking command of HMS Warrior, Britain’s first ironclad warship. Henry VIII’s galleon Mary Rose had just been put on display, and of course HMS Victory is there in all its glory. My gaming group had been intensely playing my Privateers & Gentlemen roleplaying game, and I plundered the gift shop for Christmas presents, Admiral Nelson Toby jugs, Royal Navy recruiting posters, and other goodies.

Portsmouth, 1987,

Moonrise at Sunset

Moonrise at the Bernardo Refuge. Just tonight.

And a little closeup of Earth’s satellite.

Adrift

Waiting for pickup in the Philippine Sea. Palau, 2015.

Wee Crabby

A tiny crab snuggles into its home in an anemone. I never owned a camera capable of taking this kind of picture, so I suspect this was taken by Atti, one of our group.

Sulawesi, 2013.

Meridian

From 1995, a picture of Kathy at the Royal Observatory, at Greenwich. She’s standing on the prime meridian, but the scanner’s cut off her feet so you can’t see it.

The photo may have been taken by Sue Casper or Gardner Dozois, who joined us on the excursion. We were zigzagging our way to the first Glasgow Worldcon.

We got on a ferry near Tower Bridge and cruised down the Thames, where History lines both banks of the river. In Greenwich we walked through the lovely Christopher Wre...

Lepidoptery of the Mind

When we were in New York State in October, we spent half a day cruising around Ithaca, viewing Kathy’s alma mater of Cornell. We didn’t see much, because pouring rain pretty much confined us to our car. But there was one exhibit I really wanted to see, which was for some reason stuck in a corner of the Agriculture Building. With the entrance under construction, I snuck into the Ag Building through a basement door, shook the rain off my jacket, wandered through an underground labyrinth fil...