Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 65
May 2, 2019
Sport Xtreme
In my Worldcon GoH speech a couple years ago I mentioned Finland’s habit of inventing new sports, conceived I suppose in the winter when they have little else to think about while drinking. Finland is the home, for example, of swamp football, competitive sauna, and competitive hobby horse riding. Of course Finland is also the home of heavy metal, with bands such as Finntroll, Eurovision winner Lordi, Stratovarius, and Night Wish. In fact Finland, per capita, has more metal bands than anypl...
April 29, 2019
Unconventional
A lot of my posts lately seem to be about new editions of one of my books or another. That’s a good thing, right? Today’s post brought copies of the Author’s Definitive Edition of Conventions of War. Read and enjoy!
April 24, 2019
10:32
April 22, 2019
Terran Prize Awarded!
The Terran Prize for 2019, sponsored by George RR Martin and consisting of a scholarship for a foreign writer to this year’s Taos Toolbox Workshop, has been awarded to Chinese author Zhou Wen (昼温.) Zhou was born in Jinan, Shandong province, and has a double B.A. in English and finance, and a Master’s degree in translation from Shandong University. She is currently enrolled in the Chinese University of Hong Kong for another Master‘s degree in translation. She is 24 years old. As a translator...
April 21, 2019
The Mead Story
A friend laid some home-brewed mead on us, and last night we opened a bottle and shared it with some friends who’d never had mead before. A strong, sweet honey odor and a taste to match. Pretty nice. All of which reminded me of the time I tried to brew some mead. I was maybe nineteen and had found a recipe somewhere. I bought the ingredients, and my friend Jeff offered the use of his kitchen. Jeff was my age and into theater, and in fact lived in a theater annex. The theater was a former...
April 17, 2019
Inverted Soup Bowl
Tonight’s sunshower sunset.
April 15, 2019
Soldier of Arete
Alas. According to multiple sources Gene Wolfe has died at the age of 87 in his Illinois home. I’ve been on a mini-binge of Gene’s books lately, mostly recently Home Fires, and I think the mini-binge will have to continue. I admired Gene’s plain, clear style, which was an ideal surface beneath which to hide the machinations of his unreliable narrators, and to gracefully unwind his diabolically complicated plots. (Not that all his unreliable narrators were deliberately trying to deceive. Som...
April 11, 2019
Metropolitan for the Masses
My novel Metropolitan is now on sale for $0.99, or for whatever $0.99 is worth in your local currency. The ebook may be found at the following online retailers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Apple, Google, Kobo [NOTE: the price has not yet dropped on Kobo, but it should. Very soon now. Really.] I’m stupidly proud of this book, and I think that if any of my works is remembered 100 years from now, it will probably be this one. Here’s your night’s blurb: NOMINATED FOR A NEBULA AWARD....
April 9, 2019
No Longer Anonymous
Friend of the blog Anonymous— I presume not the entire hacker collective— tells me that the audio book of City on Fire is available! Go forth and listen! (While checking to see where I could find the book, I discovered that the reader reviews of City on Fire on Amazon all properly belong to a more recent book of the same title by one Garth Risk Hallberg. I have asked Amazon to put Mr. Hallberg’s reviews in the proper place and to find the ones belonging to me. [I got more stars than he did....
April 4, 2019
Estecado
This year I am once again in Portales, NM, the cultural capital of the Llano Estecado, for the Jack Williamson Lectureship. The usual gang of fun-lovers is here, including Connie, Courtney, and Cordelia Willis, Toolbox survivors Sheila Hartney and Lauren Teffeau, Emily Mah, Sarena Ulibarri, and many others. Cordelia, who works in a crime lab in California, gave a talk this afternoon about DNA genealogy, which had me wishing I was a crime fiction writer, just so I could use all the cool infor...
