Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 67
February 27, 2019
Megalo-Happenings
I’ve always felt there was a place for megalomania in art. (Go big or go home, right?) And recently one of the most megalomaniacal works in history premiered in Paris. Eleven years in the making, financed by a pro-Putin oligarch, over a dozen feature films plus 700 hours of ancillary material, and shot in an abandoned swimming pool in Kharkiv, Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU is finally shown to the public. Allegedly a full-length biopic— or more than a dozen full-length biopics— of the Nobel-winni...
February 25, 2019
Throwing Flame
Today I had a flamewar. The good kind, the kind fought with actual flamethrowers. Well, flamethrower, singular. I was the only person who had a flamethrower, which is another reason why it was the good kind of flamewar. Every winter we have to go out and burn out last year’s crop of weeds, which has been next to impossible this year because the weather has been extremely windy, and I don’t want to set fire to the entire county by sending a crop of fiery tumbleweeds bounding over the landsca...
February 22, 2019
Tasting
So the other night we held a scotch tasting with our friend Sue Lampson. (Fortunately her nondrinker husband Alan was able to take her home.) The bottles I contributed are shown above, ranging from sweet/sherry/vanilla on the left to smoky and peaty on the right. Sue brought her own box of goodies, and so we spent a pleasant evening sipping this and that. The problem with spending an evening sipping a dozen or more scotches is that it’s difficult to remember afterwards what you liked and did...
Don’t Watch This Space
I had a rather long essay posted here, in which I made a dumb mathematical error that invalidated my whole premise. (Figures are not my friend.) I removed the post not because I was embarrassed— at my age I’m pretty much immune to embarrassment— but because I didn’t want anyone as math-impaired as I am to link to it. Which was a shame, because it was actually a rather entertaining post. Sic transit gloria internet, and all that.
February 21, 2019
Other People’s Money
So I have a brilliant plan to give other people’s money away, damned liberal that I am. My plan was inspired by news of the MacKenzie Bezos divorce, in which the amount of the settlement was estimated to be in the neighborhood of $66 billion. (Though it may be a bit less.) My first thought was, Hey, a novelist gets rich! There’s hope for me yet! (Though perhaps only if I marry the world’s wealthiest man.) My second thought was, What the hell would I do with $66 billion if I had it? I would...
February 20, 2019
When I Wrote It
Some days I’m glancing at my Amazon sales numbers and can’t avoid reading the reviews. There was one review of This Is Not a Game and the whole Dagmar series that said they were excellent books, but warned the reader that they weren’t in any way science fiction. To which I can only respond: They were science fiction when I wrote them, baby!
February 18, 2019
Boxes
More boxes of books have arrived. They’re coming faster than I can give them away! Be that as it may, this photo should tell you that the revised edition of The Praxis is finally in print! (It’s been available as an ebook for some time.) It’s the “Author’s Definitive Edition.” It says so right there on the cover! It will be followed in due course by the revised editions of The Sundering and Conventions of War. So how much of this definitive edition, you might ask, is actually new? And the...
February 15, 2019
Black Beret
Motored up to Santa Fe last night to see the (seemingly) immortal Richard Thompson, OBE, and his current four-person trio. I donned a black beret in tribute. Pardon the amateur quality of the video (not by me), but it has the virtue of showcasing Thompson’s phenomenal guitar skills in a song that is a tribute to his guitar heroes. Here he plays like Django, Les Paul, Chuck Berry, Hank Marvin, and (now and again) Richard Thompson. Also, check out the phenomenal drummer Michael Jerome, who f...
February 11, 2019
Abandoned Carcass
Shoshana Zuboff takes aim at surveillance capitalism. . . . the digitization of everything was giving technology firms immense social power. From the modest beachheads inside our browsers, they conquered, Blitzkrieg-style, our homes, cars, toasters, and even mattresses. Toothbrushes, sneakers, vacuum cleaners: our formerly dumb household subordinates were becoming our “smart” bosses. Their business models turned data into gold, favoring further expansion. Google and Facebook were restructurin...
February 8, 2019
Collegiality
Presenting a video in which I and about a dozen other writers discuss the collaborative project that is Wild Cards.
