Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 7

Horizon

The moon and Venus near the horizon. Earlier tonight.

Latomia

This modest bit of Sicilian landscape has an infamous history. This is the Latomia dei Cappuccini, an ancient stone quarry on the north side of the city of Syracuse. In 413 BCE, the Athenian attempt to capture Syracuse collapsed, and the entire Athenian army, its allies, and 200 ships were forced to surrender.

The captives were confined to a stone quarry on this site. (You can see the stone galleries on the cliffs in back of the photo) While the non-Athenians were enslaved and sold...

The Green Hamster Plague

No doubt you all remember my Nebula-winning story, “The Green Leopard Plague,” which revolves around a contagious virus which allows people to take energy direct from the sun.

Well, guess what? I’ve scored another hit on the WJW Predict-O-Meter!

According to this video, “scientists” (as they are always called in these presentations) have worked out a way to implant chloroplasts in mammalian tissue— specifically hamster tissue.

We may soon anticipate swarms of green super-ham...

Approaching the Rainbow Bridge

Maid of the Mist approaches the Rainbow Bridge. Niagara Falls, 2024.

Row of Cheaters

From 1980, Olympia in Greece, home of the original Olympic Games.

The tow of plinths on the left memorialize those caught cheating. Their home cities were expected to purchase a bronze statue of Zeus to be placed on one of these plinths, which was then carved with the name of the cheater, the name of his father, and the name of his city.

The statues have long been scavenged and melted down, but you can still read the names of the cheats.

Infamy can last forever.

Packed

Among all the outstanding works I saw at the Corning Museum, this was one of the most impressive. Outwardly a modest genre painting, this turns out not to be a painting at all, but a mosaic— a micromosaic, to be specific.

The picture is made up of thousands of tiny glass rods bundled together and standing on end. There are 1400 rods per square inch, all assembled by hand. (Some works had as many as 5000)

Were I condemned to make a work like this, I’d be raving mad within a day.

Up the Pole

So here I am in Cambridge in 1987, punting along behind the Cambridge Backs. I hadn’t punted in 12 years, but my skills (such as they were) came back quickly enough, and I hardly collided with anything at all. It was nice the the river had a gravel bottom, unlike the muck at the bottom of the Isis in Oxford, and so the river never tried to snatch the pole out of my hands.

On this trip I taught Melinda Snodgrass to punt, and she soon was poling along like a pro. We were on our way to t...

Elevator Games

Another Banksy rat, this one found in the elevator of the Fenimore Museum.

I admit I don’t know what the hell is going on here, The rat seems to have a cassette recorder strapped to his chest, and his face is— exploding?— undergoing transformation? His paintbrush(?) also seems to have suffered.

Your guess is as good as mine.

Wave Action

This is a photograph of the 2012 solar eclipse in the South Pacific. We were on a ship a couple days’ voyage north of New Zealand, and it was following the track of totality across the water.

Unfortunately the sea wasn’t completely still. I had set the camera for a long exposure, the ship rolled, and I ended up with this photo of a mostly-eclipsed sun doing a mad dance across the sky.

I managed some more successful photos which I posted elsewhere.

On the Table

Some of you should recognize this. It’s at the Corning Museum of Glass.

I’d ask something like “what is this?”, but it would open the doors to floods of Cyrillic spam, so it’ll have to remain a mental exercise.

The answer later.