Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 73

Born Under the Sign of Godzilla

NASA— or maybe just a coupla scientists staying up late drinking— have looked at a new map of gamma-ray sources discovered by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope and begun plotting new constellations based on popular culture.  The list includes the Hulk and Godzilla, as well as Einstein and the Eiffel Tower. This is particularly appropriate for the Hulk, who of course was a result of Bruce Banner’s having a mishap with those pesky gamma rays. But my question is: what does this do to astrology?  Wi...

Recap

 I’ve begun work on Volume VII of the Praxis series, which so far does not have a title, and I’ve ran smack into the problem of information control. Information control, as I tell the participants at Taos Toolbox, is crucial for the writer.  Too little information and the reader is bewildered.  Too much and the reader is buried, or bored, or possibly some other word beginning with b. Get information control right, and you can build suspense.  Tell the reader enough so they can stop worrying a...

Lifestyles of the Rich and Stupid

One of the joys of reading contemporary literary fiction is enjoying the wealth of close observation that literary fiction demands.  Close observation, done right, is delightful, but you have to hope that whatever is being observed is worth the effort, and so often it isn’t, as (for example) when the subject is adultery among the white American upper middle classes. (If you’re going to write about sex, why set it among the most boring people in the world?  But I digress.) I recently read a no...

One-Act Play

SCENE:  I (hereafter ME) am driving down the freeway in my car.  The phone rings. ME: Hello? RUSSIAN ACCENT: Hello.  Where are you right now? ME: I’m in my car, driving. RUSSIAN ACCENT:  Can you pull over?  This is an important message. ME: No, I can’t pull over. RUSSIAN ACCENT: Are you sure?  This is very important. ME: I can’t pull over. RUSSIAN ACCENT: You have just [inaudible]. ME:  What? RUSSIAN ACCENT: You have just won Publisher’s Clearing House! ME:  I’ve just won Publisher’s Clearing...

Sunshine Superhouse

Last autumn we decided to install solar panels on our home.  We got bids from three solar companies, but SolarCity’s bid was so much lower than the others that I never even went back to the others to see if they could put in a competing bid. Installation was delayed because we needed to replace an old roof before putting solar panels on it, but SolarCity paid for the part off the roof their panels would sit on, so that helped.  The roof installation was delayed by bad weather, and by the fact...

Special Shapes

Morgan Stanley keeps thinking that if I just give them enough stock tips, they’ll become as rich as me.  So they bribed me with tickets to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta on Special Shapes day, and maybe in return I’ll give them a little advice concerning penny stocks. Attending involved getting up at 3:30am— I’d only got to sleep at 1:30— and then driving for the better part of an hour to the balloon field north of town.  When we arrived, dawn wasn’t even a mere hint on the horizon.  Fortunat...

Hardware Hack

Now it looks as if the Chinese have managed to do a massive hardware hack into thousands of servers used by government agencies and major corporations. Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CI...

I Am Inevitable!

I will be interviewed on KKOB radio in Albuquerque on Monday, October 8, at 6pm Mountain Daylight Time. If you live outside the area, you can stream the broadcast live. On Friday October 12, I’ll be speaking at a speculative fiction panel at the meeting in Denver of the Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller’s Association.  My panel will be at 4pm.  Harper is flying me in that day, and out the next, so if you want a book signed, you’ll have a rather small window, probably around the time...

Viral Video

In celebration of the publication of Knaves over Queens, the 26th(?) Wild Cards book, I offer the following video. It catches you up on the first 25 books, so you can start with the latest right away! Plus— catchy tune, ne?

 

Resisters

This last week marked the death of Freddie Oversteegen, 92, the Dutch resistance heroine who at the age of 14 joined a resistance cell dedicated to sabotage and assassination.  (She would meet German soldiers in bars, lure them to a secluded place, then shoot them.) She sabotaged railways, killed soldiers and collaborators, and sheltered Jews, gays, and political refugees.  (Her family had actually begun harboring Jewish refugees before the war started, and saw no reason to stop.) Ms. Overste...