Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 73

Matters Economic

I haven’t been posting here because I’ve been traveling, and either I was very busy or there wasn’t sufficient internet access, or there was no place to put my laptop so I could write on it.  (Amazing how many bedrooms have no chairs in them.  Or tables.  Or tables that aren’t completely filled with delicate bric-a-brac.) Eventually I came down with stomach flu, sufficiently awful so that I actually had double vision; so I’ve been recovering from all that, and today’s the first day I’ve felt...

A Scandal of Somm Sort

As those of us who’ve seen the movie  Somm  or the TV series Uncorked will attest, there is an organization called the Court of Master Sommeliers which offers restaurant wine stewards a number of ranks leading up to Master Sommelier, a rank which will guarantee the winners a well-paid job at a posh restaurant. The only hurdle is a fiendishly difficult exam which only 249 people have passed in the entire history of the organization, which was founded in the UK in 1977.  There’s an oral test on “...

Invasion of the Grillidae!

So has anyone seen anything like this? It may be a little hard to view, but what you’re seeing is a swarm of crickets climbing the west wall of our house.  By nightfall they were all clumped in a black mass beneath the eaves.  Now, a couple days later, they’re mostly still there. Since it had rained all the previous day, I thought maybe they were trying to climb above the flood waters, but the flood waters were no longer there. I kept yelling at them, “Hey!  Halloween is next week!”  But they...

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...