Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 75

I Am At Bubonicon

. . . or will be shortly, anyway. The weekend will be spent at the 50th annual Bubonicon held in Albuquerque.  In the time, I’ve missed maybe 6-8 of them, and attended all the rest. I’ll be doing a reading, participating in panel discussions, and giving a speech. But if you don’t come for me, come for guests of honor John Scalzi, Mary Robinette Kowal, Lee Moyer, and Eric Velhagen.  And if not for them, for the other confirmed guests: Daniel Abraham, Arlan Andrews, Sr., John Barnes, Jeff Benha...

It Begins

Another set of goodies arrived in the mail over the weekend, copies of The Accidental War fresh off the press. The official release date is September 4, but apparently the books actually exist, and in my experience books that actually exist do manage to find their way to stores.  So if you’re interested in the further adventures of Sula and Martinez, you might just want to take a stroll through your favorite local bookstore.

Top of the World

Now here’s an interesting phenomenon.  It’s raining on the left side of this photo.  On the right side, it’s clear. This is Taos Ski Valley, which is quite narrow.  This allows you to observe weather as it creeps along between the walls of the canyon.  There was one memorable day when I was sitting on the balcony of the lodge and watched a snowstorm soar up the canyon.  Except I was above the weather, and so I saw sunny white clouds above, and a dark snowstorm below plastering everything with...

What’s Happening?

My current reading is Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, an amiable, eccentric pseudo-Victorian work.  Reading it is pleasurable, but I’m over 100 pages in and as yet have no idea what the novel is about, if anything.  Amiable eccentric Victorians amble through the work encountering one another, and there either is or isn’t a sea monster lurking off in the estuary (I rather think there isn’t), and people might or might not love one another, but everyone is reasonably reasonable and there doesn’...

Loin

Here at the height of summer, fruits and veg are flying in from the farmers’ markets, as wonderful accompaniments to the vast hunk of protein I cooked tonight.  Here we see a pork loin, to which I added aromatic herbs from the garden (not ours), and which I then cooked sous vide to a nice juicy pinkish medium, after which I browned the exterior on the grill and sliced it up just as it was bathed in the rays of the setting sun. Served with organic sweet corn and gazpacho made with heirloom tom...

New Format Quillifer

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What should arrive in the mail but a box of Quillifer!  These aren’t the hardbacks that have been out since October, but brand-new trade paperbacks! For those of you who didn’t want to shell out for the hardback, and prefer fine crisp paper to ebooks, this is clearly for you! Order Quillifer at your favorite bookstore, or find it hereabouts: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, iBooks, and Kobo

Aloy vs. the Apocalypse

I just finished playing Horizon Zero Dawn after 150 hours of gameplay.  It’s not like I’ve been slacking off my other duties to play the game, because those 150 hours started back in January.  I had to slot in a few hours here, a few hours there, and sometimes a month or two would have to go by before I could get back to it.  My understanding of game continuity suffered.  I’d forget who those minor characters were. The game has been widely praised and won a fistful of awards, including the “...

Clouds of the Valkyries

Tonight an enormous striated cloud formation, at least 40-50 miles wide, poured over the mountains and drifted in our direction.  I’ve never seen anything like it. The supercloud looked all pretty and pink in the sunset, but I felt uneasy.  We’ve turned into Extreme Weather Planet in the last couple weeks, with summer heat alternating with downpours that have caused a lot of flooding.  (In fact last night, during class, my karate school got flooded when waters poured in under the back door.  ...

Can We Have the Enterprise Now?

So researchers at CERN have broken the speed of light, but only with neutrinos. If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster. That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works....

Babington

Who was it who, on this blog, recommended to me the works of Thomas Babington Macaulay?  I’ve searched but have been unable to find the comment. Be that as it may, Macaulay has become my reading for much of the summer. When I’m teaching at Taos Toolbox, there’s always the question of what to read when I’m not writing critiques of other authors.  When I’m in full-bore critique mode I can’t read SF or fantasy for pleasure, and so I tend to default to history and biography. My last year’s Toolbo...