Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 78

A T. Rex is Reading My Mind!

This edition of Dinosaur Comics pretty much sums what’s been going on in my head since I bought the latest model MacBook. If part of this isn’t showing up on your screen (darn MacBook anyway!), click on the art to get the whole picture. Copyright (c) 2018 by the excellent Ryan North.

Cosmic Coincidence

The moon and Venus appeared together tonight.  The sight was magnificent, and the photo is a bagatelle by comparison. (Does anyone know what a “bagatelle” actually is?)

Sabotage in the Home

Of course you knew that when you installed Alexa, Siri, or Google’s Assistant in your home, you were installing a spy.  You just trusted that Amazon, Apple, or Google would use your information for good, or at least would not actively harm you. What you may not have known is that these assistants aren’t just spies, they’re potential enemy saboteurs. Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetect...

Grumbling

So my innards are grumbling, and I expect the next few hours won’t be any fun at all. I’m doing my prep for tomorrow’s colonoscopy.  You have my permission not to envy me. I’m mentioning this not to elicit sympathy— because there is none on the Internet— but to remind those of you of a certain age that this is one of those things that has to be done regularly, a fact driven home to me twenty years ago, when Roger Zelazny died of cancer because he delayed this annoying but very necessary proce...

A Mythical Beast

A statue of a unicorn eating a lily,  across the road from the James Thurber House. Here’s a link to the story, in case you’ve never read it.

Hello, Columbus

I am in Columbus.  The one in Ohio, not the one in New Mexico that Pancho Villa attacked, or the one in Indiana, or the one in Georgia; and certainly not the Columbus City in Iowa, or the Columbus City in Alabama.  (If Columbus founded any more cities in North America, I’m unaware of them.) I am here for Marcon, which I am informed stands for Multiple Alternate Realities Convention.  I am a guest, but not the Guest of Honor, of whom there are rather a lot.  I am in fact a “featured author,” w...

Archivum Secretum

The Vatican Secret Archives houses 53 linear miles of documents going back 12 centuries, much of it handwritten in Latin using archaic script.  It’s not Secret, exactly, it’s just inaccessible, because in order to look at one of the documents you actually have to be there, in the Vatican, along with your knowledge of Latin and archaic scripts.  Plus you have to know what you’re looking for and where to find it. A lot of it looks like this: But a new project could change all that. Known a...

Ice Flows

A video taken a couple weeks ago in my home town of Duluth.  Kind of hypnotic, no? I remember stuff like this from when I was a kid.

Crawling

I few nights ago, I woke from a really scary nightmare. I don’t remember the dream at all, which is a shame, because judging from my reaction to it, it would have made an excellent premise for a fright film.  At any rate, I woke very suddenly, with my heart pounding and my eyes wide with terror. Plus, my scalp was crawling.  As in: all the muscles in my scalp (and apparently there are a lot of them) were involved in a tug-of-war to try to decide where my new hairline was going to be. My scalp...

Something About Cabell

I have lately been revisiting the works of James Branch Cabell. (rhymes, by the way, with “rabble”) Insofar as Cabell is remembered these days, it’s as a writer of fantasy fiction.  The best of his fantasies were reprinted in the Sixties as part of Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy Series, which is where I found him when I was a teenager.  I haven’t reread him till now. He’s part of a different fantasy tradition from what we see today.  In his heyday, the teens and twenties of the previous century,...