Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 79

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,...

Double News Day

So a big box of proofs for The Accidental War arrived on my doorstep today.  Looks very action-y, doesn’t it? The Accidental War will be released in September, but it’s already available for preorder at your favorite book venue. Since I got a whole box of them, I’ll probably be running a contest shortly.  Stay tuned. Elsewhere in the world, Tantor Audio has released Angel Station as as an audio book.  Also available at your favorite venue, or at Tantor its ownself.

Stuff I Found in the Sky Tonight

No Dreck

Some days you get lucky, and you turn on the TV and find something you’ve absolutely always wanted to see. This happened to me on Wednesday, when I watched the second episode of Season Three of The Expanse. The episode was written by James S.A. Corey themselves, and the climax featured a space battle between Rocinante and a Terran warship.  Which was great, because in The Expanse we have real physics. When was the last time a series set in space had real physics?  Maybe never. Here’s how i...

Artificial Reality

Here’s tonight’s crescent moon, with Venus in the lower right corner.  Venus is red because she’s close to the horizon. This is actually Photoshopped.  The reason it’s Photoshopped is that my new Canon hardly ever manages to focus properly on a distant object sitting in the sky.  If only I could focus manually . . . Anyway, I zoomed in on the moon and got a more in-focus view: You should be able to view the moon’s entire disk, though the dark part is quite faint.  I snipped out the in-focus c...

News from the North

Last year’s discovery of a tomb beneath the restored Church of St. Nicholas in Demre, Turkey, may yet produce the body of St. Nick himself, and settle whether Santa is buried in Turkey, or in Ireland (which claims it), or in Italy, where Venice and Bari both claim his body,(or maybe just parts thereof). But this of course ignores the well-attested fact that St. Nick lives in Korvatunturi, a fell in Finnish Lapland. Home to roaming herds of reindeer and often blanketed in snow, the Korvatuntur...

Tiny Heads

Behold!  It is a video of my Guest of Honor interview at last year’s Worldcon 75, conducted by Joshua Bilmes.  The first 20 minutes or so seems to be missing, but don’t worry, we’re just getting to the exciting part! If you go full-screen, you may be able to actually see me, somewhere in the far distance.

A Toolbox Full of Goodness

Taos Toolbox 2018 is full, with 18 talented attendees, plus instructors and speakers Nancy Kress, Walter Jon Williams, Carrie Vaughn, George RR Martin, and EM Tippets. It’s going to be awesome. And there will be plenty of inspiration on offer, because no less than three of the current Nebula nominees are Toolbox veterans: Lawrence M. Schoen, Fran Wilde, and Kelly Robson.  Plus Fran also got herself a Hugo nomination. (In addition one of my former Clarion students, Sam J. Miller, is up for the...