Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 79

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...

Bull Piss and Mummies

Would it change the power or poetry of Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway if we learned that the evaporative yellows that infuse the atmosphere with mystical light were wrought from the distilled urine of cows cruelly raised on a diet consisting exclusively of mango leaves? Here Kelly Grovier asks the question: What is great art actually made of?  Or from? The answer is found in  An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour, which explores the vast array of colors of the Forbes Pigment Co...

Miss Jones

I’ve finished watching Season Two of Jessica Jones, wherein it was demonstrated that our alcoholic, PTSD-afflicted, short-fused trainwreck of a heroine is by far the sanest person in her family. I mean, wow.  Turn the cray-cray up to 11. The first season had David Tennant as Kilgrave, the creepy stalker who is, basically, the obsessed character seen in a lot of genre romance, except that in romance he’s seen for some damn reason as a good guy. Kilgrave is that character as he would exist in t...

Terran Prize Awarded!

The 2018 Terran Prize, founded by George R.R. Martin and consisting of a full tuition scholarship to the Taos Toolbox master class for writers of science fiction and fantasy, has been awarded to Joey Yu. Joey Yu was born in Taipei, educated in Vancouver, and now works in Shanghai as a freelance creator.  He is the author of several novels published in China, including The Sunlight Trilogy of futuristic fantasy novels, The Mirrored Truth, and The Locus, which won the Excellence Award of the T...