Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 83

For Aliens Only

Big news, my compeers!  George RR Martin is now offering the TERRAN PRIZE of free tuition to Taos Toolbox, the master class for writing science fiction and fantasy.  From his press release: “When astronauts look down on Earth from orbit, they don’t see borders, national boundaries, or linguistic groups; they see one world, a gorgeous blue globe spinning in space, streaked with clouds.   I don’t know if humanity will ever reach the stars (though I hope we will), but if we do, it won’t be Ameri...

I Am Me Right In Front Of You

This coming Sunday, January 14, I’ll be at the Jean Cocteau Theater in Santa Fe for a 3pm talk and signing.  George RR Martin will be conducting the interview. Albuquerque Comic Con will be going on at the same time, so I expect the crowd might be a little thin. Feel free to show up and confound my expectations!

 

Table Manners of the Stars

In my novel Implies Spaces, I referred to a particularly catastrophic cosmic event as the “big belch.”  Now the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes have viewed a “double burp” from a black hole in a galaxy known by the stirring name SDSS J1354+1327. The Mighty Williams Prediction Machine rolls on! Hubble was able to show them that a cloud of blue-green gas extending away from the black hole represented the aftermath of an earlier burp. They found that electrons had been stripped from atoms in...

Nazis for New Year

If you use social media, you’ve met neo-Nazis and their allies.  They’re everywhere, and they’re about as charming as you’d expect.  And if you haven’t met them personally, you’ve probably met one of their avatars. The con goes like this: The impersonator lifts an online photo of a Jew, Muslim, African-American or other minority — typically one with clear identifying markers, like a yarmulke-clad Hasid or a woman in hijab. Using that picture as a Twitter avatar, the bigot then adds ethnic and...

Big Moon

Another holiday, another trip to the Bernardo bird refuge.  Which this time included another big ol’ full moon rising just after sunset. Gotta say, I remain impressed by that 50-to-1 zoom and what it can do.

Straight Up

I amazed myself by taking this photo on Christmas afternoon, while the moon was more or less directly overhead.  I hadn’t imagined the 50-to-1 optical zoom on my Canon was going to be this good, or that the software would be able to stop the image jittering.    I hadn’t even brought a tripod with me.

Cranes

People have asked me my plans for the holiday, and I’m pleased to report that I don’t have any. Honestly, after all the travel and work and running around I’ve done all 2017, the idea of spending a couple days at home, staying warm, eating prime rib, and opening presents, was very, very attractive. But we did take a jaunt Xmas afternoon to the Bernardo bird refuge, just fifteen minutes south of here, to watch the sandhill cranes fly in at sunset.  There were thousands of them, and there were...

Tamale Time

Among the holiday traditions in New Mexico are the consumption of tamales, the setting of fires, and late-night visits to the graves of the ancestors (where, usually, fires get set). We haven’t set any fires ourselves, but we did pay an after-dinner visit to a local graveyard to enjoy the peaceful night and the luminaria displays.   The dead seemed not to mind our presence, even though our ancestors are cached elsewhere. We hope you practice your solstice traditions in joy and peace, and that...

Yuletide Breakage

Normally we take a certain amount of damage around the holidays.  The tradition of a plumbing emergency on Christmas Eve is well established here, and when it happens we have the joy of trying to get emergency plumbing service here some time before Santa’s scheduled arrival.  Fortunately PHC of Peralta, NM, has always been right here when we needed them. This year the plumbing problems started a couple weeks early.  I noticed that the water pressure kept fluctuating between high and low, cycl...

This Is Quite a Sale

As a holiday gift to you all, I’ve reduced the price of the first of the Dagmar series, This Is Not a Game, to 99 cents till at least Boxing Day. You can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google, iBooks, and Smashwords. So buy yourself a little prezzie!  What are the holidays for?