Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 87

It’s Here!

Quillifer is released today!

 

 

You can order at your favorite local bookstore, or at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or for ebooks only Google, iBooks, and Kobo.

Alas, Cronkite

Once upon a time, Walter Cronkite did stuff like this.  When Watergate was a confused scandal difficult for the public to grasp, Cronkite took two evenings to put it all together on television.  The second evening was curtailed by a terrified network chairman, but by then Cronkite’s point had been made, and the Watergate scandal went on to unroll on TV and in the courts and Nixon’s presidency was doomed. But now journalists are a despised, compromised profession, working for billionaires and...

Welcome Arrival

Advanced copies of Quillifer arrived today.  They looked so posh I put them on a red velvet cushion. Quillifer, I remind, will be released on October 3.  You can pre-order at your favorite local bookstore, or at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, iBooks, and Kobo.

Gilt and Glory

More gilding from St. Petersburg— I have to think half the world’s gold supply is slathered over the buildings and monuments.  This is part of the Admiralty, originally a fortress built by Peter the Great, now an Empire-style complex built in the early 19th century. The weathervane atop the tower is in the shape of a warship.  Nabokov once wrote a story about the spire. This photo was taken quite late at night, after 10pm, but during the White Nights the sunsets go on quite literally for hour...

Body Count

I’ve been watching the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam, and trying not to be completely overcome by shell shock.  I lived through the era, but now seeing twelve or more years of folly and slaughter condensed into 10 episodes of television, is something like having 10 bad acid flashbacks in a row while being repeatedly walloped by a baseball bat. I keep having to remind myself that things have got better in the years since.  We may still be involved in endless war, but we’re not spending near...

Sea of Lost Ships

Via Janice, the announcement of a “ship graveyard” in the Black Sea, featuring the preserved remains of wrecks stretching over 2500 years.  Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman . . . it’s all there. The Black Sea is a notoriously stormy sea, and the Greeks called it Euxeinos Pontos, “the hospitable sea,” for the same reason they called the Furies “the friendly ones.”  They didn’t want to give the sea any ideas, it was nasty enough as it was.

 

 

Days of Frenzy

I had a lovely time traveling this summer, but I knew I was going to pay for it later.  And by later, I mean now. I’m working on a number of things more or less simultaneously.  Promoting Quillifer!, which will be released on October 3.  Doing an online sale of Voice of the Whirlwind, which (unfortunately) sort of crowds onto Quillifer! since it starts on October 5.  Preparing a paperback release of Voice of the Whirlwind, which I hope to have ready by the time the sale starts, just in case r...

First Review

My new novel, Quillifer, has received its first review, or at least the first review that anyone’s bothered to tell me about.  From Publishers Weekly: 09/11/2017
In this sprawling, lively episodic adventure, Williams (Angel Station) returns to his swashbuckling historical fantasy roots while exploring new territory. Eighteen-year-old Quillifer, a butcher’s son and legal apprentice, lives a life of ease and pleasure in the city of Ethlebight, in the fictional realm of Duisland. When Ethlebight...

Pleasantry

Hope you’re all having a pleasant weekend, doing pleasant weekend-like things.  Like sailing. This isn’t my boat, unfortunately, but I snapped its picture during my Northern jaunt, as it sailed past a bastion of Suomenlinna, also known as Sveaborg, the gigantic island fortress outside Helsinki harbor.  Despite being known as the Gibraltar of the North, the fortress was the site of a number of military disasters that culminated in its surrender to the Russians. The fortress survives in its bea...

Two Views Toward Heaven

Looking back on my summer of travel, I found these photos of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg.  Commissioned by Alexander I, the cathedral took 40 years to build, and produced a saying in Finnish: “Rakentaa kuin Iisakin kirkkoa,” “to build like Isaac’s Church,” meaning to take forever to complete some vast, ungainly, overdesigned project. Like St. Petersburg, the building of which cost the lives of tens of thousands of serfs, St. Isaac’s is build on the bodies of its workers: 60 alone...