Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 90

Gustaf Slept Here

We are in lovely Stockholm.  This involved 13 miserable hours on a ferry from Turku, though the misery was mitigated by glorious views of first the Finnish, and then the Swedish, archipelago.  By the end I didn’t care about the archipelago, I just wanted to get off the damn boat. Stockholm’s series of islands is a beautiful setting for a city, though there are some disturbing elements, for instance a fountain that seems to be dedicated to the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

 

 

Archipalego

So a military attaché, a philosopher, and a couple writers went out on a boat . . . Sounds like the beginning of a joke, and maybe it was, but I assure you it actually happened. Friend of the blog Marcus Prest (author of Android, etc.) has been playing host to us in Turku for the last several days, and the other day I was taken out into Finland’s gorgeous Archipalego Sea in a boat belonging to Marcus’ rather piratical friend Bjorn. This is Bjorn.  He’s just a little bit outgoing. After a cru...

Lakeland

This week we’ve been looked after by my Finnish friend Kari Salo, who I’ve known since he came to stay with my family when we were both fifteen. Kari and his lovely wife Anneli invited us to her lakeside summer cottage, where we enjoyed kicking back with a beer and a sauna after our busy week in St. Petersburg. The water was too cold for swimming, and the weather too wet for much else, but it was still great being on the water. And the sauna was what I like to think of as a real sauna, which...

No niin

For those of you planning on coming to the Helsinki Worldcon, or otherwise visiting Finland, here’s Ismo to tell you the single most important Finnish word.

Drinking Your Beer in Finland

We’ve left Russia behind and are back in Finland for the next week or so. Finland has some of the most complex rules in the world for alcohol consumption.  Those of you coming to the Helsinki Worldcon might find them confusing, so here’s Ismo Leikola to give you a briefing.

Nabokov’s Butterflies

At one point in my life, the author and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov was my primary literary god.  He’s still a major influence, for all that I don’t write anything like him. There is a museum devoted to him in St. Petersburg, in his family’s old mansion.   (You can’t really describe it as “his” house, since he fled St. Petersburg in 1917, when he was a mere student.) The museum is free, which is good because there’s not a lot in it.  There are editions of his books, and old family photogra...

Scamming Scammers Scam Amazon With Scamming Scams

Kindle Unlimited, for those of you who don’t know, is an Amazon service where (if you’re an author) you upload your book exclusively to KU.  In return for this exclusivity, Amazon does . . . well, I’m not sure what they do for the author, but if you’re a reader, you can read, um, Unlimited numbers of titles for about ten bucks a month.  The money goes into a pool, controlled by Amazon, and is distributed to authors not by books downloaded, but by pages actually read. This probably makes sense...

Scamming Scammers Scam Amazon

Kindle Unlimited, for those of you who don’t know, is an Amazon service where (if you’re an author) you upload your book exclusively to KU.  In return for this exclusivity, Amazon does . . . well, I’m not sure what they do for the author, but if you’re a reader, you can read, um, Unlimited numbers of titles for about ten bucks a month.  The money goes into a pool, controlled by Amazon, and is distributed to authors not by books downloaded, but by pages actually read. This probably makes sense...

Lessons of History

Let’s see now . . . Russia needed a revolution because . . . wait a minute . . . it slipped my mind.  Let me think.  I’m sure it will come to me any second . . .

Mr. Jones

What is practically the first thing I see in St. Petersburg? A monument to American naval hero John Paul Jones, that’s what.