Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 90

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.

In St Petersburg

100 years after Lenin’s arrival, l make my own appearance at the Finland Station. Let’s get this party started.

Lost in Transition

All sorts of things happened en route to Finland, though none of them actually happened to us. The problem was that very little actually happened once we got into the little commuter mini-jet to fly to Chicago, which was the first leg of a long-distance triad that was supposed to continue to JFK, and from there to Helsinki. First, we sat on the ground in Albuquerque for over an hour while the pilot tried to get permission from Chicago to fly there.  Contingent permission given, we then loiter...

Travel Time

I’m off to Helsinki and several weeks of traveling around the Baltic before the Worldcon. I’ll be checking in when I can.