Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 97

Enter the Inferno

The Dopes came. We died. All the while the horror of the rite went on, swirling and reflecting off the gold leafed walls, not a cultist in sight. Peterson’s eyes stayed open and blinking. Steam-links were threaded into his still-quivering muscles, crimped through incisions into his bones; pistons and cylinders shoved up inside the empty cavity of his body, bolted to drillings in his bones. His boiler went in. All the steam plumbing was connected up. A flurry of mechanical arms and hands, lik...

O’erwhelmed

I have been hacking my way not through a jungle, but through a half-dozen or more jungles.  Jungles with names like IRS, Conservancy District, Ebooks, Travel, Training, Weed Combustion, Copy-Edits, Tractor Repair, Auto Sale, Deadlines, and others that discretion bids me not mention. And now I seem to be coming down with my third cold of the winter. My current existence might best be described as “character-building.” Progress, however slow, seems to have been made.  I thought I’d finished my...

REREAD

Thursday March 2nd, Tor.com is hosting a REREAD of the Wild Cards series.  If you have a question or a comment, feel free to drop in.  Authors and editors will be there. It’s all about you, my friends.  So the more of you are there, the better this will be.

Second Line

Happy Mardi Gras, y’all!

 

Lovecraft’s Nightmares

H.P. Lovecraft was notoriously afraid of fish.  (As well as Jews, Italians, Irish, Negroes, and immigrants generally.) But Lovecraft was afraid of ordinary fish.  Cod, for example, or maybe prawns.  What he didn’t know was that the sea was full of stuff that would have caused him to shriek, gibber, and drop away in a dead faint, as his hero Randolph Carter was wont to do when confronted with an eldritch monster from the depths of space and time. Behold some examples. Lampreys.  They bore int...

Totally Not a Game

An Indonesian woman arrested for suspected involvement in the killing of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s half-brother in Malaysia was duped into thinking she was part of a comedy show prank, Indonesia’s national police chief has said, citing information received from Malaysian authorities. Tito Karnavian told reporters in Indonesia’s Aceh province that Siti Aisyah, 25, was paid to be involved in pranks . He said she and another woman performed stunts which involved convincing men to c...

My Boskone Schedule

I’ll be in Boston this weekend for Boskone 54, one of my favorite conventions.  It’s large, it’s literate, it has a very large percentage of professional attendees, and even after all these years it’s still about the books, which is clear the second you walk into the large dealer room, with table after table of (often rare or obscure) volumes by your favorite authors. At Boskone, events on Friday afternoon are free (including a couple of mine, apparently).  So if you want to see me (or Brando...

Valentine Special

I’ve written a long Valentine’s Day love letter to Croyd Crenson, Roger Zelazny’s character in the Wild Cards series, thus kicking off a new series, “My Favorite Wild Cards Character (that I didn’t create).” And while you’re visiting, check out the other content at  wildcardsworld.com.

Cold Night Special

A cold, miserable, drizzly day just begs for this cioppino, with shrimp, tilapia, oysters, scallops, and littleneck clams.  Enjoyed along with a tart cabernet sauvignon from Marlborough. Happy eating, y’all.

An Imaginary Conversation in Which I Triumph Totally

As opposed to “an actual conversation,” here’s one I wish I could have.  With any number of writers. ME: I enjoyed your new novel, but there was one part that puzzled me. HIM: What was that? ME: The part about the squidlike alien beings who were fans of Sonic Youth.  I mean, the book’s set in the far future— how did Sonic Youth get into the picture? HIM: Oh that?  That’s satire. ME: Satire?  Of what? HIM: Well, you know . . . satire. ME: But what are you satirizing, exactly?  Sonic Youth?  So...