A friend laid some home-brewed mead on us, and last night we opened a bottle and shared it with some friends who’d never had mead before.  A strong, sweet honey odor and a taste to match.  Pretty nice.

All of which reminded me of the time I tried to brew some mead.

I was maybe nineteen and had found a recipe somewhere.  I bought the ingredients, and my friend Jeff offered the use of his kitchen.

Jeff was my age and into theater, and in fact lived in a theater annex.  The theater was a former church in Old Town, and the attached parsonage had been turned into an apartment.  Jeff shared this apartment with a roommate, a middle-aged gay man (also into theater) who lived with his teenaged boyfriend.   Relations among this diverse cast of characters were amiable, especially considering how eccentric we all were, though I was a little surprised by the duo’s habit of wandering around the apartment in very little clothing. I suppose that if I were as buff as they, I might have been seen in Speedos more often myself.

So Jeff and I brewed up our mead, which was decanted into a two-gallon glass container.  Jeff had a fridge in his bedroom closet, and the mead was put to rest in the fridge overnight, with a “floating cap,” a screw cap left very loose, to allow fermentation gases to escape.  When we went to sleep, I crashed in a sleeping bag on the floor of Jeff’s room.

Around four in the morning there was an enormous explosion as the mead detonated.  The floating cap had not floated far enough.  The detonation not only blew open the refrigerator door and sprayed the closet with glass shrapnel, it knocked down the refrigerator shelving and threw the contents of the fridge onto the floor.

It was dark and no one had any idea what had happened.  I thought there had been some horrific accident and was doing my best to escape my sleeping bag, which resisted with all its power.  Jeff assumed we were under attack, leaped atop his bed, seized his broadsword, and began issuing battle cries.  (Jeff was totally the sort of person who would have a broadsword waiting by his bed.)

This was the situation when the two roommates arrived and rather sensibly turned on the light.

So, reader, picture the tableaux: two nearly-naked men in Speedos, one lunatic waving a broadsword and screaming “SOULS FOR ARIOCH!“, and me engaged in mortal combat with my sleeping bag.

The rest of the evening was anticlimactic, featuring as it did cleanup.  The room reeked of mead for weeks.

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Tonight’s sunshower sunset.

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Alas.  According to multiple sources Gene Wolfe has died at the age of 87 in his Illinois home.

I’ve been on a mini-binge of Gene’s books lately, mostly recently Home Fires, and I think the mini-binge will have to continue.

I admired Gene’s plain, clear style, which was an ideal surface beneath which to hide the machinations of his unreliable narrators, and to gracefully unwind his diabolically complicated plots.

(Not that all his unreliable narrators were deliberately trying to deceive.  Some just weren’t very bright, or had limited access to information.  One was dead.  Latro in the Soldier series lost his memory every time he went to sleep.  The point was that, for whatever reason, readers couldn’t fully trust the stories they were being told, and had to navigate Wolfe’s terrain with eyes open, just as his narrators did.)

And sometimes the readers were better informed than the characters were.  If you were paying attention, you’d know that Patera Silk in the Long Sun series had been enlightened by the God of Abraham.  Silk consorts with publicans and sinners, has a relationship with a prostitute, Hyacinth, and has an obligation to save the world, or at any rate the Whorl.  But he manages to sideslip the fate that is intended for him, marries Hyacinth, and slip-slides away to, apparently, live happily ever after.

Gene became a Catholic in order to wed Rosemary, but he must have had an unconventional view of his own religion.  The Long Sun books could be read as a long allegory of the Gnostic Heresy, for example.  (Not that this should deter you from reading the books, which are Gene’s masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned.)

In person Gene was amiable and erudite and willing to be amusing, though he also had a steely temper that would sometimes flare (though I never witnessed it in person).   He’d fought in Korea and also boxed— Gene and I once compared our boxing scars.  (Well, mine weren’t boxing scars, they were inflicted by a martial artist wearing boxing gloves, so they should count..)  Gene got his scars during the same bout, and so had I (though in my case it was supposed to be practice).

And Gene could be inspiring, sometimes when he wasn’t intending to be.  During a convention panel about workshops, when listening to Gene, the entire plot of Aristoi unfolded in my head, as if I were Patera Silk being enlightened by the Outsider.  I have no memory of what Gene was saying, except that I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about Aristoi.

Harlan Ellison said of Gene that he was “engaged in the holy chore of writing every other author under the table.”  A chore at which he succeeded, and mightily.

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My novel Metropolitan is now on sale for $0.99, or for whatever $0.99 is worth in your local currency.  The ebook may be found at the following online retailers:

 Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Apple, Google, Kobo

[NOTE: the price has not yet dropped on Kobo, but it should.  Very soon now.  Really.]

I’m stupidly proud of this book, and I think that if any of my works is remembered 100 years from now, it will probably be this one.

Here’s your night’s blurb:

NOMINATED FOR A NEBULA AWARD. Walter Jon Williams’ classic science fantasy Metropolitan is once again available for a new generation of readers.

Aiah has fought her way from poverty and discovered a limitless source of plasm, the mysterious substance that powers the world-city. Her discovery soon involves her with Constantine, the charismatic, dangerous, seductive revolutionary who plans to overthrow, not simply the government, but the cosmic order . . .

“A spectacular blend of fantastic science, high politics, and low intrigue . . . Williams’s world and characters are richly imagined yet utterly real.”
–Melissa Scott

“Entertaining . . . Williams understands that science fiction can breathe life into language . . . [His] writing is always lean, lively and engaging.
—New York Times Book Review

“Blends SF aspects with noir stylings to create a potent atmosphere or urban dystopia . . . Ever the expert storyteller, Williams provides more than enough suspense.”
—Publishers Weekly

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