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January 20, 2017

Post-Apocalypse

rift-smallIn an apocalyptic mood for some reason?  (I can’t imagine what that reason might be.)

In that case you should take advantage of the 99-cent sale on my bestselling ebook, The RiftThe Rift was intended as a breakout book, in which a larger-than-usual audience would be exposed to my Walter-y goodness.  In the event, the publisher deliberately sabotaged the book’s release, and the sales figures, while okay, were sufficiently unspectacular to assure that I wouldn’t sell another novel for five long years.

(I’ve written a long essay about this, should you find yourself interested.)

Once I freed the book from the original publisher, I issued it as an ebook, and now it’s my best-selling work.  So that’s a happy ending of sorts.

The Rift has a kind of eerie prescience, in which events like Hurricane Katrina and the Fukushima meltdown were prefigured in fictional form.  You may find parts of the work to still have relevance today (though personally I hope not).

You’ll find The Rift at KoboiBooksAmazonNookSmashwords, and Google.

Here’s what the critics had to say about the book:

The Rift would be a very good beach book, if you could put it down long enough to get into the water.” —— The San Diego Union Tribune

” A breakout book that you’ll swear the author lived” —— SF Age

“I don’t like disaster novels. I would not have even glanced at The Rift if it weren’t backed by Walter Jon Williams’ reputation for excellence. And I definitely would not have kept reading if Williams hadn’t demonstrated on every page that he deserves his reputation. The result? I was so engrossed in—— and engaged by ——The Rift that I forgot that I don’t like disaster novels. This book is an impressive achievement.”
—— Stephen R. Donaldson, New York Times bestselling author of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

The Rift is bloody wonderful! Williams brings an historic disaster back for an encore and metaphorically flattens it again. This is the stuff for which sleep is lost–and awards are made.” —— Dean Ing

The Rift shakes up the world like it’s never been shaken before.” —— Fred Saberhagen

“[For fans of the disaster novel] Williams delivers the requisite thrills and setpieces—— but he also, to paraphrase Conrad, offers a bit of that truth for which they forgot to ask.” —— Locus

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