Walter Jon Williams

Reviews Too Late: Defiance

September 2, 2009

I watched my Netflix copy of Defiance the other night, and thought it would make an interesting comparison with Inglourious Basterds. I mean, here were real Jews, killing real Nazis, as opposed to cartoon Jews killing cartoon Nazis. The Bielski partisans did stuff that really mattered, like saving 1200-odd people from the Holocaust; whereas the […]

Read the full article →

Great Flaming Gas Bags!

September 2, 2009

Jess Nevins at No Fear of the Future has produced a history of the zeppelin pulps, a subgenre I never knew actually existed. (I thought it was all a joke.) And yes, there really was a magazine called Spicy Zeppelin Stories. The article details a rather unusual collaboration between pulp editor Frank Armer and the […]

Read the full article →

Feel The Burn

September 2, 2009

It makes this New Mexican’s heart swell to bursting to know that the successful test today of the new all-American airborne laser assassination weapon was conducted right here in our state!Tremble, evildoers! Someday soon you’ll just be walking down the street working out your wicked schemes, and suddenly— just as in my favorite scenes in […]

Read the full article →

The New Literacy

September 1, 2009

From the article by Clive Thompson (thanks to Blake Charlton).As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as […]

Read the full article →

Nipple Song

August 31, 2009

Nothing better to start your day than a fine jumpin’ Bollywood video— this time with handy English subtitles!

Read the full article →

Rescission

August 31, 2009

In response to Ron’s post on “Putting it Simply,” below, I dug up a statistics on government-run health care. Since most of you probably don’t read this blog for the comments on the comments, I thought I’d put them here.In countries with government-run health care, there isn’t a man with a gun telling you that […]

Read the full article →

At This Rate, My Plan for World Domination Will Come to Fruition Even More Quickly!

August 28, 2009

Mark W. Tiedemann has said some awesomely nice things about This Is Not a Game over on irosf.com. When Williams is good, he is very good—and this is one of his best. He dances across the lines that blur real world and gameplaying with elegance and an acerbic sense of consequences that denies the artificial […]

Read the full article →