David J. Williams

Two interesting SF movies: I gather the first is already out in some theaters but the second isn’t due out till later in the year.

Sleep Dealer: which looks to be a provocative examination of immigration and the growing stratification of wealth in the “global village.”  Anyone seen it yet?

Moon: dark psychological thriller directed by David Bowie’s son and starring Sam Rockwell.

And yeahyeahyeah. . .  I know I had all these Grand Plans about promoting Burning Skies on the blog this week.  Sorry guys, the third book took priority.  But next week I’ll be giving away Spanish copies of Mirrored Heavens, and Spartacus the Wondercat will be BACK AS PROMISED.  (Right now he’s shedding though.  Like crazy.  How much hair can one #$# animal have???)

Now surfacing after three days locked in a room with my cat and this #$# manuscript . . .and here are some cool links:

—If you haven’t watched the full Susan Boyle video, you really #$# should. Don’t mind admitting I can’t watch it without getting a little teary.

—Hat tip to Making Light: these are the principles of the American cargo cult.

—If you’re into electronica, may I recommend Sonic Solutions?  Their Pax Romana album is available on itunes, and is definitely part of the Autumn Rain soundtrack that’s usually cranking away in my head.

—Fuck, this is a cool preview-–only Roland Emmerich could pull this off.  This movie will be h-u-g-e.

—Margaret Roland over at Magic District has put together a “how to write a novel” version of the old text-based Adventure.  As hilarious as it is accurate.

I’m giving Amazon a day or two to get their arse in gear and explain what’s up before I pay my web dudes to take down their banner/link.  But simply saying it was a glitch isn’t exactly what I’d call a full mea culpa. This was either:

A.  A soon-to-be-ex middle manager’s “executive” decision.

B.  A fundamentalist Easter egg.

C.  All of the above.

I’d expect that Bezos will get ahead of this issue quickly with a public statement, but power and wealth does funny things to people’s heads/sense of accountability, so who knows? It’s amazing how a digital powerhouse is acting like a bunch of bricks-and-mortars morons.

The legendary Charlie Jane Anders over at io9 has done an awesome write-up of the new artwork on the website—check it out!

And stay tuned next week, as the BURNING SKIES campaign ramps up another notch! There’ll be prize giveaways, and rumor has it that Spartacus the Wonderbeast might be coaxed away from his magicfoodbowl to take the helm for a post or two. Hope everybody enjoys the weekend—I know I will (as long as I can crank another 3000 words by Monday).

So I’m hauling up the curtain on BURNING SKIES . . . still more than a month away from release, but now you can see what it’s all about. If you’ve got me on RSS, come on over and check out the stellar new art and all the Tasty Sequel Action. I’m particularly pleased with Randall MacDonald’s Europa Platform artwork:  most of the stuff that’s out there featuring O’Neill cylinders dates all the way back to the 1970s, and Randall has cranked out some gorgeous stuff that feels oh-so-modern.  Almost makes you want to live there . . though you should probably wait till the book is done.  Hey, why not pre-order now?

The inimitable Mikes over at the Dragon Page did an interview with me a couple weeks back, which I’m only just now posting because I only just listened to it, because I have a Weird Phobia about listening to myself on tape. I suspect this is a subconscious fear that what I recollected as a reasonable conversation wil come across on tape as the mad ranting of a professional psycho.  Or maybe it’s just a very subtle method of procrastination. I’ll think it over and get back to you.

io9 put together a list of future presidents for the 21st century, and President Andrew Harrison from MIRRORED HEAVENS/BURNING SKIES has made the list!

THE AWESOME RETROFIT: Harrison rules from 2088-2093; other U.S. presidents include Lex Luthor, Victor Von Doom, Oprah Winfrey, the alien FXJKHR, and—my personal fave—Robert L. Booth from Judge Dredd, the man who started the Great Atom War that turned North America into radioactive wasteland!!!

THE ACTUAL TRUTH: As all loyal citizens know, President Andrew Harrison (aka “the Throne”) took power in 2088 as first president under the Reformed Constitution, and then proceeded to invoke the state of emergency clause; twenty-two years later, he continues to rule with absolute powers, presiding over an Inner Cabinet composed of scheming traitors loyal officers.

Have been AWOL this week figuring out some details regarding the last 40,000 words of the Autumn Rain trilogy. Am still working the thing over, but in the meantime let me wish you a good weekend with . . . the epic speech of The Humongous in Road Warrior, complete with boomerang hijinx! Don’t let it be said I don’t love ya.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

With the pressure mounting, Ronald Moore did what most of science fiction’s high-profile series-builders have done: he choked in the clutch. Sure, the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica was spectacular, with plenty of moments to remind us of what made this franchise the most compelling of the decade. . . but it was nonetheless still deeply—massively—flawed, in so egregious a manner that you can only wonder what the fuck he was thinking (besides licensing agreements and royalty checks).

Usually when narrative arcs fall apart, we get deus ex machina.  This time we just got deus.  Battlestar Galactica’s rebooting tried in so many ways to hold up a mirror to our own culture; in so many ways it succeeded, and this was certainly one of them.  Back in the year 2009, our world is moving out of control, and all we seem to be able to do is hope (however explicitly/implicitly) that God will save us from the results of our own decisions—or that the worst and most irrational of those decisions will turn out to be, miraculously, What God Really Fucking Wanted All Along.

There’s a name for this kind of thinking:  infantile.  Moore promised more, and we deserved better.  Particularly problematic was the anti-science back-to-the-land meme that engulfed the ending.  Again, an apt reflection of our own time—a kneejerk reaction against the technology that threatens to overwhelm us.  In our current crisis, science-fiction is the only genre that offers the scope we need to navigate our way forward.  Last Friday, we saw the genre stumble toward wish-fulfillment fantasy.  The scale of the missed opportunity is nothing short of breathtaking.

Here’s a very cool website/organization: Papers, Please: The Identity Project, dedicated to monitoring and publizing the clamp-down of governments on freedom of movement.

Demands on citizens to ‘show their ID’ have spread from airports to all major forms of long distance domestic public transport. Some of these ID security programs check people against secret government lists. Some of these programs are simply tests of the traveler’s obedience. Dissent through public protest is in danger of being chilled by the fear of ending up on government lists.  We are witnessing the advent of a national ID card, passed by Congress as the Real ID Act. . .

As someone whose name is on the U.S. government’s terrorist watchlist, these are developments I follow with no little interest.  (Turns out there’s a very bad David J. Williams out there.  One of the penalties of having a somewhat generic name.  Or maybe it’s me.  It’s not like they’d tell me.  It’s not like the name’s ever coming off that list anyway.)  Back in my days of management consulting, when I was flying all the time, I always found it weird to be getting the third-degree everytime I crossed the U.S. border, when I’d usually spent the better part of every flight working on a book about a society where identity is the primary mechanism of government control—and the manipulation of identity is a standard tool in every razor’s arsenal. . .