Walter Jon Williams
Our guest tonight will be Walter Jon Williams. What follows is John Clute's article on him from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (available in paperback and CD-ROM).
Walter Jon Williams (1953- ) US writer whose first works were nautical tales as by Jon Williams, beginning with The Privateer (1981). He began to publish sf with Ambassador of Progress (1984), a [...] novel in which a female agent whose mission is to revive civilization makes contact with an abandoned, semi-feudal colony planet. Knight Moves (1985) describes the attempts of an immensely powerful immortal and his old friends and enemies to discover a technique of matter transmission and to repopulate an almost abandoned Earth with fantastic creatures taken from mythology, in a style reminiscent of the early Roger Zelazny.But it was with the appearance of cyberpunk that WJW seemed to have found his true voice as a writer. In the Hardwired sequence -- Hardwired (1986), stories like "Video Star" (1986), Voice of the Whirlwind (1987) and Solip:system (1989 chap) -- he displayed a fascination with intensely detailed surfaces, biologically invasive gadgetry, and the effects of powerful corporations and rapidly changing technology on (romanticized) social outsiders. The first tale, in which underdogs of a repressed Earth rebel against dominant orbital corporations -- proved sufficiently popular to spawn a role-playing game based on it, despite the unlikelihood of much of its plot; the game is presented in Hardwired: The Sourcebook (1989 chap). In the rather better second tale the clone of an alienated one-time corporate soldier, brought to life on the original's death, hunts for clues to that first demise in a narrative richly informed by Zen and speculations on the nature of identity.
The Crown Jewels sequence -- The Crown Jewels (1987) and House of Shards (1988) -- comprises two "divertimenti" describing the adventures of a Raffles-like burglar in a cod-Oriental future human culture heavily influenced by aliens to whom style is sacred. But WJW retained a cyberpunk outlook for his next major novel, Angel Station (1989), in which family groups of interstellar traders both fight to survive as major corporations squeeze down their markets, and also betray each other for the chance to deal with a newly discovered alien race. Facets (coll 1990) assembles most of his short fiction.
In the tautly told Days of Atonement (1991) WJW moved to a near-future USA where a macho small-town sheriff struggles with the physics needed to understand an apparent outbreak of bodily resurrections at the nearby Advanced Technological Laboratories. Aristoi (1992) goes in the other direction, into a far-future venue once again evocative of Zelazny. Wall, Stone, Craft (1993 chap) ingeniously posits an alternate world in which Lord Byron, unhampered by a club foot, becomes one of the heroes of Waterloo, and subsequently interacts with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, here powerfully imagined, so that Frankenstein (1818), and all of sf to come, is inevitably created. Ingenious and energetic and knowing, WJW seems very much at home with the mature genre SF of the 1980s and 1990s.
Other works: Elegy for Angels and Dogs (1990 dos), a sequel to Zelazny's The Graveyard Heart (1964 Fantastic; 1990 chap dos), with which it is bound sequentially (> DOS-A-DOS); Dinosaurs (1991 chap).
To update John Clute's article, since it was written Walter Jon Williams has come out with his critically acclaimed novels Metropolitan and its sequel, City on Fire.
Visit WJW's home page at http://www.thuntek.net/~walter/
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