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At Easter 1972 crowds at the Jacaranda could enjoy a brunch buffet of smoked pork chops and applesauce, fresh homemade pastry, fresh fruit, salads, puddings and juice all for $2.50 ($1.75 for children). Workers decorated the buffet table with holiday-themed ice sculptures, including a giant bunny rabbit. Those who opted for dinner could choose from roast meats and seafood.
The Best of Walter Jon Williams, Walter Jon Williams (Subterranean 978-1-64524-002-0, $45, 616pp, hardcover) February 2021
A writer always feels an instinctive camaraderie with other writers who debuted more or less simultaneously with one’s own beginnings. This does not mean that all writers in a given generation love and admire each other unconditionally, but only that a person recognizes and bonds more readily with other members of their own generation. It’s a realization that our paths are parallel, a shared journey and, with luck, of similar extension. We all kicked off at the same starting line, and we will all finish up around the same time, getting to see entire careers, side by side and from start to finish. We were not present at the commencement of the careers of our elders (although we might have shared their later years), and we will not live to see the whole careers of our juniors. But this particular assortment of scribblers, bound by a chance coincidence of birth
The Best of Walter Jon Williams, Walter Jon Williams (Subterranean 978-1645240020, $45.00, 610pp, hc). Cover by Lee Moyer. February 2020.
Exactly 30 years ago, this column’s lede was “Walter Jon Williams is an interestingly various writer….” The intervening decades have given me no reason to alter that opinion, variations on which I have been repeating just about every time I write about a Williams title. So why should I break the chain now? In 1991, when I drafted that review (of
Days of Atonement), Williams had published seven SF novels and a collection of shorter work and was already a fully formed professional with a range stretching from the cyberpunkish and space-operatic, to alien encounters, to crime-caper/comedy-of-manners mashups. (Not counting five historical-nautical adventures as Jon Williams.) Since then, his output has expanded to encompass fantasies, disaster epics, alternate histories, pocket universes, near-future technothrillers, and less-easil