“Well-developed characters, an intriguing plot and a clear-eyed view of the double-edged sword called change make [AMBASSADOR OF PROGRESS] an engrossing book...”
-LIBRARY JOURNAL

“Williams has an above-average knack for fast pacing, gritty realism, and high-tech details.”
-BOOKLIST

An interstellar catastrophe has left humanity scattered on dozens of primitive worlds. Fiona is an emissary to one such world, charged with helping the inhabitants of Echidne rise from barbarism.

But once she’s arrived on the planet, she finds herself in the middle of a war... the Brodaini, the world’s most ferocious warriors, have risen in revolt against their overlords. The combat threatens to become a war of extermination.

Fiona is a neutral in the war. But Echidne is proving a perilous place for neutrals...

ORPHANS OF DEEP SPACE . . .

They're outlaws now. Created to serve a function grown obsolete, haunted by the holographic ghost of their father, Ubu and Maria have lived their entire lives skating along the edge of extinction. Now they and their ship Runaway are in flight both from the law and from a predatory clan of competitors. They're going to come back rich, or not at all.

But what they find in the depths of space isn't wealth, but a secret so startling that Ubu and Maria will need every last reserve of guile, cunning, and intelligence just to survive . . .

"No one can accuse Williams of failing to grow with each new major work . . . Straight-forward space adventure with a strong picaresque flavor. The pacing is brisk, the high-tech details vivid, the rewards to readers considerable." ---Booklist

"Williams colorfully invokes the life of the trader families and their honkeytonk space stations. With its emphasis on youth, beauty, sex, and mischief, [ANGEL STATION] also conjures a contemporary mood agreeably distinct from its futuristic settings." --Publishers Weekly

"Williams has it all." --Analog

"Williams is a skillfully literate addition to the stylish new generation of science fiction writers." ---Chicago Tribune

Written with care, intelligence, and grace, [Aristoi] depicts a future society based on highly developed computers and biological engineering, the key skills of which are controlled by an elite known as the Aristoi. This world is depicted meticulously and vividly, and so is the near war of all against all that is unleashed when one of the Aristoi falls prey to the corruption of power. A fine, thoughtful work, highly recommended; Williams seems to grow with each book. ---Roland Green, Chicago Sun-Times

Beneath the facade of universal prosperity, however, lurks a tide of dissension and madness that can only be fought from within. Williams tests the borders of imagination in a novel that combines brilliant hard science and speculative vision with a firm grip on the central humanity of his characters. A priority purchase for sf collections. ---Library Journal

In this complex and rewarding novel, Williams has created a future which features many of the wonders SF has been promising us for years: virtual reality, genetic engineering, faster-than-light travel, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, telepathic links with computers, and more. ---Publishers Weekly

Gabriel is one of the Aristoi, the elite class that hold dominion over a glittering interstellar culture, their rule more absolute than that of any Old Earth tyrant. When another of the Aristoi is murdered, Gabriel finds that the foundations of his civilization are tottering, and that his own power may have its roots in the greatest lie in all history.

In order to defend himself and the interstellar order, Gabriel must go on a quest into the heart of barbarism and chaos, and discover within himself his own lost, tattered humanity.

"Écrit avec brio, grâce et intelligence, [Aristoï] décrit une société future basée sur l'informatique de pointe et la bioingénierie, deux domaines entièrement contrôlés par une élite, celle des Aristoï. Ce monde est dépeint de façon vivante et précise, tout comme la guerre qui le menace lorsqu'un de ses dirigeants succombe à la corruption de la toute-puissance. Un excellent roman, qui donne matière à réflexion et que je recommande vivement ; Williams semble s'améliorer à chaque nouveau livre." —Roland Green, Chicago Sun-Times

"Sous cette façade de prospérité universelle est tapie une menace de folie et de dissension qu'on ne peut affronter que de l'intérieur. Williams teste les limites de l'imagination dans un roman où se mêlent hard-science rigoureuse et visions spéculatives, sans jamais perdre de vue l'humanité de ses personnages. Un achat prioritaire pour toutes les collections de SF." —Library Journal

Gabriel fait partie des Aristoï, l'élite dominante d'une culture interstellaire sophistiquée, dont le règne est plus absolu encore que celui des despotes de la Vieille Terre. Lorsqu'un des Aristoï est assassiné, Gabriel découvre que les fondations mêmes de sa civilisation sont ébranlées et que sa propre puissance repose peut-être sur le plus grand mensonge de l'histoire.

Afin de se défendre et de préserver l'ordre interstellaire, Gabriel se lance dans une quête qui le mènera au cœur de la barbarie et du chaos, et qui lui fera découvrir en lui-même les vestiges de son humanité perdue.

Favian Markham is a rising young American officer in during the War of 1812. As commander of the small, slow brig Experiment, he must break the British blockade and take his outgunned vessel on a daring raid into the Narrow Seas of England. On his desperate journey he faces duels, rivalries, ambitious politicians, yardarm-to-yardarm combat, and the deadly beauty of a foreign courtesan. Yet his greatest battle is not with the enemy, but with his own divided nature . . .

Brig of War (originally published as The Raider) is one of the historical novels with which Walter Jon Williams began his career.

In a frigate stolen from his own navy, Captain Favian Markham races to New Orleans with the dispatches he's captured from a British warship- dispatches making it clear that the city will soon be the target of a British fleet and an invading army.

But Favian finds New Orleans a city of intrigue, where Creoles conspire against the Americans, where streetfighters cloak their murders under the Code Duello, the pirate Jean Laffite battles the Navy, and a cabal of elite soldiers conspire to hand the city to the enemy— and where two sensuous Creole women, Eugenie and Campaspe, vie for his favor.

In order to resist the coming invasion, Favian must fight his way clear of conspiracy and unite the divided city, and soon discovers that in order to buy time for the defenders, he must sacrifice his own ship, and his own career, in a hopeless fight against an overwhelming power . . .

Nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Award, City on Fire returns to the world-city of Metropolitan, a city dominated by plasm, the magical substance capable of both creation and destruction.

With her help, Aiah's lover Constantine has established himself in the metropolis of Caraqui, a nation dominated by corrupt officials, gangsters, and the genetically altered known as the "twisted." Here they hope to create a revolution in the cosmic order--- but first they must fend off treachery, war, and the threat of Taikoen, the "hanged man," a deadly creature that lives within plasm itself. Aiah must fight not only for her revolution and for her place in the world, but for Constantine's very soul.

"City on Fire is a splendid, riveting novel in which the most powerful magic is that of a writer directing the twin streams of reason and intuition to produce a dream within the texture of reality." ---Russell Letson, Locus, April 1997

"City on Fire, by Walter Jon Williams, is that rarest of entertainments, a sequel that improves on a successful predecessor . . . Mr. Williams' prose is distinguished by a no-nonsense confidence that perfectly matches Constantine's unshakable faith in his own destiny and in his ability to resist the corruption that notoriously comes with power." ---Gerald Jonas, NY Times Book Review, Feb 23, 1997

"City on Fire offers something for just about every kind of reader . . . Williams really gives the reader hours of entertainment with polished style, twisty plots, action and vivid characters." ---Jeff Watkins

"Williams [creates] a magnificent world-city, its entire surface urbanized by a multitude of civilizations that draw their very existence from plasm, the mysterious energy contained in all matter . . . Well-drawn, believable characters give emotional force to this fine novel . . . Ultimately, however, it is Williams's complex world-city, more convincing than even Asimov in Foundation, and his endlessly inventive use of plasm that will hold readers' fascinated attention. ---Publishers Weekly, Dec 30, 1996.

A classic work from Walter Jon Williams, "Daddy's World" earned the Nebula Award for Novelette in 2001.

Little Jamie lives with his family in an eerily perfect environment, entertained by characters from literature, sung to sleep at night by the Woman in the Moon. But cracks begin to appear in Jamie's world that reveal rifts within his family, and he begins to see the terrifying reality behind the walls of his life, and to understand that perfection has its price . . .

Loren Hawn is a traditional Western peace officer walking the streets of 21st Century New Mexico, seemingly unaware that times have changed. And when a dying man named Randal falls out of a bullet-riddled car and dies in Loren’s arm, Loren finds he isn’t the only man living in the wrong time--- because he remembers pulling Randal’s dead body out of a wrecked car twenty years before.

Loren knows the mystery is connected to a high-security laboratory built on the outskirts of town, and he knows that if he doesn’t work fast, all evidence of a crime will disappear into national security vaults. In order to bring justice back to his community, Loren will have to risk everything, his life, his job, his faith, and his family.

Peter Heck

Williams' longest, most densely realized and successful book to date.

Roland Green

This is a novel that works marvelously on a variety of levels-- as an adventure story, a trek through personal entanglements, a study in detailed police techniques and an enlightening lesson in theoretical science. And if that isn't enough, it also offers a totally unexpected ending.

"Walter Jon Williams is a visionary of tremendous power and originality . . . He kills every damn time." —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Game designer Dagmar Shaw is skilled at creating vast online entertainments with millions of players.  But Dagmar is haunted by her past, and by memories of a burning city, and of the friends who died as a bloody vengeance plot played to its conclusion around her.

Dagmar is an expert at manipulating the online players known as the Group Mind.  But when an acquaintance appears with the plan to manipulate an entire Middle Eastern country, to stage a revolution and make the people think it was all their own idea, Dagmar is both appalled and intrigued.

Can she crash the Deep State?  And can she do it without creating another bloodbath?

This is no longer a game.  The bullets, the tanks, and the spies are real, and so is the danger as Dagmar plunges into the task of gaming an entire state.

When it first appeared, Deep State gained a modest amount of infamy as the novel that predicted the Arab Spring, and appeared the very week the Egyptians occupied Tahrir Square.

"And since this is an intrigue thriller, there are undercurrents and deceptions and hidden agendas and secret loyalties and unexpected betrayals, deeper states of operation and deeper games being played for higher (or lower) stakes. Dagmar faces not only the normal perils of an elaborate and delicate con, but those of the deep state of international politics, where you don't know who has been bought or intimidated, who might be a plant, who has a history that will blow up at the worst possible moment." —Russel Letson, Locus

"Williams has crafted a slick, intelligent techno-thriller that never allows the melodramatic storyline to swamp the cast of sympathetic characters."  —Eric Brown, the Guardian

"Both prescient and utterly of the moment, featuring an ingeniously concocted and elaborated plot and a compelling cast of characters, Deep State is a success on every level . . . if ever one of Williams' books had crossover potential . . . this is it.

" . . . The biggest plot coupon of all . . . is really the card on which the whole hand turns, and Williams does not blow the trick. On the contrary, he weaves this bit of scientific or pseudo-scientific legerdemain very deftly into the warp and weft of his plot, giving the novel that satisfies both logically and emotionally.  Like his doughty heroine, Williams is absolutely at the top of his game here." —Paul Witcover, Locus

"Walter Jon Williams is a visionary of tremendous power and originality . . . He kills every damn time." —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Sean Makin was a washed-up child actor, until Dagmar Shaw made him a star. Now he's starring in a big-budget action thriller that offers him the chance to become a box-office titan.

Except the action and the thrills aren't just in the movie. Dangerous and destabilizing new technology is floating around behind the scenes. Police and cartel lords lurk in the shadows. An assassin is on the loose, and has already claimed his first victim.

Sean could be next in the killer's sights, unless he can find out what the bad guys want, who's hiding it, and how many people he's going to have to betray in order to save his life—and more importantly, his celebrity.

This Hugo Award-nominated novelette takes place in the distant future, when a highly-evolved humanity finds itself at war with the alien Shars. The product of eight million years of evolution, Ambassador Drill is sent to make peace... but does he retain enough of his humanity to recognize that of his enemies?

For its thirtieth anniversary, Hardwired is now available in a deluxe new edition, with new content by the author.

Earth lies prostrate beneath the lash of the Orbital powers, and Earth’s Balkanized nations have no choice but to let the Orbitals plunder their remaining wealth. Below the zone of Orbital control, buttonheads, panzerjocks, dirtgirls, and hustlers scramble for their ticket out of the gravity well.

But now, if the criminal underworld and the guerrilla underground can join forces, there is a chance to shift the balance of power— in a war fought on the ground by hardwired commandos, in the air by high-flying deltajocks, and by genius hackers in the neural interface.

As Roger Zelazny said, "Hardwired is a tough, sleek juggernaut of a story, punctuated by strobe light movements, coursing to the wail of jets and the twang of steel guitars— glittering, nasty, and noble— and told in a style perfectly suiting its content. It has all of my favorite things— blood, love, fire, hate and a high ideal or two. I wish I’d written this one.”

The Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of this cyberpunk classic includes essays by the author devoted to the origin of the novel, the unexpected source of the term “panzerboy,” and an amused guide through some of the oddities of the first German edition.

One obsessed cop. Two master thieves. A very small island in space. And The Greatest Treasure in the Empire.

Silverside Station is a small asteroid resort catering to the rich, the famous, and the celebrated— but is it big enough for both Drake Maijstral (the devious hero of The Crown Jewels) and Geoff Fu George (rated the galaxy’s top burglar by the Imperial Sporting Commission), both of whom have set their sights on the Eltdown Shard, a fabulous jewel that captures the light of a dying sun, a jewel that dangles around the comely throat of the Duchess Roberta, a beautiful and dashing heiress who clearly has plans of her own.

Mayhem and hilarity at the only possible result. House of Shards continues the droll adventures of Drake Maijstral— thief, devout coward, and reluctant hero— as he schemes his way to the top of the ratings.

When mankind's every need is serviced by artificial intelligence, and death itself is only a minor inconvenience, what does it mean to be human The answer lies hidden, deep within the Implied Spaces.

Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, is a scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays, Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening to set off a nightmare scenario, perhaps even bringing about the ultimate Existential Crisis: the end of civilization itself.

Traveling the pocket universes with his wormhole-edged sword Tecmessa in hand and talking cat Bitsy, avatar of the planet-sized computer Endora, at his side, Aristide must find a way to save the multiverse from subversion, sabotage, and certain destruction.

From Walter Jon Williams, the celebrated and influential author of Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, and Angel Station, comes Implied Spaces, a new novel of post-singularity action, pyrotechnics, and intrigue. Williams, whose name has long been synonymous with state-of-the-art science fiction, builds on the prophetic futurism of Vernor Vinge and Charles Stross, adding his own brand of poetic prose, masterful plotting, and engaging storytelling.

"What happens when technology reaches the casements of reality The answers to that question may dominate the rest of humankind's Experience. In Implied Spaces Walter Jon Williams wraps excellent adventure around this core question, and gives insights from a number of different perspectives."
—Vernor Vinge, author of A Fire Upon the Deep and Rainbows End

"Walter Jon Williams really knows how to play power chords in the key of 'sense of wonder': and in Implied Spaces he's gone to town on the guitar solo!"
—Charles Stross, author of Halting State and Accelerando

"Implied Spaces pioneers a new genre of SF—the 'Sword & Singularity' novel. Williams combines fantasy tropes believably with nanotech, bleeding-edge infotech speculation, classic smashing-planets space opera, and intriguingly human, or possibly post-human, characters along with a fast-moving plot and a quirky sense of humor in a mélange that's cosmological, theological, ontological, comic, and thoroughly entertaining."
—S. M. Stirling, author of Dies the Fire and The Sunrise Lands

This short novel takes place in the universe of Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire's Fall series.

Three years after the Naxid war, Lord Gareth Martinez has accepted a meaningless post as Inspector General of Chee, a newly-settled world. Intending nothing more than a pleasant vacation with his family, Martinezirst discovers corruption among the contractors engaged to develop Chee . . . but then he finds something far more dangerous--- a literal cosmic menace that threatens to wipe out all life on the planet.

A Philip K Dick Award-nominated novel.

Eight hundred years ago Doran Falkner gave humanity the stars, and he now lives with his regrets on a depopulated Earth among tumbledown ruins and ancient dreams brought to life by modern technology.

But word now comes that alien life has been discovered on a distant world, life so strange and impossible that the revelation of its secrets could change everything. A disillusioned knight on the chessboard of the gods, Doran must confront his own lost promise, his lost love, and his lost humanity, to make the move that will revive the fortunes both of humans and aliens . . .

Knight Moves is an engrossing and evocative read, a tale of immortality and love and death rendered in a style that reminds me more than a little of the early Roger Zelazny. Williams’ people are intriguing and sympathetic, and his portrait of an Earth left transformed and empty by a humanity gone to the stars, where aliens dig among ancient ruins for old comic books while the creatures of legends stir and walk again, will linger in my memory for a long time. Williams is a writer to watch, and– more importantly– to read. –George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones

Knight Moves uses an unmatched cast of characters, human and otherwise, to tell an intriguing story. – Fred Saberhagen, author of the Book of Swords Trilogy

NOMINATED FOR A NEBULA AWARD. Walter Jon Williams' classic science fantasy Metropolitan is once again available for a new generation of readers.

Aiah has fought her way from poverty and discovered a limitless source of plasm, the mysterious substance that powers the world-city. Her discovery soon involves her with Constantine, the charismatic, dangerous, seductive revolutionary who plans to overthrow, not simply the government, but the cosmic order . . .

"A spectacular blend of fantastic science, high politics, and low intrigue . . . Williams's world and characters are richly imagined yet utterly real." —Melissa Scott

"Entertaining . . . Williams understands that science fiction can breathe life into language . . . [His] writing is always lean, lively and engaging. —New York Times Book Review

"Blends SF aspects with noir stylings to create a potent atmosphere or urban dystopia . . . Ever the expert storyteller, Williams provides more than enough suspense." —Publishers Weekly

After years of civil war, the genius of Edgar Allan Poe is nearing the breaking point. Poe has devoted himself to the Confederacy, but his dreams of honor and glory are drowned in blood and slaughter far more vast than the terrors of his imagination.

Anguished, tortured by memories of his dead wife and his dead hopes, Poe finds himself holding a key position against Grant's assault, and must decide whether or not to sacrifice all that he still loves in service to a dying cause.

NS201005 May 2010 Night Shade Books

Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories

by Fritz Leiber
edited by Jonathan Strahan and
Charles N. Brown

Rules of '48

by Jack Cady

Grey

by Jon Armstrong