Welcome to the first of three episodes recorded at the 60th incarnation of Boskone, which according to longtime attendees, offered up the warmest weather that con has ever seen. Considering past Boston Februarys have been brutal, going so far as to one year bring on a blizzard, stranding people at the con hotel, I was thrilled. I was also thrilled to be able to grab lunch with Walter Jon Williams the day Boskone began at Cafe Polonia, which has been serving traditional and gourmet Polish and Eastern European dishes in South Boston for more than 20 years.

Walter’s the author of more than forty volumes of fiction, in addition to works in film, television, comics, and gaming. He began his career by writing historical fiction, the sea-adventure series Privateers & Gentlemen. But after the market for historicals died, he relaunched himself as a science fiction writer.  He’s written cyberpunk (Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, Angel Station), near-future thrillers (This Is Not a Game, The Rift), classic space opera (Dread Empire’s Fall), “new” space opera (Aristoi), post-cyberpunk epic fantasy new weird (Metropolitan and City on Fire), and the world’s only gothic western science fiction police procedural (Days of Atonement).

He’s been nominated for many literary awards, and for a number of years was science fiction’s “Bull Goose Loser” — that is, the person who had the most award nominations without having actually won anything — a streak which ended when he won a Nebula Award in 2001 for his novelette “Daddy’s World.” His short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Omni, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and others, as well as such anthologies as Alien Crimes, The New Space Opera, Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, plus George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards project. He’s also been involved in the gaming industry, having written RPGs based on Privateers & Gentlemen and Hardwired, contributed to the alternate-reality game Last Call Poker, and written the dialog for the Electronic Arts game Spore. In 2017, he was the Guest of Honor at the 75th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Helsinki.

We discussed why when he started out he didn’t think he was good enough to make it as a science fiction writer, how if I were to read his first drafts they’d terrify me, the con at which Gordon Dickson wandered around trying to sell one of Walter’s novels to editors, why the ’50s was the Golden Age of historical fiction in America, the way in which his first science fiction novel was an inversion of all the historical fiction he’d written before, which issues of Fantastic Four got him so angry he quit reading comics for 20 years, how deep he was into his career before he finally realized he might actually make a go at this writing thing, the most frequent problem found when teaching Taos Toolbox, what he learned about his Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated “Surfacing” by leaving it untouched in a drawer for six months, his motivation for the one time he had to say no to an editorial suggestion, what his extremely rare bouts of writers block — lasting only a few days — were really about, and much more.

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Here’s what we chowed down on during our lunch at Cafe Polonia —

Walter’s Highlander Smoked Cheese Appetizer
traditional Polish smoked cheese served with lingonberry jam

Scott’s Blood Sausage Appetizer
served lightly broiled with caramelized onions

Walter’s Boneless Pork Chop Entree
lightly breaded pan fired pork cutlet served
with a special sweet cabbage stew

Scott’s Polish Plate Entree
Hunter’s stew, stuffed cabbage, three pierogies,
and grilled Polish sausage kielbasa

Shared Blueberry Crepe
served with a garnish of whipped cream

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Coming up two weeks from today will be another conversation straight from Boskone, this time with Annlee Newwitz, whose new novel The Terraformers was released just a few weeks before the con. Their debut novel Autonomous won the Lambda Literary Award and was nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards, plus their short story “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” won the 2019 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

Thanks for listening!