Got It Live If You Want It!

by wjw on October 19, 2011

The new ebook of Voice of the Whirlwind is now available for Kindle, Nook, and via Smashwords.

Pretty awesome cover, neh?

Elsewhere in ebook news, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Days of Atonement, and Rock of Ages should now be available in the Apple store, as well as Diesel and Scrollmotion.

If they’re not yet available in the Sony store, they should be shortly. (Sony seems to take its sweet time.)

Quite frankly, I’d prefer you downloading from Smashwords rather than iBooks, because I get a bigger cut— but hey, whatever works for you. The customer is king ’round here.

Dai Phillips October 19, 2011 at 10:44 pm: Great cover, and thank you again, Professor Williams. However I am compelled by the sixth amendment to the standing rules of the Internet to point out that the weapon on your new cover has been modeled on a repainted Nerf(TM) gun: http://i.imgur.com/VSDpa.jpg
JW Johnson October 20, 2011 at 5:29 am: Are you going to make Solip System available?
John Appel October 20, 2011 at 5:34 am: Sweet! A great story, and one of my favorites. My paperback copy is *almost* as beat up as my copy of Hardwired.

And this is your best cover yet!
wjw October 20, 2011 at 5:58 am: Thanks for the compliments on the cover. Of course the right piece of art helped.

One thing I’ve discovered is that to look like a “real” cover, there has to be some busy stuff on it, because we’ve all grown up seeing covers loaded with busy stuff. It can’t just be my name and the title, which is— realistically speaking— all an ebook needs. So I threw in the two reviews and suddenly the cover looked about 300% more real.
Dave Bishop October 20, 2011 at 8:31 am: I’m glad that more of your stuff is available in e-format, Walter, as I’ve finally bought myself a Kindle. Generally, I’m pleased with it.

Mind you, connecting the thing to my wi-fi network turned out not to be straightforward. Then, after a couple of days, it lost the connection for a while – then re-found it again. Referring to ‘Help’ wasn’t much help as Amazon referred me to my ISP … who referred me to Amazon (perfectly normal for a ‘Help’ function, in my experience). You don’t get these problems with paper and ink!
DensityDuck October 20, 2011 at 9:21 pm: I dunno. I think I liked the Royo version better. There’s just a certain je ne sais quoi about someone who manages to get a popped-collar unzipped-to-the-waist jacket on a freakin’ spacesuit.
DensityDuck October 20, 2011 at 9:23 pm: Oh, and–good story, and I *love* the basic idea, but did you ever read “Who Censored Roger Rabbit”?
Shash October 20, 2011 at 10:30 pm: That’s a rockin’ cover. It suits the story well.
Allen October 20, 2011 at 11:08 pm: I’ve read “Voice of the Whirlwind” 8 million times. Give or take a few million.

Several. I’ve read “Voice of the Whirlwind” several times.

It had a huge impact on me back in 1993. It topped my list of favorite books for about 5 years there. Eventually knocked out of the top spot by Greg Egan’s Diaspora , I think.

I re-read VotW a few years ago and thought it held up extremely well, better than Diaspora. The computer/communications technology described came across as a bit dated, but otherwise, still a great book. Now that I’ve got it on my kindle, I’ll give it another read! ~8,000,001.

In the last few years my tastes have leaned more towards the surreal. VanderMeer’s “Finch”, Gilman’s “The Half-Made World”, and Swanwick’s “The Iron Dragon’s Daughter” now top my favorite’s list.

Have you written anything in that vein, or have any plans to do so? City on Fire and Metropolitan actually come pretty close I think, and both were great books. Anything else?
oozlum October 21, 2011 at 2:18 am: Great story – have had the book for many many years (it’s sort of travelled with me) and recently I bought it and Hardwired as audiobooks from audible, AND got a hard copy of ‘Frankensteins’ to bridge the two. Actually, I’ve got so much out of them I’d paypal you $10 just for the hell of it, if I could work out how to. So thanks.
wjw October 21, 2011 at 5:31 am: I’ll be making “Solip:System” available soon. As soon as I can steal a decent scan from the pirates.

Allen, I haven’t done anything much more off-the-wall than the Metropolitan books, and I wouldn’t describe them as surreal. (“Highly imaginative unconventional fantasy,” yes.) I’m probably too wedded to narrative to break it down much. But you never know, I might get inspired that way . . .

DD, it took me a while to figure out your Roger Rabbit question, and then I remembered the doppelgangers or whatever they were called. I didn’t read the book until after I finished VotW, so the Whirlwind’s antecedents are probably a bunch of cheesy “amnesiac veteran confronts mystery of his own past” movies from the 1940s, some of which I probably drowsed through as midnight movies when I was a kid.
wjw October 21, 2011 at 5:42 am: Dai, I always assumed it was a Supersoaker .
Ralf The Dog October 21, 2011 at 1:57 pm: Just a quick question, I may be remembering it wrong, however, I am thinking there was a chapter in Rendezvous with Rama, titled, Voice of the Whirlwind. Was your book title inspired from the other?
DensityDuck October 21, 2011 at 4:26 pm: wjw: haha, I read Roger Rabbit after I’d read Whirlwind, so I thought it was kind of funny that this general idea had shown up before. Roger Rabbit is, I think, a relatively obscure book (the only reason I read it at all is that my wife is a huge Christopher Lloyd nut, and has copies of the books that all the movies he’s been in are based on/written for.)

****

The thing is, it’s not that the prop designers are so uncreative (well, maybe they are, but anyway.) It’s that the Nerf gun is basically a ripoff of the Pulse Rifle from Aliens, which is the platonic ideal of the sci-fi machine gun.
Dave Bishop October 21, 2011 at 9:17 pm: Just a general query, really. Do you think that it’s possible to sight down, what I’m assuming, are sights on the top of that gun with that slitty-eyed mask on? Or does one just fire it from the hip?

I suppose, on closer inspection, there’s a distinct possibility that it could incorporate some sort of laser guided sighting … which sort of answers my own question … (Where am I going with this? Stop now while you’re ahead!)
marc sobel October 21, 2011 at 10:07 pm: Dai Phillips

You should keep quiet about this. We don’t want the general public to know that Nerf stole the design from a marooned Time Trooper. It would screw up the time stream.
wjw October 22, 2011 at 5:54 am: I read Rendezvous With Rama when it came out, but I don’t recall the chapter titles. VotW’s title comes from the King James Bible, Book of Job. “God is the whirlwind.”

I think you don’t need to shoulder the weapon, you just plug the interface into your skull socket and it shoots where your eyes are looking— or if not eyes, the sensor of your choice. Caseless ammunition, so you won’t be bothered by recoil. It also probably fires little grenades, like that sucker in “Aliens.”

Of course no one in VotW dresses up like this or fires a weapon like that, but it’s still a great picture.
Clyde October 25, 2011 at 8:17 am: I commented and linked to this on my Google+ page.
https://plus.google.com/105283036578244839305/posts
Great cover.
Blackie November 6, 2011 at 4:18 pm: Great to see this book out again. Whenever I get to talking with some one about SF or speculative fiction in general, this book and The Rift always come up. Whenever I have a copies I lend them out and never get them back! Arrgh!