In addition to fiction, I’ve written a number of films for Hollywood. But then I won Nebula Awards in 20, and I became Just Another Award-Winning Author. I’ve been nominated for numerous literary awards, and for a number of years was science fiction’s “Bull Goose Loser,” the person who had the most award nominations without having actually won anything.

I’m also a reasonably prolific writer of short fiction, including contributions to George RR Martin’s Wild Cards project. As you might guess, some of my books escape easy categorization. I’ve 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 of course the world’s only gothic western science fiction police procedural ( Days of Atonement). The first novel to attract serious public attention was Hardwired, described by Roger Zelazny as “a tough, sleek juggernaut of a story, punctuated by strobe-light movements, coursing to the wail of jets and the twang of steel guitars.” (And let me just say that when you get a blurb like that, you point to it whenever possible.) I view science fiction as a kind of infinite playground in which I can move from one set of equipment to the next, from the slides to the monkey bars to the swings- which is a way of saying that I don’t just write the same sort of book over and over. (These are now available as ebooks after being out of print for decades.) After the market for historicals died, I began a new career as a science fiction writer.

I began my career by writing historical fiction, the sea-adventure series Privateers & Gentlemen. I’ve won awards, I’ve appeared on the bestseller lists of the Times and the New York Times, and I’m a world traveler, scuba diver, and a black belt in Kenpo Karate. I’m Walter Jon Williams, and I’m the author of something like forty volumes of fiction, in addition to works in film, television, comics, and the gaming field.

Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams