Subject: Review: "Prayers on the Wind" by Walter Jon Williams

From: [email-masked] (P.D. TILLMAN)
Date: 06 Mar 2000 12:15:21 -0500

Prayers on the Wind by Walter Jon Williams
	Review Copyright 2000 P. D. Tillamn

Rating: A+.  WJW's strongest work to date, and one of the 10 best SF short
stories ever. IMO, of course, but folks, it don't get much better than
this.

This started out to be a review of WJW's newish collection [note 1], but
then I read "Prayers," for the fourth or fifth time, and was blown away
again.

The Gyalpo Rinpoche, Forty-first Reincarnation of the Bodhisattva Bob
Miller and Treasured King of human space, has finally agreed to meet the
Sang Ambassador. The well-named Sang, a warlike race of centauroid slavers
[note 2], are protesting an alleged human incursion into Sang space.

"Prayers" combines a twisty story of interstellar power-politics with a
wonderful nanotech - Big Library - Buddhist backstory that I dearly hope
WJW returns to sometime, plus his signature grace-notes & lovely
throwaways:
	'A statue of the Thunderbolt Sow came to life, looked at the
	 Regent. "A message from the Library Palace, Regent," it said.'

"Prayers on the Wind" has beauty, blood, humor, sex and religion.  Exotics
human & alien, technology-as-magic, high treason and transcendence. The
ending brings tears to my eyes, even after multiple rereads. What more can
one ask of fiction?

%T Prayers on the Wind
%A Walter Jon Williams
%B The Good New Stuff
%E Gardner Dozois
%D 1999
%O Novelette, debut 1991 in When the Music's Over, Lewis Shiner, ed. 
%O Nebula nominee, 1992. Reprints: 1992, Dozois Year's Best, Ninth Annual
%O 1998, Frankensteins & Foreign Devils, collection by WJW, NESFA, $23

Note 1) Frankensteins & Foreign Devils (1998), which appears nearby.

Note 2) The Sang are something of an ET Draka. This may not be
coincidental: Colonel-Ambassador !urq remarks that she can envision no
finer ending than "a glorious death in service to the state."

Links: 	Author <http://www.thuntek.com/~walter/index.htm>
	Publisher <http://www.nesfa.org/press/>

review copyright 2000 by Peter D. Tillman  <[email-masked]>
Read more of my reviews:
http://www.silcom.com/~manatee/reviewer.html#tillman
(including WJW's Rock of Ages, which is something Completely Different....)