Author Archives: Rosalind Williams

Thank you for that question, Maddy! Summer day, sandwiches on the deck, chit chat, during which my friend Maddy asks: “I’ve heard of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, but not William Morris. What is he doing in your book?” … Continue reading →

So I have been musing since Stephen King’s 2009 novel Under the Dome has been turned into a TV series (even better than movie rights these days). King has explained that the image of a town under a transparent dome … Continue reading →

Being old school, I still get most of my news from newspapers. For a long time now I have hardly glanced at so-called national news. Who wants to read about gridlock, which by definition is not news, because the story … Continue reading →

It’s not quite time for summer beach reading yet, but it is time for end-of-the-spring term reading. For me this consists of catching up on all the New Yorker magazines that have been accumulating during the winter. I feel guilty … Continue reading →

Even people who have zero interest in general history can get intrigued by family history, or at least some branches thereof. My interest in family history, generally mild, recently got a boost because one of our graduate students, Rebecca Woods, … Continue reading →

Last week I started looking around MIT to connect with people who might help me develop my idea of doing retrospective GPS tracking of l9th-century writers.  Like almost any university these days, MIT is full of people interested in and … Continue reading →

The Triumph of Human Empire begins in the spring of 1890. Its first chapter describes where Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson were that April, what they were and thinking, and where they thought they were heading in … Continue reading →

One of the most difficult parts of writing The Triumph of Human Empire was trying to define an event of consciousness.  The rise of human dominance on the planet has been the ultimate slow-moving process, taking place over many millennia, … Continue reading →

As usual, the Onion is out in front in making sense of the senseless: BOSTON—After Monday’s horrific terror attack at the Boston Marathon that killed three and left hundreds injured, officials confirmed Tuesday that the bombings and senseless violence that … Continue reading →