The Best of Walter Jon Williams, Walter Jon Williams (Subterranean 978-1645240020, $45.00, 610pp, hc). Cover by Lee Moyer. February 2020. Exactly 30 years ago, this column’s lede was “Walter Jon Williams is an interestingly various writer….” The intervening decades have given me no reason to alter that opinion, variations on which I have been repeating just about every time I write about a Williams title. So why should I break the chain now? In 1991, when I drafted that review (of Days of Atonement), Williams had published seven SF novels and a collection of shorter work and was already a fully formed professional with a range stretching from the cyberpunkish and space-operatic, to alien encounters, to crime-caper/comedy-of-manners mashups. (Not counting five historical-nautical adventures as Jon Williams.) Since then, his output has expanded to encompass fantasies, disaster epics, alternate histories, pocket universes, near-future technothrillers, and less-easily-characterized subgeneric collisions, extensions, mutations, and transmogrifications.