Will Wiles

@willwiles

"The Dead Man's Empire", sequel to the award-winning "The Last Blade Priest", is out now from Angry Robot. Author of several novels, and the short story collection "The Anechoic Chamber & other weird tales" (Salt). He/him.

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Will Wiles@willwiles· 6d

From first place in 2009 to 22nd place in 2026, and now guaranteed to go lower. For shame.

Map showing the ILGA rankings of European countries for LGBT rights. While most of Western Europe and Scandinavia is green, the UK is a shameful orange.

Will Wiles@willwiles· 6d

Remember, we must separate the art from the artist

Two large bins, one for general waste, the other for paper recycling

Will Wiles@willwiles· 6d

How I think my working day is going to feel, vs how it actually feels

St Jerome in his Study, painted by Antonello da Messina. A perfect picture of academic serenity in idealised architectural surroundings. Jerome sits calmly attentive, straight-backed, reading.

Saint Jerome painted by Pieter Coecke van Aelst from the quoted post. Jerome is slumped, one hand supporting his head, the other with a finger on a tumbled skull. He looks flustered and miserable and his desk is untidy.

Will Wiles@willwiles· 11d

Greetings from Sicily! (I mean, the Isle of Wight)

View from terrace of Osborne House across parched formal gardens with a bright blue sea visible in the distance

Will Wiles@willwiles· 14d

Posting this before someone else does, IYKYK. (repost with alt text)

Jonathan Meades's "Bennometer", measuring the white heat of technology

Will Wiles@willwiles· 18d

Tracy Jordan in "30 Rock" saying: "I finally understand the ending of 'The Sixth Sense'. Those names are the people who worked on the movie."

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jul 10

Checking in on how people are enjoying my fantasy novel titled "Do Not Eat Elfcap"

Anonymised screengrab of 4-star Goodreads review that reads, in its entirety, "I would eat elfcap"

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jul 7

Screenshot of part of AI author scam email. It reads: "I recently discovered The Dead Man's Empire, and what stayed with me most was its exploration of Bureaucratic satire, post-mortem spatial management, and the dark architecture of corporate governance., particularly Investigating how the dry, structural layout of administrative record-keeping can be subverted to manage a expanding empire of the deceased."

Russell Dalrymple in Seinfeld saying "Not even close"

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jul 3

We must reject such imagined communities and embrace the true geography of this island

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jun 28

Back in the late 2000s when bloggers ruled the earth the usual way of threading this needle was to get wistful about expressionism

Fritz Hoger's Chilehaus in Hamburg, a massive office building in dark brick with green copper roof, which culminates in an acute angle like the prow of a ship

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jun 26

I'll take it

I am Pope Leo XIV, according to this dumb quiz

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jun 25

Filling out a paper tax return? Section 21 eviction?

Headline from the Independent: "Gary Numan says way he attracted his wife might be illegal now". I didn't read the article.

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jun 21

Why won't Instagram links show the picture? Am I doing something wrong? Sigh. Anyway here's a nice picture of the book on some hard concrete

A pile of Ray Newman books on my back step.

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jun 20

Poster for George C Scott's "Day of the Dolphin"

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jun 20

My sincere apologies to The Onion, Stan Kelly and anyone who thought of this before I did

Stan Kelly's iconic "Sickos" drawing of a man leering through a window, perversely enjoying what he's seeing, with the same image reflected beneath him and tinted algae green

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jun 10

Thank you! Isn't it! She later wore that dress on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Antony Gormley's "One and Other" installation.

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jun 10

20 years ago today

Hazel and I, newly wed, walking down a street in Marylebone

Will Wiles@willwiles· Jun 8

I do like it when this sort of thing happens

A nice Bluesky feed congruence between visually similar pictures of a Gemini space capsule and "Noseybonk", a terrifying character from 1980s kids' TV

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 28

(The painter JC Hook, not the crocophobic sea captain)

From "The Inner Life of the Royal Academy" by GD Leslie (1914): "Hook was very fond of babies. I remember his saying once that a house was not worth going into that had not got a baby and a barrel of beer on tap in it."

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 28

I am a minor later disciple of the true prophet

A portrait painting of the author JG Ballard, by Brigid Marlin

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 27

In hoc signo vinces

A flag that resembles a hot dog, with two pale brown horizontal outer bands representing the bun, and a sausage-coloured middle band. A thin wavy yellow band down the middle represents mustard. I saved it to my desktop from Bsky or Tumblr some months ago and made no note of the the artist, I'm sorry about that.

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 15

"This is one of the most satisfying, well crafted secondary world fantasy series out there, perfect for fans of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Tyrant Philosophers or Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft" - thank you @abigailnussbaum.bsky.social for such a kind review of "The Dead Man's Empire" in April's Locus!

Thumbnail image of the cover of the April 2026 edition of American SFF magazine Locus.

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 13

The odious Streeting reminds me of the disturbing way Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell used to draw Cecil Parkinson

Steve Bell's version of Cecil Parkinson, a sort of varnished and vain figure in a pinstripe suit, overstuffed like a Chesterfield sofa,with staring eyes, exuding beams of alleged "charisma" like the ark of the covenant

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 7

Here's the same crow a couple seconds later, once it had reached the top of the fence

A crow on a fence, turned away from the viewer

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 7

Tried to photograph a crow in the garden using the zoom on my new phone and got a rather exciting action shot

Phone photo of a crow taking flight from a wooden planter. The crow is a blur of sudden movement, wings outstretched, feathers splayed and resembling brush strokes

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 6

🥰

The cover of "Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks" Brian Eno, which makes abundant use of the pedal steel guitar

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 4

Wow, this is good stuff

"Studio 3E, for religious services" says the caption on a photograph of a deeply weird room that looks like a 1930s telephone exchange that has been converted into a cult's headquarters. There are slim green columns, pared-down art deco exedra, stars and alpha-omega devices, it's a lot.

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 4

They're professionals

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 1

The best angle I could get! But this is only one-third or so, everything related to comics and graphic novels is upstairs

A different angle of the bookshelf partially pictured earlier

Will Wiles@willwiles· May 1

My pleasure! Index shows four Whelan paintings, about halfway down (and the other artists included, which shows what a great introduction to SFF art it was for young me)