Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 326 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Walter John Williams.

He's the author of over 30 novels in a wide range of genres,

including hardwired, Aristoy, impliedied Spaces and Quilifer.

He's also published three short story collections and is a regular contributor to the Wild Card series

of shared world superhero anthologies.

And we'll be speaking with him today about his new novel, The Accidental War, the latest volume in his praxis series of Military Space Opera.

And now here's our interview with Walter John Williams.

All right, so we're here with Walter John Williams. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Okay, so your new book is called The Accidental War, and it's the latest volume in the Praxis series.

So just tell us a bit about how this series first came about.

Well, we have to go back into the midst of time about 20 years.

When Caitlin Blaisdell, who was then an editor at Harper Collins, said that she would like to see a space opera

from me.

And so creative people generally have, are thinking about like any one of a dozen projects at a time

and you know I have come up with by now more projects than I will ever have time to write.

So which project I choose at any given time depends on the level of interest from publishers.

And I had been thinking about a space opera series. It was kind of down a few numbers in my list, but I sort of brought it up to the front of the list and sold it. She liked my ideas.

And then that was the first three books of the practice series. I decided to do

to do space opera straight. I mean I wanted to do a big wide scale of old

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