Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 105

Kirkus and Me

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Great news for people who happen to be me! My latest collection, Not So Much, Said the Cat just made it onto Kirkus's list of Best Fiction of 2016.

The list is broken down into categories, so that Romance writers don't find themselves lumped in with Mystery and Thriller. Science Fiction and Fantasy lists ten books -- and I've got to say that I find myself in grand company.

So I am very, very happy today.

You can see my entry here. Or you can go to the top of the lists and browse in the categories that most interest you here.


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The Least Pleasant Cure for Writer's Block Imaginable.

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I've only had one case of writer's block in my life but it was a dooziy. It came on after I'd sold my first three stories but before any of them appeared in print and it lasted for nine months.

Nine very, very long months. During the time that block lasted, I also turned thirty, lost my job, and got married.

I tried every cure in existence. I tried plotting out stories in great detail ahead of time. I tried free-association. I even went with that old chestnut and had somebody walk in with a gun:

"Holy cow!" somebody exclaimed. "He's got a gun!"
"What do you want?" somebody else asked.
"Don't hurt us! We'll do whatever you want, just don't hurt us."

And so on and on and on, until I finally acknowledged that no plot was congealing out of this mess and tore the sheets in half and dropped them in the trash basket. It was as if all your friends had dropped by and then refused to leave, but kept chattering away and raiding your refrigerator for food. Entertaining, perhaps. But certainly not art.

Nevertheless, every day I sat down to write. Every day I produced great volumes of words. Every day I discarded them all. Until, finally, nine months into the process my hind-brain got the message that refusing to give me ideas wasn't going to get it out of sitting in a chair, writing, every day.

At which point, it gave in and I started writing again.

I haven't been blocked since.

This is the least pleasant cure for writer's block imaginable -- keep on writing and continue to keep on writing until something breaks within you and you can write again. And here's the really scary part of this cure:

It worked for me. But I have no idea if it'll work for you.

Still, when all else fails... what have you got to lose?


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A Final Visit from Mrs. Porter

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Marianne's mother came to our house yesterday, to visit for the last time. When she died, she left her body to a medical school and the cremated ashes have just been returned. We're making arrangements to reunite her with her husband, William Christian Porter, in a cemetery in Fort Indiantown Gap.

When Mrs. Porter was born, women did not have the vote. She grew up to be a Roosevelt Democrat. She even had a job, for a time, helping to set up the Social Security system. When Barack Obama was elected president, she wished him well. But she was disappointed because she wanted a woman president.

Briefly, yesterday, I thought she was going to get her wish. Alas, it was not to be. So, instead, I will ask you to pause and be silent for just a few seconds in memory of a woman who, in her nineties, asked her pal, the church sexton, if she could get her picture taken on his Harley.

That's her up above.


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Everfair and the Utopian Tradition

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Nisi Shawl's  first novel, Everfair, comes with its own origin story, and it’s a good one. As Shawl revealed in John Scalzi’s blog Whatever :

The impetus for writing Everfair came out of a 2009 World Fantasy Convention panel I was drafted onto. The topic was steampunk; the other participants were Liz Gorinsky, Ann VanderMeer, Michael Swanwick, and Deborah Biancotti. What I didn’t understand going into the panel was why, with my love of Victorian literature and my self-admitted gear kink, I didn’t groove heavily on this genre? The answer I discovered and propounded to the audience: disgust caused by steampunk’s cozy relationship with colonialism. Enough with the be-goggled pith helmets and offscreen resource extraction already, I declared—I was going to write a steampunk novel set in the Belgian Congo! Egged on by Swanwick’s shudders and eye-rolling I added:

 “And I will make you beg to read it!”

This is a marvelous bit of myth-making and, as all good myths must be, it’s true. I don’t recall rolling my eyes, but I definitely shuddered. Literally and repeatedly. Because the essence of steampunk is fun and the thought of setting a joyous romp in a time and place that King Leopold made as close as anyone’s come to creating a Hell on Earth seemed to me, to put it mildly, impossible.
So let me begin  by admitting that, yes, Nisi Shawl has accomplished what I thought could not be done. But the anecdote inadvertently does Everfair a disfavor by linking it too firmly to steampunk and thus placing the suggestion in the readers’ minds that its chief accomplishment is to take the subgenre to an area new to it. (In a subsequent Locus interview, Shawl specified two writers who wrote in that area before her.) In fact, its origins aside, the connections with steampunk are tangential to her novel’s main concerns and accomplishments.
A quick recap of the premises: In the Nineteenth Century the Fabian Society acquires a great deal of money and with it buys a fraction of the Belgian Congo from King Leopold. There, with the aid of steampunk technology largely unavailable to the rest of the world, they intend to create an ideal society. This is told through the intertwined lives of several different protagonists most of whom, as an added treat for readers who like to puzzle such things out, are based on real historical figures.
Everfair , which rhymes with “neverwhere” and echoes Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon, declares its intention in the title. It is primarily concerned not with the lives, loves, and fates of its characters, engaging though they are. Nor is it a steampunk romp, though the first half or so, in which a Fabian government is established, new technology is invented (chiefly -- and it was cunning of Shawl to find this way of indicating Belgian cruelty without wallowing in atrocities -- artificial limbs and other prosthetics), and an airship war is waged against the European oppressors, is certainly entertaining enough to qualify. And while the novel soon becomes an alternative history, this is far from being its main concern.
Everfair  is a Utopian novel.
It is, moreover, to borrow Ursula Le Guin’s useful subtitle to The Dispossessed, “an Ambiguous Utopia.”
 It is a common characteristic of Utopias that they are set Somewhere Else, on a far island or a secret valley, or on the planet Anarres, where they are safe from the corrupting influences of the rest of society. By dumping her Utopia in the sea of history, Shawl is able to question and test the very idea of Utopia in a more rigorous manner than is usual.
What happens then? Interesting things. A romance is destroyed by one character's unrecognized (by herself) racism. World War I comes along, and the Everfair government, after free and open debate, chooses sides unwisely. The king of the native people reasserts his authority and disbands the ruling council. Later, he expels all Europeans from Everfair...
There is a school of thought in Buddhism that holds that true enlightenment can be achieved -- but only for an instant. Perhaps something similar applies to Utopias. At novel's close, the main characters have good reason to think their enterprise was a failure. Only the reader, looking in from outside and aware of the alternative, knows better.
I wish I had the time expand on all this at great length. Alas, I have obligations. I cannot here do justice to this wise and important book. All I can do is urge you to read Everfair . 
Then find someone else who has done the same and talk -- argue if you wish -- about its ideas.

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"The Harder I Work..."

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Over on Facebook, my friend Kyle Cassidy quoted me as saying to him, "The harder I work, the luckier I get."

I have only the haziest recollection of saying that, but it sure sounds like me. Certainly, all my heroes -- Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, the list goes on an on -- have been hard workers.

So I feel the collective weight of their potential disapproval on finding myself perilously close to not posting here today. Long ago, when I began this blog, I committed to posting twice weekly. Normally, I manage three times. Only rarely have I failed to post more than once.

On Wednesday, I was working hard and had no ideas for a post. So I let it slide. Now, on Friday, I'm working hard and I have absolutely no ideas for a post. None whatsoever.

But that's no excuse. So here it is, my second post of the week. I've been working all day, and at this point, even as simple an act of writing as this is hard work.

But I do it just to keep my luck up.


Above: A steampunk cave bear.

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Ghost, Dancing

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It's Halloween and I'm feeling whimsical. Please forgive me. And happy Halloween! Have a scary but safe night, everyone.


And, least you forget...

My annual Halloween story, written as usual on leaves, can be found here.


Above: All images copyright 2016 by Michael Swanwick.



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Lord Autumn's Game

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One of my Facebook friends, and I apologize for not remembering his name but at the time I didn't realize I would need it, commented that his wife doesn't read science fiction or fantasy but does occasionally ask if "the Leaf Guy" has done anything recently. By whom she means me.

The Leaf Guy is a title I am proud to assume. Autumn is my season, Halloween is my holiday (just ask the neighborhood kids!), and fallen leaves are a medium I take a particular pleasure to dabble in.

This year, the summer was dry, autumn came late, the nights were warm, and for a while it looked like I wasn't going to have the bright leaves needed to write a Halloween story on.

But at the last moment they came through.

So the other day Marianne and I wandered through nature preserves and cemeteries, writing on leaves and photographing the results. Beforehand, I had written a four-sentence Halloween story called "Lord Autumn's Game." It came out well, I think.

You can read the story here.


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An Autumnal Cocktail

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Marianne and I were out in the cemetery today and we dropped in to visit our favorite dead couple there, George and Mary Spain. You will note that their grave is inscribed COCKTAILS AT SIX.

It being Autumn, we fixed them a Manhattan. It was Marianne's idea to use a red maple leaf for the cherry.


And you may well wonder...

What were we doing in the cemetery? The answer will be posted here on Friday.


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Before The Cat Said Not So Much

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Recently, Carl Slaughter asked me to make a few comments about all the collections I've published leading up to this year's highly-praised Not So Much, Said the Cat . The results are up on File 770 .

To give you an idea of what the comments are like, here's some of what I had to say about my first collection, Gravity's Angels. Arkham House's editor, the late Jim Turner, used to call me up and say, “Listen, Swanwick, I don’t have time for any of your nonsense. I just need a question answered and that’s the end of it.”

And then:

“Hello, Jim. It’s good to hear from you,” I’d say. And with a harmless bit of gossip here and a comment about a hot new story there, I could keep him on the phone for hours. There aren’t many people I’d want to keep on the phone for hours, but he was right at the top of the list.

Jim’s original idea for the cover was to use Picasso’s Guernica as a wrap-around. But when he looked into it, the proportions were wrong. “I’d have to crop it to make it work,” he told me over the phone, “and you can’t cut up a great work of art!”

I will be grateful to my dying day that I resisted the urge to say, “Oh, go ahead, Jim.”

You can find the entire article here.


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Truth and Hearsay

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I am confident that sooner or later there will be a device capable of recording dreams and, shortly after that, an affordable consumer version of that device. Alas, I do not expect it to arrive in my lifetime. So it belongs to that throng of things which I can enjoy only in my dreams.

This reflecting was brought on by a dream I had the other day. I was eating a meal -- no, a repast! a feast! -- in a restaurant and it was all astonishingly delicious. And because it was the last dream of the night, I woke up with vivid memories of exactly how it all tasted.

I did not bother putting it down into words, of course. Rich... unctuous... crispy... the whole battalion of terms used by food critics could neither do justice to the dream-feast nor give you a good idea of how it tasted.

Here's the interesting thing, though. People will tell you that you can't experience taste or smell in a dream. Some will even go so far as to claim that it's impossible to dream in color. This last I know to be untrue because on those rare occasions when I dream in black-and-white, it's an unusual enough event that I marvel at it while the dream is still going on.

And now I know for sure that it's possible to experience flavors in a dream.

What's interesting about this is that for me this is a simple fact. For you, however, it's only anecdotal evidence.

Unless, of course, you've had a similar dream yourself. Then it's fact.


And every time someone declares what can and can't happen in dreams...

I wonder where they got their information from. How large was the study? How reliable was the methodology?

Surely they don't come up with such statements based on their own. Because then they'd be asking me to accept anecdotal evidence as fact.


Above: This is what a mailbox looks like in dreams. Except this is a real one I drove past today.

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