Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 135

[dream diary]

.March 19, 2015

I dreamed some friends and I went to the Copyright Office to register some new poems.  Terry Bisson was working there and, when he was done the paperwork, handed us smooth stones with the first lines of our poems carved into them.  Then he explained at which public officials and at which specific protests we could legally throw the stones.

Bisson had recently been knighted by the British Queen and so, throughout all this, we had to address him as "Sir Terry."  Which was amusing to those of us who knew his politics.

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Milles Na gCopaleen's Catechism of Cliche

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Who is the single least known great writer of the Western Canon?

Brian O'Nolan.

And who was this gentleman I never heard of before?

The single least known great writer of the Western Canon.

Upon what authority do you make this extraordinary assertion?

Upon the unimpeachable authority of his great novel, At Swim-Two-Birds .  And the equally impeachable authority of his great fantasy The Third Policeman .  And the eminently peachable authority of everything else he ever wrote.

Under what name did he write?

Flann O'Brien.

Why, then, have I never heard of him?

He destroyed himself through a combination of drink, wasting his wit in pub conversation, wasting his writing time on newspaper columns that kept him from starving, putting a novel in a drawer after a single publisher rejected it, publishing under pseudonyms, writing a novel in Irish despite the readersip for such a book being unprofitably small... In short, he was Irish.  God help him, he was Irish. Also a humorist, which is almost as bad.

What does it make me if I've I've never read the sot?

Blessed of God, for you have his works before you ready to be discovered.

But if I don't bother to read them?

A total idiot.


Oh, all right.  I have somewhere in the house a copy of The Best of Myles , a collection of O'Nolan's pseudonymous weekly columns written as by "Myles na gCopaleen."  They are mad whimsical, the work of a man who was a master of the language, and the reason I don't know where the book is is that I hid it.  Otherwise, I'd keep reading it over and over and never get anything done.

By chance I recently ran across a blog that reposted one of the great man's columns, the "Catechism of Cliche."  And it prompted the foregoing orgy of admiation.

You can read the catechism here.


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Four! Philadelphia! Authors! Four! (Plus One New York Editor)

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Here's a cool signing event coming up in less than two weeks.  It's...

But first a little backstory.

One of the first pieces of publishing advice Gardner Dozois ever gave me, back in the 1970's, was to "sell lots of stories to one magazine."  That way, you get noticed, people start following your work and looking for more, and your reputation builds faster than if you spread your stories hither and yon.  Later, when he became editor of Asimov's , he amended this advice to "sell lots of stories to one magazine -- and make that magazine Asimov's ."  But the principle remained the same.

I followed Gardner's advice and it worked well for me.  Tom Purdom, when he returned to writing short fiction in the 1990s, did much the same thing.  He offered everything he wrote to Asimov's first and since none of them were ever rejected, that's where they all appeared.  Inevitably, then, we would periodically have stories in the same issue and I began referring to these as "Philadelphia issues."

Recently, Gregory Frost and I wrote a  story called "Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters -- H'ard and Andy Are Come to Town!"  Which, at the risk of sounding immodest, is a hoot and a half.   It was accepted in Asimov's , and slated for the April/May 2015 issue.  In that same issue, almost inevitably, is Tom Purdom's latest story, "Day Job."  And, probably not coincidentally, there is also a story by another fellow Philadelphia, Fran Wilde, titled "How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age."

That's four Philadelphia writers, for those who are counting.

(Okay, okay, Greg lives just outside of town in Lower Merion.  But before that he spent enough years in the city to pay his dues.  At a minimum, he's a Greater Philadelphian.  Anyway, L. Sprague de Camp also lived outside of town, but we always counted him as one of our own.)

Four writers apparently achieves some kind of critical mass, because this time editor Sheila Williams noticed this alignment of stars and declared the April/May Asimov's the first Official Philadelphia Issue.

To celebrate which, there will be a bookstore appearance and signing on:

Saturday March 28, 2015 1:00 PM
Barnes & NobleRittenhouse Square, 1805 Walnut Street, Philadelphia 
Four Philadelphia authors and one major science fiction editor -- which means you can get five autographs for the cost of a single magazine.  That's a good deal.
Plus, these are clever and witty and interesting people.  I should know -- I'm one of them.
I recommend the event.  It'll be great fun.  I promise.

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Waking the Dead

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I'd met Terry Pratchett a few times, at awards ceremonies and the like.  He was pleasant, a little reserved, and it was clear to me that he wore his signature hat chiefly to hide a bald spot he was touchy about.  But you couldn't say I knew him.  So, to find someone who might say a few words in his memory, I went to a rather shabby funeral parlor in the Ramtops where a rather shabby group had gathered for a rather shabby wake.  They all wore black.  They were all, within a rather loose definition of the term, women.

There was a sideboard cluttered with food.  I took one glimpse at the sausage and quickly looked away.  "So tell me --"I said to the nearest witch.

"It's a terrible loss, to be sure, dearie," Nanny Ogg said.  "But at least she didn't go out cackling."

"Uh, who are we --"

"Why, Granny Weatherwax, to be sure.  Who else would we be gathered here to mourn?"

"Well --"

"I never honestly thought the old bat could die," Magrat said.

A sudden silence came over the room as everyone looked over their shoulders.  Then, when nothing happened to any of them, they all sighed in mingled sadness and relief.

"That's it, then.  She's well and truly gone."  Nanny Ogg topped her teacup and every other one in sight from a flask.  "Drink up, while I thinks of a muffin in her honor."

"I don't know what we'll do," Magrat said, "without her."

"You'll do the same as you ever did.  You think that just because somebody did you a good turn or ten, they have an obligation to hang around forever, at your beck and call?  It ain't healthy!  Let her go, lace up your boots, shoulder your rucksack and get on with it.  That's what she'd have wanted you to do."

I cleared my throat.  "Actually, I came here to get a quote from you about Terry Pratchett."

"Uh.  Who?"

"Never heard of the sot!"

"He was a writer," I said.  "The best at what he did, much admired, greatly beloved, profoundly mourned.  He left behind something like seventy books."

Nanny Ogg took a huge bite of sausage, and then belched with prolonged satisfaction.  I did not know which would haunt me the longer -- the sight or the smell.  "Oh.  Well, then," she said.  "The same goes for him, I'd reckon."

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Two Ways to Improve Your Book Reviews (Part 2)

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Decades ago, when I was first taken on as a client by the legendary Virginia Kidd, she had two pieces of advice to offer me.  The first was, "Never rewrite your old books."  The second was, "Don't write reviews."  Her reasoning being that positive reviews don't win you friends but negative reviews create enemies like nobody's business.  These were wise words and if I've disobeyed her second dictum from time to time, I've tried to only do so when there was something I wanted to celebrate.

A more nuanced approach was taken by John Updike, who for many years wrote long critical reviews for the New Yorker.   They were both entertaining and elucidating.  So much so that when I discovered that the library had a copy of Hugging the Shore , a cinder block of a book which was largely a decade's worth of those reviews, I borrowed it and ripped through all the reviews in less than a week.

At first glance, all the reviews were positive.  That was part of their charm.  But midway through the book, I finished a description of the virtues of I forget which book it was and realized that he hadn't liked the book.  This fact, however, he had left out as irrelevant.  Instead, he carefully described that book in such a way that those who, like himself, wouldn't enjoy it, would not feel compelled to buy a copy.  Those who would like the book, however, would shortly be holding a copy in their hands.

This is much more work than recording one's gut reaction to the book.  But it's worth it, as I discovered when I borrowed the previous collected cinder block from the library and discovered that in the Sixties and Seventies Updike had not been shy about letting you know the ways that other people's books had failed him.  That was a highly politicized time and Updike was a believer in the moral propriety of the Viet Nam War, so his scorn tended to fall upon left wing writers.  Who in turn and for whatever reason (drugs may or may not have been involved) were more likely to be writing "experimental" fiction than those he admired.

Negative reviews are always fun if it's not your own book that got caught in the wringer.  But the collection was nowhere near as enjoyable as the later one was.  That aura of great-souledness was gone.

This insight proved useful to me sometime later when I agreed to review several books for a serious publication and found that I had serious problems with one of them.  Having spoken with the author's admirers on many occasions, I knew that my problems were not theirs.  So I doubled down on the work and wrote a careful description that would leave the fans salivating but warn away those who, like myself, would not enjoy it.

That was many years ago.  Have I ever once regretted not doing my best to take the author down?  No.

Similarly, Neil Gaiman's review of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, ends with him admitting that it's a "a novel that’s easy to admire, to respect and to enjoy, but difficult to love."  Reading those words, I could feel Gaiman's reluctance to commit them to paper.  But he had an obligation to make it clear that this was a novel that might not satisfy readers of traditional fantasy.

It was a nicely done essay.  It made me want to read the novel and then make up my own mind about it.

You can read Neil's review here.


So am I saying that you have to refrain from writing savagely negative reviews . . . ?

No, of course not.  Do whatever you wish.


And by sheer coincidence . . .

I received my contributor's copies of "the Philadelphia issue" of Asimov's Science Fiction yesterday (more on the Philadelphia part Monday), and this morning discovered that Robert Silverberg had dedicated his column to... John Updike's reviews.  His slant on them is different from mine and well worth your reading and pondering.

So if this topic is of interest to you, I urge you to buy a copy of the April/May double issue of Asimov's as soon as it hits the newsstands.  March 17th, I believe.


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Two Ways to Improve Your Book Reviews (Part 1)

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A week or so late, I discovered Neil Gaiman's New York Times review of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant.  And was particularly struck by the grace of Neil's opening paragraph...

Fantasy is a tool of the storyteller. It is a way of talking about things that are not, and cannot be, literally true. It is a way of making our metaphors concrete, and it shades into myth in one direction, allegory in another. Once, many years ago, a French translator decided that my novel “Stardust” was an allegory, based on and around John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (it wasn’t), and somewhat loosely translated the book with footnotes to that effect. This has left me a little shy of talking about allegory, and very shy of ever mentioning “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

... and so I decided to share with you two simple techniques that will make your book reviews (assuming you do review books) significantly better.

The first, as illustrated above, is to bring something into the discussion from the world outside the book in question.  In Gaiman's case, it's a personal anecdote, but it could be almost anything -- an interesting fact about Linnaeus's grave, the nesting habits of the halcyon, a better technique for opening walnuts -- provided only that it is pertinent to the book under discussion.  

Why bother?  Because it opens out the realm of discourse beyond that of a judgmental reader confronting a book full of static words to show how the work in discussion is actually in dialogue with the entire universe.  A book is, to the extent of its author's talent, a living thing and sometimes even a magical one.  Rather than tying it to a chair and interrogating it in hopes it will give up its meaning, you should make the encounter one between the book, the reader, and the world.

You don't have time to do this thoroughly, of course.  But if you drop a hint, the reader will follow.

You can read the review here.


Next:  The second technique.


Above:  The very cool illo is by Peter Sis, author and artist.  You can find his web page here.

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Speculations K.C. -- the Kansas City Worldcon Anthology

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Is this the future of science fiction anthologies?  It's certainly a future.  I'll be fascinated to see if kickstarted books remain viable into the foreseeable future, or if they're a bit of a fad.  One thing is clear, though.  You need to know what you're doing.

Editor Bryan Thomas Schmidt seems to know what he's doing.  He's assembling Speculations K. C.,  an anthology of science fiction stories both new and reprint (spoiler: mine will be a reprint -- but a good one!) by science fiction writers either associated with Kansas City or with next year's Worldcon, MidAmeriCon II.  Where (ahem) I'll be a guest of honor.

Personally, I think it would be a great book to bring to MAC II for autographs.  Particularly if you snagged more than your friends did.  Not that I'm suggesting you make a cutthroat game of it.

You can find the Kickstarter campaign, decide whether you want to support it, snag yourself an early copy here.


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The Collected Poetry of Michael Swanwick

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As always, I'm on the road again.  And my iPad is dying.  So I shan't even try to come up with an illo for this post.

Over on Facebook, the other day, my friend Mario posted a picture of a nudibranch and the first several comments scanned, so I tied them together into a piece of doggerel.

"Marianne should collect your poetry," Mario wrote.

"There's an idea," Marianne responded.

"No, there isn't," I typed sternly.

So, as a preemptive move, I am publishing here the complete contents of my poetic oeuvre.  To whit:

Why should I buy comparative
And thus pay twice the price,
When the simple and declarative
Quite amply will suffice?

I will not buy a porringer
When all I need's a porring.
Now will I spring for oranger
When all I need's an orange.

That's my contribution to world poesy:  a rhyme for orange.  A small accomplisment, but mine own.

And so I retired from the lists undefeated.

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Janet Kagan's Song

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The death of a certain actor recently, got me thinking about Star Trek , and whenever I think of Star Trek and death, I think of Janet Kagan, who died far too young.

Janet's second novel written but first published was Uhura's Song , a Trek tie-in and one that was particularly popular, in part because it gave agency to a character everyone liked the but show's scripts slighted and in part because Janet's fiction connected with people.  Her first novel, Hellspark, followed soon after, part of a two-book deal.  (The story was that the publisher wasn't taking first novels and so her editor offered her the Trek contract in order to get around that restriction.  Maybe so.  It's also possible that the editor was desperate for good writers to do the tie-ins at a time when -- believe it or not -- they were hard to get.)  It was extremely popular.

Those were her only novels, unless you count Mirabile, a collection of stories set on the eponymous novel, all starring the same protagonist and all telling a single progressive story.  These stories were wildly popular.

One day, much to her amazement, her story "The Nutcracker Coup," won a Hugo.  Nobody else was amazed.  Her work was positive, upbeat, funny, and fun.  These were qualities she valued in fiction (Her favorite novel was James H. Schmitz's The Witches of Karres ), and so that's what she wrote.  This was not the dominant style at the time she wrote it, but she wrote what she loved.

So if there are any young writers out there wondering... that's how to win a Hugo.  Write the kind of fiction you want to read.

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Writing 501: Too Many Epiphanies

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The other day, I was chatting with a young writer who has her first novel coming out soon, and she said, "I was hoping you could tell me how to be a better writer."

"Yeah," I said, "I'm looking for that too."

Thinking back on this exchange, it occurred to me that almost all writing advice is written for as-yet-unpublished writers -- Writing 101, as it were.  But the rest of us could use a little help now and then too.  So I'm starting an occasional series, nothing elaborate, of Writing 501 advice.

Today's nugget comes from Charles Baxter, via an article by Alison Lurie in the New York Review of Books .  Here's Lurie's take on Baxter's take on the proliferation of epiphanies:

In a chapter called “Against Epiphanies,” for instance, Baxter discusses what a student I used to know called “stupid little realization stories.” Once upon a time, he says, as in Joyce’s “Araby,” the sudden rush of knowledge and/or self-knowledge was new, surprising, and effective. Now, however, “Everyone is having insights…. Everywhere there is a glut of epiphanies…. But…there is a smell about them of recently molded plastic.” One problem is that these insights tend to “depend on an assumption that the surface is false.” There is also often an implication that characters in a story who do not have these insights are morally or intellectually inferior. “Now that the production of epiphanies has become a business, the unenlightened are treated with sad pity, and with the little grace notes of contempt.”

 As I read this, an authentic story climaxing with an epiphany is still possible.  But the epiphany must be real, hard-won.  Too often, the epiphany is employed as a device, slapped onto the end of the story as a way of getting the writer out of it, or of giving a sugar-surge of energy to a plot that simply hasn't earned it.
In any case, it's well worth thinking about.  Correctly applied, Baxter's observation will have the salubrious result of making your fiction significantly more difficult to write.  Which is to be desired, yes?

The NYRB article is behind a paywall.  But you can read the Boston Globe review of Baxter's new collection of short fiction here.

Above:  Charles Baxter himself, from the Boston Globe review.  Joyce's "Araby," incidentally, is a terrific story.  Any writer who hasn't read Dubliners yet really should.
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