Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 154

Geek Highways: Almost Ready

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The Geek Highways expedition is only two days away!  And already, Miss Helen Hope Mrrrlees has figured out that something is up.  So she's occupying the suitcase and glaring at us in disapproval.

Cats are so conservative.


And . . .

Today's blog is just a place-holder to let you know that Friday's will be put up sometime in the afternoon.

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Geek Highways: Organizing the Electronics

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Marianne and I assembled all the electronic devices we plan to bring along on the Geek Highways expedition.  On the one hand, rather a lot.  On the other, fewer than I expected we'd take.

In my old age, I confidently expect to have the following conversation:

Young Person:  Why did you take so much stuff with you?

Old Me:  Well, we planned to take lots of pictures, maybe a movie or three, read some ebooks...

Young Person:  Why didn't you just use your iRing for all that?

YP has a good point, I'll confess.  Why does the future always take so long to get here?

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Geek Highways: Starting to Pack

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Saturday is coming!  So Marianne and I went through the go bag yesterday to make sure we had everything.  The go bag is kept by the back door, ready to be slung into the car on a minute's notice and contains everything you might suddenly discover you need when you're at a Motel 6 in the middle of nowhere.  A corkscrew, for example, a flashlight, or an adequate set of eating utensils.

The absolute most essential?  Spices.  You'd be amazed how a little hot sauce can perk up a boring motel breakfast.

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Geek Highways

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I'm hitting the road again, off on the Geek American Road Trip.  Saturday morning I set out on a two week road trip from Philadelphia to Boston -- and it will be a close thing if I can make it in that time.

Why?  Because I am a writer of science fiction and fantasy and I am looking for my roots.  I'll be searching out sites of  both literary and scientific significance.  And I'll be not only blogging about it but tweeting as well.

Those who wish to follow our adventure (Marianne is coming along as my camerawoman and tech crew) can do so by following @michaelswanwick on Twitter.  Or look for #geekhighways.  I'll also be posting here pretty much every day.

This will, I hope, be very cool.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.

And keep watching the skies.


 Above:  Okay, there are no roads like that between Philadelphia and Boston.  This shot was taken in Nevada.  But a road is a road is a road, as Aunt Gertrude would have put it.  That sense of limitless possibility is everywhere.

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The Wind Rises

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I went to see Hayao Miyazaki's new film, The Wind Rises, the other day.  It's important to rush out and see a new Studio Ghibli film as fast as possible because the distributor (Disney) never gives it much of a push or very long in the theaters.

And this is definitely a film worth seeing on the big screen.  My heart belongs to fantasy, so my favorite animated film is still Spirited Away, followed by Princess Mononoke.  But as animation, this may be better than either.  Nobody knows better how a red tin roof or wind in the grass or a dingy, poorly lit hallway should look than Miyazaki.  He is unsurpassed in his portrayal of everyday beauty.  And some of the crowd scenes are probably as detailed and varied in activities shown as anything that's ever been done in the medium.  Put this together with From Up on Poppy Hill , and you've got a great social (though not political) history of Japan for half of the past century.

There's been some controversy because The Wind Rises is a biopic, albeit one with a pacifist message, of Jiro Horikoshi, the chief designer of the Zero, a warplane that killed many Americans in WWII.  But since I have nothing original to say about that, I'll skip over it and go straight to what struck me most strongly:

As portrayed in the movie, Jiro Horikoshi was a talented young man with a strong imagination, in love with flying machines and particularly horrified by war and carpet bombing.  He is more observant and creative than those around him, achieves early and sustained success, and works with a large group of other talented individuals in order to create something extraordinary.  Thosehe works with are perfectly capable of creating a good product.  But with him at the helm, the end result is invariably better than it would be without him.

Which is to say that The Wind Rises is a Mayazaki's hidden autobiography.

I recommend it.  But then, I recommend pretty much everything the man has created.

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Five Seasons (Winterthaw)

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I was in a consignment shop the other day and bought a cheap frame suitable for holding five small pictures.  I figured I could write five short-shorts for it, just as soon as I found a theme. Almost immediately, I thought, "Five Seasons," and shortly after that, I asked Marianne how the year could best be divided into five.

Together, we came up with Winterthaw, Greengrowth, Summerdeep, Autumnbright, and Darkwinter.  Then, when I got home, I wrote five closely related (but amoral, alas, quite amoral indeed) works of flash fiction.  A little fussing with the word processing program, and all was done.

Here's the first season:


Winterthaw


I crave thy pardon, mistress, that I did try to eat thee.  It were the Darkwinter, when we all do what we must to survive.  I understand why thou dost flinch from my touch.


Still.  Didst thou not kill thy sister, who did love thee, when the foodstuffs ran low?  Not that I disapprove.  It were the right thing to do, God wot.  Hunger knows no morals.  I did the same with my father, poor soul.


Those dire times are behind us.  The snows are melting at last.  We can scrabble in the mud for last year’s roots, and perhaps a small rodent or three.  We keep our knives sharp and close to hand, of course, because we each know what the other is capable of.


Now the ice turns back into pond water.  The air is warm.  Desperation falls a day, a second day, a third into the past.  Now at last – though I grip my blade as firmly as thou dost thine – I am free to say . . .


I do love thee.
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Our First Third Of A Century

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Saturday, Marianne and I reached a milestone in our lives -- thirty-three years and four months of marriage.  We have now been man and wife for over a third of a century

We had been thinking of having a large party.  But because Marianne's mother died in January (at age 103, so it didn't come as a surprise) and Marianne's still in mourning, we had a smaller gathering of close friends whom we've known for many decades.

In keeping with the low-key nature of the celebration, I commissioned something simple to give my beloved:  A silver coin cut into a one-third piece and a two-thirds piece.  Why a coin?  Well, in The Iron Dragon's Daughter, there's this explanation by Jane's one true love:

“… you know how if you take a coin and break it in a vise and throw half in the ocean and keep the other in a dresser drawer, they'll yearn after each other? One day you're taking out a pair of socks and you knock the drawer-half onto the floor without noticing. Somebody kicks it toward the door. A week later, it's half a block away. And the other half meanwhile, a fish swallows it and is caught and gutted and the entrails thrown into the trash, half-coin and all. So that maybe a couple of months later, it might take a century, you'll find the two lying in the sand at the verge of some nothing-special stretch of country road, nestled together. 

"That's kind of how I think we are."

I was thinking of Marianne when I wrote that, and it still seems true to me today.


And since you're wondering . . .

The coin was cut by master jeweler Janet Kofoed.  Her usual work is much more extraordinary (and, for what it is, scandalously underpriced) and can be seen here.


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Random Annotations: The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O

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It's a quiet Friday and I have no news.  So I thought I'd begin an occasional series called Random Annotations , comments about aspects of my own fiction.  Here's the first:

The last paragraph of "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O" contains two elements worth noting.  The paragraph, in its entirety, is as follows:

He kick-started the Harley and with a roar they pulled out into traffic.  Crow cranked up the engine and popped a wheelie.  Off they sped, down the road that leads everywhere and nowhere, to the past and the future, Tokyo and Short Pump, infinity and the corner store, with Annie laughing and unafraid, and Crow flying the black flag of himself.

Short Pump:  A small town outside of Richmond, Virginia.  When I lived in Seven Pines, not far away, it was an easy joke, the ultimate small town.  Since, alas, it has grown considerably.

. . . and Crow flying the black flag of himself:  This is the only line in my entire body of work which exists in two forms, one written and the other oral.  When I do a reading of the story, the word Crow is repeated three times: ". . .  and Crow, Crow, Crow flying the black flag of himself."  Why?  Try reading it out loud.


Above:  I saw this road in rural Maryland a few days ago.  Annie and Crow are archetypes, of course, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that they cast shadows and echoes throughout reality.


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Elephants and Icebergs

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Monday I gave a lecture at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.  Are you terrified yet?

Before you make a run for the Canadian border, I should clarify that.  I was lecturing Herbert Gilliland's science fiction writing class, which he titled How to Sell to Analog.  As I have indeed on various occasions sold to Analog (a friend told me that Stan Schmidt once said to him, "I've just bought a story from Michael Swanwick -- and it contains real science!"), I was qualified to be there.

The French have a useful expression, l'esprit d'escalier, which translates as "staircase wit," which is what happens when you think of the clever thing you shoulda said on the way out of the party, when it's too late to say it.  Inevitably, I've thought of something I should have said then but didn't.  So I thought I'd share it with you here.

One midshipman asked me a question about the use of science in the story.  My answer was solid.  But I should also have said that a great deal of science fiction is knowing the science but explicating it as little as possible.

The example I like to use is that if you're writing a story about elephants, you must know that it is physically impossible for an elephant to lift all four legs off the ground at the same time.  You should not have one character turn to another and say, "As you know, Raj, an elephant can never..."  But you need to know this fact because when you write that exciting scene in which your elephant is being chased by timber wolves, the moment it leaps effortlessly over a ravine, you're going to lose every elephant lover in your audience.

So, any gonna-be writers reading this take note:  Get your science right.  Explain only as much as the reader needs to know to get the story.  Research is like an iceberg -- nine-tenths of it goes unseen.

Oh, and if any of your writing buddies are midshipme n, be sure to pass this along.


Above:  Yes, they have bespoke Coke machines at the Academy.  I have no idea if the franchise is lucrative enough to justify the cost of the graphics or if it's just that somebody in the graphics department was feeling patriotic


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Movie Legos

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At the urging of my son, I went to see The Lego Movie yesterday.  And it was, yes, both witty and entertaining.  I do not regret going to see it.
But it was also . . . How shall I put this? . . . absolutely predictable.
Did anybody doubt for an instant that Emmet would get the girl?  That just before the good guys could save the day, they'd all be captured and it would look like the bad guys had triumphed?  That the villain would be reformed?  That father and son would be reconciled?
Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  As if you needed it.
I have no complaint about the movie.  The small children for whom it was made clearly loved it.  And that's good.  What grinches me is that every big-budget movie these days seems to be constructed on the same grid, with the same plot twists.  It's as if they were all given a huge tub of Movie Lego pieces and told, "Go to it!"
You can make all kinds of things with Legos.  But you can't make a working cyclotron.  Or a human liver.  Or a suit that you'd care to wear.  And with Movie Legos, you may be able to make many admirable entertainments.  But you couldn't make a Casablanca, a Citizen Kane, a Vertigo.  
I may have to swear off big budget movies for a while.

And as always . . .
I'm on the road again.  See you when I get back!

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