Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 156

Waylines

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Pretty much out of nowhere, I got the following letter from Waylines , an online zine of speculative fiction:

Sorry to come out of left field like this, but I'm writing everyone I know to drum up some support for the Waylines Magazine's Year Two campaign. It has entered its last week and, unfortunately, we've got a long way to go. If you haven't heard of the magazine, Waylines is a pro-paying spec fiction magazine, and in our first year we published 14 stories. We're trying to fund Year Two via Kickstarter and are currently at 16% with 7 days left. So if you know anyone who might be interested (or might have some spare cash ) please tell them to check out the campaign on Kickstarter. 

So.  The rule of thumb here is that if you read Waylines and like it, you should kick in some money.  Otherwise . . . well, it'll just go away.

The same applies for all science fiction magazines, including the Big Three:  Asimov's, Analog, and F&SF.  If you like the kind of stuff they publish, you really ought to have a subscription.  Because otherwise . . . well, you've heard this before.

The Kickstarter campaign is here.

And the Waylines site is here.

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An Everyday Word.: Quotidian

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I am perhaps overfond of the word quotidian, which is derived from the Latin word for "daily." It means, simply enough, everyday or ordinary.  But it's such a lovely, glittery word that it makes the commonplace sound extraordinary.

As it is.

Above is a quotidian miracle, the like of which is witnessed every day by astronauts in the International Space Station.  Think of it the next time somebody tries to tell you that the space program is dead.

Enjoy.

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Sappho and Me

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Terrific news today.  Two previously unknown poems by Sappho have been discovered, one of them said to be virtually complete!  This is a big deal because almost none of the great poet's work survived into modern times.  We only know that Sappho was a great poet, in fact, because the ancients said so.

I have a collection assembled by Anne Carson titled If Not, Winter , assembling every word of Sappho that survives.  It begins with the famous "Hymn to Aphrodite" (also known as Fragment 1), which as of 2002 was the only complete poem, and then quickly turns fragmentary.  Fragment 32, for example, in its entirety, is:

who honored me
by giving their works

while 67B is:

]nor
]these
]
]more
]around
]
]desire

Maddening.  So I made my own small corrective in Dancing With Bears .  In it, Aubrey Darger, confidence artist extraordinaire has found Ivan the Terrible's library, which I imagined as being stuffed with every lost book of antiquity we most wish had survived.  Here, he is interrupted in his reading by a young colleague:

Darger picked up his book, adjusted the oil lamp, and said, “Listen to this:
                        “Summer will be ours, if you but say you love me,                         Night-hawks flitting under the stars                         And jasmine perfuming your skin.                         If not, winter.  And I –”
“I don’t see why I had to pay them so much.  They didn’t do nothing but put up a bunch of posters, and keep an eye out for the goats.  I did all the fucking work.”
With a sigh, Darger shut his book again.  “Admittedly, my paraphrase from Sappho’s impeccable Greek was a touch rough.  But you had the opportunity to hear a poem that was long believed to be lost forever, and you brushed it aside simply to whinge that your comrades weren’t pulling their weight.”


If only Darger hadn't been interrupted!  But let's be honest.  Even though I could fake up the poem-opening, constructed from the same fragment that gave Carson the title of her book, there was no way I could create even a rough English-language paraphrase of a great lost poem.

Still, for just an instant, there was a hint, a suggestion, a hopeful dream of something  I could never have brought into existence myself.  I'm rather proud of that.

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Even Better Than The Bagger 287

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Because your day needs to be more demented.  Everybody!  Let's sing:

Any person who gets in its way is soon to be de-meated
Beelzebub himself now fears the Bagger 288!

If you'd rather watch it on Youtube, click here.


Above:  Yes, Virginia, there really is a Bagger 288.  Every earth sciences textbook in the world has a picture of it somewhere.

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Me, Interviewed

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I've been interviewed by R. K. Troughton over at the Amazing Stories website.   The interview includes my explanation of how I came to create Darger and Surplus, why I decided to write science fiction, thumbnail sketches of Gardner Dozois, William Gibson, and Gene Wolfe, my plans for the Mongolian Wizard stories, how I plan to spend my old age, and much more.

Here's a snippet, from my discussion of the (rather dreadful) first story I ever wrote, something titled "The Theoretical Man" :

One amusing bit of trivia about that first story is that it contained the line, “The sky was a cathode-tube grey.” As a result, though I greatly admire everything else William Gibson has ever published, I was never very impressed by the famous first line of Neuromancer, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” It sounded too much like something I’d written.

You can read the interview here.  Or just go to the Amazing Stories site here and poke around.  There's lots of good stuff there, including a  recent interview with Michael Moorcock that makes me feel like a slacker.


Above:  That's me.  With a koala.  Author photos are pretty dreary things, really.  But there's a koala for you to look at, so that's okay.


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Heinlein Concluded

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I'll have to confess that the only time I ever encountered Robert A. Heinlein -- I stood in line to get his autograph for a friend -- I wasn't greatly impressed.  Oh, I acknowledged his importance to science fiction and the virtue of most of his books.  But he held himself like a man who was posing for his own statue.  And his guest of honor speech at MidAmeriCon (the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention) was rambling, seemingly made up on the spot from whatever thoughts chanced to enter his head, and climaxed with the observation that "We will always have wars," presented as being something we should all be grateful for.

Not an easy guy to like.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I read the first volume of William H. Patterson Jr.'s biography of the man and found myself favorably revising my opinion of Heinlein.  He seems to have deliberately pruned the documentation of his life to make himself out to be the kind of cardboard hero that was presented for emulation in biographies aimed at boys, back when he was young.  But wherever a glimpse survived of the real man, he was a much more attractive fellow.  He was generous to friends.  He put up with the young Ray Bradbury (who was apparently a very disruptive presence) because he thought the lad had potential.  Most endearingly, early in his career he let down his guard and wrote to a friend demanding to know why John W. Campbell wouldn't simply tell him what sort of story he wanted, so Heinlein could simply write it for him.

Most new writers have been there.  We can all feel his pain.

In yesterday's mail I received an Advanced Reading Copy of Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue With His Century: Volume 2, 1948-1988: The Man Who Learned Better.  There was a rumor circulating among often-reliable people that the biography had ballooned to three volumes, so it's a relief to discover that this is the concluding volume.  Writers, musicians, and other artists are most interesting when they're struggling to find their voices and make their names.  Success is, to use the technical term, far less "plotty."  So I'm glad the chronicles of Heinlein's success can be contained in a single book.

Volume 2 opens with Heinlein's early struggles almost at an end.  He's selling to the Saturday Evening Post , his work is in high demand, and he's knee-deep in the creation of George Pal's science fiction movie  Destination Moon .  All he needs is for a few of the checks to actually arrive and the hardscrabble phase of his career will be over.

That's as far as I've gotten, but it's really all you need to know.  Either you're going to buy this book or you're not.  You know in which camp you lie.

Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue With His Century: Volume 2, 1948-1988: The Man Who Learned Better (which has to be in the running for longest title of the year) will be published in June by Tor Books


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Mea Culpa?

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Recently I received an angry email from one "jac," reading:

What do you think an introduction is for? I just started reading an interesting-looking collection of short stories by James tiptree Jr. As usual, I began at the very beginning, with the introduction, where Mr Swanwick proceeded to list the plot twists of the stories I was about to read. Why would anyone do that? A deliberate attempt to screw with me, the reader? A regrettable ignorance of the concept of a postscript, where you could safely discuss the book under the assumption the reader had finished it? Mistaken confidence that nobody would ever read his introduction anyway?
thanks, buddy. Way to go.

My first, unworthy reaction was to think "You were reading Tiptree for the plot twists?  Go back to O. Henry."

But that was, as I said, unworthy.  People read as they read and it's not my part to police them.

Did I really give away the plots?  I took a look at the intro (to Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, incidentally) and I don't think so.  I was certainly trying not to.  As an example, here's what I said about the first story, "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain":

So, no.  My conscience is clean.

But let's say I'm wrong and that my introduction gives away everything about the stories.  Then the worst I can be accused of is spoiling one story. 

The rest were spoiled by the reader when he continued reading after the first set of spoilers.


And as always . . .

I'm on the road again.  But I'll be back here Monday.

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[dream diary]

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January 23, 2014:  In the middle of a varied but mostly uninteresting dream -- though I did like the enormous bin full of life-sized tin R2-D2 toys, no two identical -- I uncorked a bottle of wine and it smelled terrible.  The tiniest of sips verified that it had gone bad.

This was interesting because I vividly remember both the smell and the taste.  Thus putting the lie to James Branch Cabell's belief that, short of white magic or drugs, nobody had ever experienced either taste or scent in a dream.

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A Few Words About the Most Wonderful Writer in the World

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R. A. Lafferty is back in print!  This is extremely good news because Lafferty was the single most original writer in science fiction.  He wasn't the smartest -- that crown would go to either Gene Wolfe or Samuel R. Delany.  Nor necessarily the "best" -- to Wolfe and Delany, here add Le Guin and Russ and maybe five or six others as contenders for that honor.  But he wrote stuff unlike anything anybody else ever wrote or will ever write again.  And he had ideas so brilliantly off the wall as to make the rest of us go, "Where the [bleep] did that come from?"

His best work was genuinely wonderful, in the old, unspoiled sense of that word.

Now Centipede Press is bringing out the complete short fiction of R. A. Lafferty, edited by John Pelan.  Volume 1, which arrived in the mail today, is The Man Who Made Models.  It contains seventeen stories, some of them among his best (mention "Narrow Valley" to someone who knows it and watch him or her smile), an afterword by Pelan and an introduction by, well, not to be coy about it, me.

The intro,  "Eight Words from the Most Wonderful Writer in the World"  sets down in print everything that I know about Lafferty.  It was a pain to write.  And I was thrilled to have the opportunity to offer up my suffering to God.

That's the good news.  The regrettable news is that the book is being issued in a limited edition of 300 and costs sixty dollars.  It's worth it, mind you!  And there should easily be three hundred people willing to shell out the money for it.  But you're not likely to be in a position to buy six or seven extra to give friends.  And I suspect that it's going to sell through fast.

I also suspect that this series is going to cost me a bundle by the time it's complete.

But, really, that's good news too.

You can find the table of contents (and buy a copy, if you wish) here.


And if you're unfamiliar with Lafferty . . .

The single best place to start is with a paperback short fiction collection called Nine Hundred Grandmothers .   Strange Doings and Does Anyone Else Have Something Further To Add? are almost as good.  And then you're on your own!  A word of caution, however:  While some of his novels are among my favorites, others are a strange sort of religious allegory that are definitely not to everybody's taste.  Luckily, most of those are small press publications and difficult to find.  Though I believe I have pretty damn near all of 'em.
 
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Under Ben Bulben

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I am home again and, as usual after such trips, weary as weary can be.  In such a mood, I tend to find myself reminiscing about past trips and today is no different.  My thoughts are filled with the journey Marianne and I made to Ireland in 1982.  All of Ireland is wonderful but the West was particularly so and many of of my best memories of that beautiful land arose there.

One cannot be of a literary bent and visit the West without going to Thoor Ballylee, the Norman keep that William Butler Yeats and his wife George rehabbed and made their home.  We did and then, later the same day I believe, looked up Yeats' grave in Drumcliff.  That's it pictured above.  The inscription came from the final lines of the final section of Yeats' poem "Under Ben Bulben."  The relevant lines of which are:

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

The grave was small and simple.  There are many far grander in the same little cemetery.   There were no flowers laid upon it.  But -- such is the power of words! -- I was profoundly moved by it.  I lowered my head and closed my eyes and recited the epitaph from memory.

Then I stole a flower from another grave and laid it upon the Yeats's.  Poets must have their due.


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