Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 163

My Worldcon Diary

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I'm back from the road.  And I've got to admit that I had a pretty nice time at the Worldcon.

Highlights included:

Meeting  Vivian and Yang Feng, (left and right above) from Science Fiction World , the Chinese magazine and publishing house in Chengdu, China.  They were both the kind of people you take an instant liking to, and reminded me how much I like China, Chengdu, Science Fiction World , and all the folks I met on my visit there.  I value my association with SFW and hope it can be extended into the future.

Hanging out with Pat Cadigan, one of the two greatest science fiction writers ever born in Schenectady, New York.  She won a Hugo, by the way.  That was typical of her.

Having a ray gun shootout with George R. R. Martin.  I won.  Though I suspect he'd disagree.

Drinking and arguing and talking trash and literature with Eileen Gunn and Gary K. Wolfe. Every convention, there's someone you keep running into and into and into, without intending to.  This con, it was Eileen and Gary.  Though my very good friends Ellen Datlow and James Patrick Kelly came close.

Short encounters with Howard Waldrop and Kim Stanley Robinson. 

The How to Write Short Fiction panel with James Patrick Kelly, Cat Rambo , and Vylar Kaftan.  This one worked brilliantly for two reasons: 1) It was a straight-up question-and-answer session.  Nothing but what the audience wanted to hear.  2)  Nobody showboated.  There was some polite disagreement, but we all simply did our best to give the best and most useful advice possible.  There is a consensus wisdom on how to write that comes from the collective experience of hundreds of writers and we simply passed along those parts of it which in our experience work.  For the rest of the convention, I had people coming up and telling me it was a great panel.

Meeting Mary Mohanraj, I think for the first time.  If I'm wrong about that, I plead convention amnesia.

Spending lots and lots of time with Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper.  I could've done that here in Philadelphia, but it just wouldn't have been the same.

Chatting with Arlan Andrews, founder of SIGMA , about his entrepreneurial experiences and his adventures in Saudi Arabia.

Skipping the Hugo Awards ceremony because, as Howard Waldrop put it, "I don't have a dog in that fight," and discovering that the hotel elevators were empty.  No lines!  I went to the SFWA Suite, where Gardner and Gordon Van Gelder were following the awards by virtual means and telling stories about the old days.  I joined them and discovered that I had become one of the Old Guys whom everyone listens to because we know the dirt and the lore and can pass it down.  I also discovered that I had somewhere along the line acquired the discretion to pass along only the non-scandalous stories.  Did I ever find myself saying, "So there he was, drunk, naked, and pushing a bed down the corridor when...?"  No, I did not.

Seeing friends, some all too briefly, I met in science fiction events in other countries.  Petra, I hope you enjoyed the George and Howard Panel I steered you toward.

And . . . well, heck.  I could go on like this forever.  I think back to my first few conventions, where I haunted the panels hoping against hope that somebody would slip and let fall the secret of how to actually be a writer, and how lonely they were because I didn't know anybody, and I have to admit that things have gotten a lot better.

So I was happy to have gone and now I'm happy to be home.  May all your travels be as happy.

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A Kind Man Departs

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By now you've heard that Frederik Pohl is dead.  I believe he's the last great writer of his generation to go, and I cannot help remembering the eulogy that the minister gave my father-in-law when he died, comparing him to one of the Cedars of Lebanon and saying, "Now he's fallen, and how different the horizon looks!"

Fred was a man of many substantive achievements -- as writer, as editor, and in many other roles as well.  But I won't talk about any of them here.  Instead, I think back to 1990 or 1991, when I won my first major award, the Theodore Sturgeon. 

It was a strange and alienating experience for me.  I flew from Philadelphia to Kansas City.  Pat Cadigan picked me up at the airport and drove me to whatever university the award symposium was held at.  It was tornado weather and I remember her saying, "If the sky turns green, I'll slam the car to the side and you jump in a ditch and pray!"  I was given a room in an empty dorm, where I was the only inhabitant that night.  The next day I found myself participating in several symposiums for which I was completely unprepared. 

At one point, I found myself alone with Fred.  "You look a little tense," he commented and I admitted that I was.  Then he said I forget what.  Nothing profound, I suspect.  Just a few kind words.  But they came at the right moment.  He put me at ease, and the rest of the weekend was a lot more pleasant for me.

The thing is that that was typical.  Whenever I spent any time with Fred, I noticed he was doing things for others . . . Trying to find a position for a stranded foreign academic. Giving a short impromptu speech in Roanoke, where he said the kind of upbeat nonsense that the mayor and the press were hoping for.  Giving advice to unpublished writers.  Dealing politely but firmly with recalcitrant publishers for SFWA.  Quietly making things better for others in ways that brought him nothing.

The last time I saw him was last year when I was in Chicago for Gene Wolfe's induction into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.  David Hartwell called me up to ask if I wanted to help them go through a few thousand of J. K. Klein's old photographs, looking for pictures he could use in a reissue or else update, I forget which, of his memoir, The Way the Future Wa s.

So I spent a few hours with David and Fred, sitting around the kitchen table, talking and sorting.  Fred was a lot weaker than he had been a couple of decades earlier, but his mind was as sharp as ever and his sense of humor was unchanged.  So I was happy.  And, I might add, the envy of all my friends afterward.

That's the last I saw of Fred and how I'll remember him:  Always doing, doing, doing, and oftentimes for the benefit of others, rather than himself.  He was a fine writer and his books are an important part of our history.  He was brilliant and he was hard-working.  But he was also very kind. 

Kindness may be the most important virtue.  Sometimes I think it's the rarest.  But Frederik Pohl had it in spades.

Goodbye, Fred.  Thanks for everything. 


You can read the Locus Online obituary here.


My apologies for not getting a blog post out yesterday.  I spent the day traveling and by the time I got home I was so exhausted I collapsed.  I'll do my bet not to let it happen again. 

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And As Always . . .

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I'm on the road again.  Early, early this morning I get on an airplane and fly to San Antonio, Texas, where I suspect I'll be too busy to visit the Alamo, despite the urgings of my friends to do so.

I'll just say I forgot.

In the meantime, here's my LoneStarCon 3 schedule.  If you're going to be there, be sure to say hi.


Friday
How to Sell to Ellen Datlow(Guest of Honor, Panel), Fri 20:00 - Fri 21:00

Panelists:Gardner DozoisEileen Gunn (M)Caroline SpectorMichael Swanwick
This one is astonishingly simple:  Write a really, really good story.  We should be able to wrap it up in five minutes.
Saturday
How to Write a Short Story (Industry, Panel), Sat 11:00 - Sat 12:00 Panelists:Kij JohnsonVylar Kaftan (M)James Patrick KellyCat RamboMichael Swanwick
This one, on the other hand, will take weeks to cover, even superficially.

Autographing   Sat 13:00 - Sat 14:00Michael Swanwick
I sit behind a table and shmooze while scribbling my name in books.
Reading), Sat 15:00 - Sat 16:00Michael Swanwick

I've almost got the story cut down to a reasonable length.  I'll probably finish the job on the plane.
The Leisure Society: Phantom or Just around the Corner? (Real World, Panel), Sat 19:00 - Sat 20:00,  Panelists:Fred Lerner (M)Mark OshiroMichael SwanwickShanna Swendson
Wow!  This really takes me back.  It's the kind of substantive speculative panel that used to be standard at conventions. 

Sunday
The Twain Shall Meet: Samuel Clemens and SF/F (Literature, Panel), Sun 11:00 - Sun 12:00, 006B Panelists:Gardner DozoisEileen Gunn (M)John PurcellMichael SwanwickTakayuki TatsumiWalter Jon Williams
Ol' Sam was a really, really good SF writer.   

Plucking Flowers in the Stranger Realms (Literature, Panel), Sun 14:00 - Sun 15:00 Panelists:Nancy Kress (M)Joe LansdaleMichael SwanwickJacob Weisman

This appears to be another panel in praise of Ellen Datlow.  Who certainly deserves it and more.

Kaffeeklatsch  Sun 16:00 - Sun 17:00, Riverview (Riverwalk)Michael Swanwick
Just hanging out and chewing the fat with fans.  The Riverwalk is a very nifty place indeed.  I almost said 'cool,' but given what the temperature is likely to be . . .

SIGMA in Action (Science, Panel), Sun 17:00 - Sun 18:00, 007A (160) (Convention Center)Panelists:Arlan Andrews (M)Charles E. GannonG. David NordleyMichael Swanwick
Did you know that Frederik Pohl used to do all kinds of speculative consulting for the U.S. government?  If he could, so can I.
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Silent On A Peak In Darien

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So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!  Today is the official publication date for Shadows of the New Sun , a festchrift in honor of Gene Wolfe.  (A festschrift for those who don't know -- and why should you? -- is a collection of writings in honor of a great personage.  Often, they're essays and reminiscences, but in this case they're all stories, mostly set in worlds of Gene's creation.)

I was thrilled to be in this book, particularly since my story, "The She-Wolf's Hidden Grin," was written as a homage to "The Fifth Head of Cerberus."  Which was an extremely important story to me.  It opened up great vistas of literary possibility.  When first I read it, I felt like:

. . . stout Cortez when with eagle eyesAnd never mind that it was Balboa who actually saw the Pacific.  That sense of awe was the same.

What I did with my story was to take Gene's and run a series of reversals on it.  The two brothers become sisters, west becomes east, sunset turns to sunrise, and so on.  When you reverse something, of course, it does not turn into its opposite but into something like your image in the mirror -- very similar, subtly off, and if you examine it closely enough: disturbing.

In order to write my story, I had to examine Gene's original very closely.  I drew  maps, read critical essays, and ended up learning a great deal about writing.  Since there was only so much time, I wound up with a short story.  If there'd been time enough to write a novella the length of "Cerberus," I'd have learned even more.

Wolfe is still the master.

When I was done my story, I looked it over carefully.  It was a good one and even a strong one.  But I was not pleased with it.  At one point, the story achieves a gathering momentum as it moves headlong toward a devastating ending (that is not self-praise; merely a description of what I was working to achieve), and from that moment on the reader knows what is coming and that it cannot be stopped.

This is a good, solid technique for a story, mind you.  But I was sure the Wolfe would have done something more with it, had he been in my place.

So . . . WWGWD?  I added a final paragraph which reversed the reader's understanding of everything that came before.  And took a bleak ending and made it far, far bleaker.

You have no idea how satisfying that felt.


And as always . . .

I'm going to be on the road again.  This time, I'm off to San Antonio for the Worldcon.  If you see me there, be sure to say hi.

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Visiting the Teeds

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It's been a long time since I lived in Vermont.  But I like to return for a visit once every few years.  Usually by digging out a copy of Jeff Danziger's Teed Stories and ripping through them in an afternoon.

Jeff Danziger i s best known as a political cartoonist. One of the very best, for my money.  But he also used to draw extraordinary cartoons  about what it's like to be a Vermonter -- the contentious town meetings, the ambiguous social standing of the snowplow driver, the extraordinary things that fall from the mouths of foreigners from out-of-state.  Along the way, he started chronicling the Teed Family -- Ma, Pa, and their 26 year-old unpaid field hand and son, Hiram.  They're farmers on one of the least profitable farms in a state that has its share, but nobody can deny that they lead rich lives.  There are two collections of the Teed cartoons available and I hear the occasional rumor that they may still be appearing in Vermont newspapers.  Or maybe that's just wishful thinking.

Which brings us around to the single collection of prose tales, Teed Stories .  I'll let Danziger set the scene:

The Teed farm becomes more and more of an anachronism with each passing year.  With family farms dying all over the country or being plowed up for condominiums, the fact that the Teeds can even stay where they are is quite amazing.  But Pa has worked out a system of not spending much money, a system made possible by not having much to spend.  The Teeds grow their own potatoes, raise their own chickens, make their own cheese and preserves, produce their own vegetables, and even keep a few turkeys around for the Thanksgiving trade.  Ma bakes her own bread and cookies, and Pa has been known to brew a little silly stuff to ward off the winter tremors.  The rest of the world has grown desperately interdependent, but not the Teeds.  They can't afford to.

These are a kind of story that has become almost extinct because, outside of genre magazines, there's next to no market for them:  Stories which exist simply to entertain -- to tell an amusing story, make you feel good, and then let you get on with your day.  Back before television came along, these would have been published in the slick magazines, backing up the latest from F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway and they would have found a national following.  The kind of folks who read this blog would likely have the collected tales among their books.  Now you have to have lived in Vermont to have heard of them.

The adventures are small -- William (that's Pa) Teed manages to keep his truck (originally a 1947 Ford) going one more year, pays his taxes, or removes yet one more unnecessary part from his tractor, bringing it another step closer to operating with perfect efficiency and no moving parts.  Ida (Ma), who is the apotheosis of the farm wife, bakes her famous meat loaf and maintains the harmony of the family.  And Hiram -- well, he's a young man so he probably does something or other when he's not working on the farm, but that's none of our business, really.

Mostly, these guys are just plain good company.  And Danziger is the right narrator for them: playful, just a touch ironic, and on the side of the angels.

Each story has a couple of illustrations.  I can't say that I've spent all that much time on farms, but I've been there just enough that they tug at my heart.  I've been down that muddy, rutty April road and inside that meticulously recorded sugar shack.  It makes me feel good to go back for a visit.

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Jehovah and the Critic

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A week ago Wednesday I wrote here about why I wouldn't make my negative opinions of work by living writers public.  Among the thoughtful responses was one by Anthony Panegyres, who wrote:

Hi Michael, I think that your thoughts would be invaluable for both writers who wish to improve their craft as well as readers who value your opinion. As you write not only in the spec-fic field but also about it too (and do it all extremely well) you shouldn't feel as though you're 'mocking' anybody when giving honest feedback - it's not a personal affront (although I do understand the emotional attachment issues, which you've alluded to). Readers seek educated opinions from writers they admire like yourself. Writers may also be thicker skinned than you think - many may want honest feedback so that they, in turn, can fine tune their work.

These are all intelligent statements.  And yet.  As a writer myself, and a friend of many writers, I can assure you it is an extremely rare thing for one of us to seek out negative judgments of our work in the hope that they might be useful. Unsolicited, they are even less welcome.  An unsolicited negative judgment from somebody we may happen to respect can be crushing.  As a group, we are not known for our rock-solid self-confidence.
It is hard to properly report the magnitude of the insecurity of writers.  But I know of an incident which can give you some idea.  It goes as follows:

There was a writer – I’ll withhold his name – who died and was transported to Heaven.  Finding himself standing before the throne of the Almighty, he fell to his knees in a rapture and cried: 

 “Lord!  I read your New Testament and it changed my life!  Everything I did was based on that book.  It was the best thing ever written – better, even than the Old Testament!” 

Then did the Lord God Jehovah start to his feet in a rage.  Thunder and lightning played about his face and the universe shook as he cried: 

“And what was wrongwith my first book?”

True story.  I knew the people involved.

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A Big Man Passes Through . . .

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True story.  I met Elmore Leonard once.  This was back in the Nineties, so I may be a little vague in the details.  But it really happened.

This was on a Sunday at New York Is Book Country, a big outdoor book fair in the Apple.  Editor David Hartwell was running a booth and invited me to come and sign.  There was another writer there when I showed up.  Terry Bisson, I think, or it might have been Paul Park.

"Get this," Hartwell said.  "Leonard Elmore is going to drop by."

Paul, or maybe Terry, said, "I've been hearing about it all morning."

We set to business signing books for people who'd never heard of us.   couple of hours passed.

Then Samuel R. Delany arrived.  "Sorry I'm late," he said.  "I had to take my cat to the vet for surgery."

"Was it sick?" somebody asked.

"Naw," I said.  "It's just a hobby."

"Elmore Leonard is going to drop by," Hartwell said.

"That's nice."

More hours passed.  The way these things normally do.  Then an ordinary-looking guy with a beard popped his head in the back of the booth.  It was Elmore Leonard.  He had his wife with him.  He was looking a little harassed.

"Look," he said to Hartwell.  "I've got this thing I've got to do.  I'll try to get back here sometime later."

"Hi," I said.

He looked at me.  Then he was gone.

"I think he changed my life," Terry, or maybe Paul, said.

"I feel like we're brothers now," I said.

Chip just smiled.

Yesterday I got news that Elmore Leonard was dead.  He was a hard-working man and a fine, fine writer.  One who left the world a little better for his being here.

Goodbye, Leonard.  It was a pleasure knowing you.

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Of Time and Faerie

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Recently, Devin wrote me:

Great fan of all the books of yours i've read (The Iron Dragon's Daughter, The Dragons of Babel, Bones of the Earth). My question is (and it will be a spoilery one for anyone who hasn't read the former two of those books): Where does TIDD fit into TDOB chronologically? I know it has to be about the same time because Jane meets Will during her bratty new money phase. The end of TIDD can't be after the end of TDOB because Will locked down all the dragons (unless the military found a way around it). Yet if Jane's breakout occurred during TDOB, you'd think it'd have made the news. After all, hundreds of people dying when a rogue dragon destroys a dorm then bombs a factory doesn't seem like the kind of thing Will or Alcyone wouldn't have heard of. Help a nerd out?


This is a tougher question than it looks.  To answer it, I have to go back to before J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy regularized fantasy.

And already, in the first paragraph, I've told an untruth.  It wasn't Tolkien who regularized fantasy but his imitators.  Today, we've got a pretty good idea of what a proper fantasy looks like -- bucolic countryside, worthy young hero, mysterious mentor, magical knickknacks, a coherent history, the whole nine yards.  That's because contemporary fantasy began with imitations of Tolkien.

I'm not sneering at the imitators, incidentally.  Today, the formula looks easy.  But it took a long, long time for people to figure out how to do it.  I tried to write imitation Tolkien myself, very sincerely, when I was a young writer, so I have a good idea how difficult a task that was.

There was an interregnum of several years between when Tolkien taught millions of people that they wanted to read fantasy novels and when the first successful imitators and then original-but-still-influenced-by-Tolkien novels appeared.  During that time, people like me read every work of fantasy they could find, and publishers obliged by rushing back into print all the classic fantasy they could get the rights to:  The Gormenghast trilogy, James Branch Cabell's satiric fantasies, Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist . . . oh, the list goes on and on.  During this period, ambitious editors -- Lin Carter in particular -- resurrected some really wonderful books (and a few clunkers) that collectively were as good as a college course on twentieth century fantasy.

I took that virtual course, and it shaped my ideas of what fantasy ought to be and what it might do.

Then the imitators and successors came along and now you have a pretty good notion of what to expect when you pick up a book with a dragon on the cover.  Sometimes this is good, and sometimes less so.  That's a topic for another day, to be written by somebody else.

One thing that was common in the great pre-Tolkien fantasies was for time to behave differently than it does in what we call "real life."  In The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany, Faerie is eternal and unchanging.  When a goblin escapes into our world, the normal ebb and flow of a farm and passing of a day is great miracle to him.  E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros ends with the world restored to the instant the book began -- so his battle-loving heroes could endlessly relive their defeats and victories.  The castle Gormenghast in Mervyn Peake's fantasies exists in a bubble of unchangingness somehow isolated from the rest of the world.

I could go on multiplying examples, but shan't.  The point is that fantasy allows a writer the extraordinary freedom to rewrite the rules of time and mortality.  In The Iron Dragon's Daughter, I took advantage of this freedom by putting Jane Alderberry through repeated Yeatsian gyres of time -- recurrent cycles of history that have the same shape but different details.  In The Dragons of Babel (and I don't think anybody has noticed this), I took liberties with the speed with which Will grows up.  And in a third volume I plan to write someday . . .

Well.  When I started TDoB, I wasn't even certain it occurred in the same world as TIDD.  I was careful not to have any characters, place names, or even gods that were common to both books.  Only the dragons were the same.  I figured either it was a different world or else the events occurred on a different continent from the first book.  Will starts out somewhere near Lyonesse,which places him in Europe, and travels to Babel, which (though it is clearly on some level New York City) is explicitly in Babylon in the Near East.

A certain fluidity of geography, as well as time, is inherent to both the traditional Faerie and my own.

Then, late in the writing, I decided that it did no harm for both books to be in the same world and might give some people pleasure, so I threw in Jane's cameo.  I knew that this was wreaking havoc with conventional continuity.  But then, I wasn't interested in conventional continuity.

(As an aside, I was wrong to think this was my decision to make.  The two books feel very similar and readers were going to assume they held a world in common whatever my opinions on the matter were.  But while you're writing a novel, you have complete authority over it and it's easy to forget that this authority ends upon publication.)

So the two novels are roughly contemporaneous.  The plots occur mostly in separate parts of the world.  And events that seem very large in the one are far away and unimportant in the other.  That's as rational as I can make their relationship to each other be.

But a rational timeline can no more be imposed upon Faerie than can a rational system of magic.  There is a fluidity not only of time and space but of rationale as well.  The rules of Faerie are not the laws of Mundania.  It is, to borrow Fletcher Pratt's and L. Sprague de Camp's title, The Land of Unreason.

Unlike Middle-earth, which Tolkien implicitly set in our own distant past, it is a land which can only exist in a work of fiction.

So that confusion you feel about how the two books fit together, that uneasy feeling that something isn't right, that things don't quite add up .  . . ?

Perfectly deliberate.

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My Apologies to Richard Nixon

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I don't talk politics in my blog for two reasons.  First, because there are plenty of people on the Innertubes willing to do that for me.  And second, because my political opinions are not very interesting.  But I don't suppose it will shock anybody if I mention that I think Richard Nixon was a terrible president.

Still, fair is fair.  In my research for the next novel, I discovered that I've been misquoting the man for decades.  As have so many of us when we cite his reaction to seeing the Great Wall as, "It is indeed a great wall."

I use that quote, in fact, as an epigram at the head of the penultimate chapter of my book.

Here, however was what he actually said :

I can only say to the media, who, like myself, have never seen the Great Wall before, that it exceeds all expectations. When one stands there and sees the Wall going to the peak of this mountain and realizes that it runs for hundreds of miles, as a matter of fact thousands of miles, over the mountains and through the valleys of this country, that it was built over 2,000 years ago, I think that you would have to conclude that this is a great wall and that it had to be built by a great people.

It turns out that the wonderful piece of absurdity I've been quoting so long was created by cutting a clause out of its context.  So, for my very small part in perpetuating that untruth, I hereby apologize.

But will I cut the quote from my novel?  No.  It's a work of fiction, and when writing fiction my primary loyalty is not to the truth but to the text.

You can read the entirety of Richard Nixon's remarks, if you wish, here.


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On My Refusal To Mock My Brothers And Sisters

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As always, I'm on the road.  You may credit all infelicities of formatting to the limitations of my ipod.

Recently, on Facebook, I grumbled about the limitations of a book I'd quit reading.  Immediately, people wanted to know the name of the author.

But I won't do that.

I understand why people wanted to know. There are many, many bad writers whose works are risibly (this may well be the first time in this century that word has appeared outside of a crossword puzzle) awful.  I read their books and I gnash my teeth.  So why won't I mock them out and publicly humiliate them?

Because they fall into two camps.

The first consists of those who hopefully put their work before the public eye and got no or little response.  If they have done anything wrong (and I am unconvinced they did), they have been punished well beyond their desert.  Some of them deserve far better.

The second consists of those who published and profited richly.  (You know -- or think you do -- who I'm talking about.). But what is their crime?  They wrote novels that tens of thousands of people loved so much that they were willing to spend their hard earned money on them.

There are people within one block of me who have done worse.

Meanwhile, there are many writers whose first allegiance is to the word, who never gave a thought to popularity, and who know their chances of ever earning a decent living wage are small. Should I be outraged on their behalf?

No.

It is a rare privilege to be able to say whatever one wants to say, to be heard, and to earn one's living by doing so.  Outside of the arts, how many people can claim as much?  Poverty is the chance they took and the price they paid.

These people are my kin -- my brothers and sisters.  We understand each other.

So, no, I won't name names.


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