Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 186

Lord Dunsany's Lost Tales

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Once again, my mailbox is my friend.  I've just received Lost Tales Vol 1, a chapbook containing ten works of previously unreprinted prose fiction by Lord Dunsany.  Here's how the Pegana Press ("dedicated," as it says, "to printing deluxe limited editions using traditional letterpress equipment and materials by hand"). website describes it:

 Previously uncollected tales from 1909 to 1915. Introduction by Michael Swanwick. Fine letterpress edition in chapbook format, hand sewn with two color Irish linen thread and printed on german paper using Goudy types and ornamentation. These 10 stories were retrieved from their original magazine printing and are now published together for the first time with the approval of Lady Dunsany and the Estate. None of these stories have been reprinted since their magazine appearance. Limited to 128 hand numbered copies; 30 pp.

Which is to say, it's not for people who like to read in the bathtub and let their cats make nests of books under the bed.  And at seventy-five dollars a pop it's nothing I could normally justify buying.  But, as you'll note, I wrote the introduction and so . . .

The table of contents is:

ROMANCE
THE HEART OF EARTH
THE ERMAN SPY
EXCHANGE NO ROBBERY
THE WAY OF THE WORLD
THE LITTLE DOIGS OF DEMOS
THE RETURN OF IBRAHIM
HOW CARE WOULD HAVE DEALTH WITH THE NOMADS
OUR LAURELS
THE EIGHT WISHES

It's a lovely chapbook and printer-publisher Mike Tortorello is to be commended for creating it.  Serious collectors can find the ordering information here.

And, sadly . . .

Phyllis Diller died the other day.  She was a very smart woman who knew more than her share of pain.  In one of her books she had the best possible advice on how to clean a casserole dish that has that baked-in almost impossible to eradicate grunge on it -- bake a casserole in it, give it to a neighbor, and wait for them to return it clean.

Diller also did something that any one of us who ever wondered about whether Coca-Cola really rots your teeth or not should have done but didn't.  When she had a tooth extracted, she took it home and dropped it in a bottle of Coke which she then sealed and placed in her refrigerator.  A month later she took it out and guess what?  The tooth was unchanged.

So she wasn't just a comedian who made fun of her own looks and life as a suburban housewife.  She had a first-rate mind.  We are poorer for her absence.

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Michael Andre-Driussi Strikes Again

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See what I have!  I am now the envy of every admirer of Gene Wolfe who happens to be of a scholarly bent. 

Michael Andre-Driussi is the author of Lexicon Urthus and The Wizard Knight Companion , both of which are indispensable reference works for the serious Wolfean or Wolfeist or Werwolfe or whatever the heck you'd call those of us who enjoy delving deep into the master's works.  To this select company we may now add Gate of Horn, Book of Silk: A Guide to Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun . 

This is the easiest possible book to review because if you need it, you know that you do and you've probably just now returned to this post all in a sweat to find out why you can't find it on any of the online booksellers.

That's because it's not scheduled to be published until sometime in, um, October I believe.  Here, though, just to give you a taste, is a single entry from the Long Sun half:

Xiphias, Master   "a one-legged fencing teacher" (III, list); "silk's self-appointed bodyguard" (IV, list).  Auk introduces Silk to Master Xiphias as a new student (I, chap. 13. 324).  Having lost a leg to treatchery, Xiphias now has a removable prosthetic made up of pieces from five others.  (See NUMEROLOGY.)  He thinks Silk is left-handed and has studied under another sword master.  (On the other hand, Silk's right arm has been injured in his night at Blood's mansion, which might cast doubt upon Xiphias's professional opinion in spotting a wound, or the behavior compensating for a wound, as well as gauging sword-fighting ability.)
     During the revolution of Viron, Xiphias participates in the battle of Cage Street and kills five troopers (III, chap. 6, 229).
Zoology: a genus of fishes comprising the common swordfish.

and, what the heck:

yataghan   one of Xiphias's swords (III, chap. 6, 232).  A type of Turkish sword used from the mid-16th through the late 19th centuries.  The single-edge blade, measuring 60 to 80 cm (24 to 32 inches), curves forward like the Iberian flacata or the Greek kopis.

In a better world people like Andre-Driussi would create books like this, uncommercial though they may be, simply because they ought to exist.  The fact that he and they nevertheless exist in our own, fallen universe is inexplicable.  Divine intervention may well be involved.

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The Treasurer's Report

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At a convention recently, a writer who entered the field at about the same time I did and who probably wouldn't appreciate being quoted in this context, observed that one of the advantages of growing old is that you know a lot of things younger people don't.  He was talking about things known simply because he was there at the time. But it strikes me that it equally applies to pop culture.

For example, how many young people nowadays know that the humorist Robert Benchley also starred in many movie shorts of  his own devising?  For that matter, how many young people have ever heard of Robert Benchley at all?  When I was a kid, they taught his essays in school.

Anyway, above is Benchley's best-known movie short, "The Treasurer's Report."

Enjoy!

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The Fire Gown

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Great news for those who happen to be me!   The Fire Gown is up on Tor.com.  This is the second of the Mongolian Wizard stories and the first which finds Ritter working for Sir Toby.  I am of course prejudiced, but I like these guys a lot and I'm delighted with how this story came out.  But then, like most writers, I write stories which I want to read and which, inexplicably, nobody else is writing.  So I am extremely happy.

Also, the good folks at Tor once again commissioned an illustration from Gregory Manchess.  That's it up above.  Beautiful stuff, eh?  I've expressed my delight with Manchess's work before.  So I'll content myself with observing that it's the kind of artwork that, deep down, a writer thinks he or she deserves.

You can read the story here.

And as always . . .

I'm been home from Newfoundland for most of a week and so, inevitably, I'm on the road again.  But I'll do my damndest to have a new post up tomorrow morning.

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Harry Harrison

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Harry Harrison died earlier today at age 87.  I never met the man and only exchanged a few brief notes with him, but he was a vivid writer and a lively presence in the science fiction world.  We are much poorer for his loss.

And I'll go to my grave knowing that I still owe that drink I promised him.  Rest in peace, Harry.

You can read Christopher Priest's excellent memorial in the Guardian here.

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Back in the Saddle Again

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I'm in print again!  It's a funny thing about the writing biz that because books come into print a good year after you write them, the times when you're busiest the public bookshelves are emptiest.  Conversely, when the racks are filled with new work, you're probably at your least productive.  So however it looks like you're doing is usually exactly wrong.

Thank God, then, for reprints.  They help keep the world aware of your existence when you're working the hardest.  As I am, on two novels and God only know many short stories.

Two paperbacks came in the mail today.  One, shown above, is Other Worlds Than These , edited by the exemplary John Joseph Adams.  It's a whacking big fat trade paperback (technically known in the industry as a "bug-crusher") collection of parallel world and portal fantasy stories.  Which contains my own "An Empty House With Many Doors," one of a select sub-set of my stories which can be read as love letters to Marianne.

Also in the mail is David G. Harwell's and Kathryn Cramer's annual Year's Best SF 17 .  This has my own "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again."  It's a far more intensely personal story than you'd guess from reading it.  I saw Gerry Adams just as the story describes, found the holy well in the Burren, and hoisted a pint in the Fiddler's Elbow.  That was my grandfather Michael O'Brien, after whom I was named, who dies on the first page. 

Literally and figuratively both, I have lain down on the Stone of Loneliness.

When a writer unpacks one of his stories to high school students, as I've done in my time, they find it hard to believe that so many things can have gone into what they see as a simple diversion.  So  much emotion, so many facts, so much autobiography.  To their doubting but honest young faces, I reply, "You don't know the half of it."

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Kill Your Darlings

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I've got another mini writing lesson today, this time about cutting excessive description.  But because using bad amateur prose for an example is like tasering fish in a barrel, I'm going to use a paragraph from an Isak Dinesen story.  Then, because all prescriptive writing advice is inherently flawed, I'm going to critique my own critique.

Got that?  Let's go.

The Critique
Here's the first part of a paragraph of "The Fish":

They rode through the forest.  In the dripping-wet woods, the young leaves were still soft and slack, silky, less like leaves than like petals, and drooping in the sweet forest-air like seaweeds in deep water.  Under the tree-crowns the forest-road was filled with translucent clarity, and with the live, bitter fragrance of fresh foliage and flowers of maple trees and poplars.  In the fine drizzling rain the birds sang on all sides; the stockdove was cooing in the high branches as they rode beneath them.

So what's wrong with this?  Everything except the first sentence.  It's vague, clogged with adjectives, hyphenated to a fare-thee-well, leans heavily on cliches and after a while the words all run together in a sodden mass of generic description.
I'm sure a great deal of work went into this block of prose.  But at this point adding more work will not improve it.  Everything (except that first sentence) must be torn out and the writer must start again from scratch.
This time, however, the writer should abandon that overdecorated and overstuffed Victorian mode of description.  One of the greatest influences on Twentieth Century prose was the invention of cinema followed shortly by the realization on the part of writers that simple clean actions and images can do the heavy lifting that previously was the job of press-gangs of adjectives.
Now let's look at the final sentence of the paragraph, which I left off of the above:

Once, a fox crossed the winding road in front of them, stopped a second and gazed at the riders, his brush on the ground, then slid off, like a small red flame extinguished in the wet ferns.

Now that's more like it!  It's vivid, it's memorable, and the simile at the end is something the readers can put in their pockets and carry away with them.  It should be kept intact.
Mind you, the prose I want cut is actually pretty good.  I'm sure that Dinesen was quite attached to it.  But if you want to get anywhere as a writer, you've got to learn to kill your darlings.  
And now . . .
Critiquing the Critique
What's wrong with the above critique?  One thing, really, and it can be phrased in two different ways.  Either:
Many readers like this story exactly the way it is.
or
The critique presupposes that there is only one way to write well -- my way.
De gustibus non disputandum.  Or, as Avram Davidson like to say, Of taste and scent, no argument.  When writers talk about what is good and bad in writing they are almost always speakin to themselves.  Because one has to keep a constant eye on one's own prose to keep from backsliding, falling away from the high standards that one has painfully built up over the years.  The danger is that said writer might come to believe that those local truths which apply only to oneself are universals.  And the greater danger is that the gonnabe writers he is addressing might make that mistake as well.
Because good writing is whatever you can get away with.  Period.
So if you're still in the learning-your-craft stage, take the above critique and do your best to apply it to your own work.  If it helps, then keep it.  But if it doesn't, you should discard it without guilt or regret.
Because there's no such thing as One Size Fits All pantyhose.
Above:  Me, sitting on the Devil's Chair atop Thunderbolt Hill in Brigus, Newfoundland.  I felt quite at home there.  (Photo by Rob.)
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Home Again Home

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I'll be traveling all day and my plane starts boarding in a couple of minutes, so this will be brief.

To mark my departure from Newfoundland, here's a scenic snapshot of the coast somewhere.  I'm not sure where, really.  It could be almost anywhere.  Newfoundland is ungodly beautiful.  I commend it to you with a clean conscience.

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North American History 101

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Yesterday, I visited the site of North America's oldest successful British settlement.  Which is . . . ?

Let's not everybody raise their hands at once.

Okay, here's a hint.  They celebrated their 400th anniversary in 2010.  No, no, not Jamestown -- that was an abject failure.  One more hint:  Squanto showed up to advise them.  No, not Plymouth.  He sauntered down there after the original settlers advised the Pilgrims to occupy an abandoned Indian village there.

Give up?  Cupids, Newfoundland.  They've only recently begun excavating the original site.  Shown above is the house frame they built over the first great building, half of which was for storage and the other half for habitation.  Yet to be found are the blacksmith shop (though they're closing in on it) and the brewery.  I really think that some Canadian beer giant needs to fund that last part of the dig.

Part of the reason so few people in the U.S. have heard of Cupids is that the local folk are too kind to rub our faces in the fact that the inhabitants of their first British colony weren't afraid of hard work.  Unlike the fops and wusses of Jamestown.  So they just say it's the first Brit colony in Canada.

Tactful, really.

And yesterday . . .

I went to a screech-in last night and kissed a cod.  So today I can proudly say:  Ich bin ein (honorary) Newfoundlander.  And very happy about it too.

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Dismembrance of Things Past

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The terrifyingly talented Lee Moyer has posted a con report about his experiences at Readercon and since he included the cover he created there for Dismembrance , the story that Elizabeth Bear and I created during the con (with photographs of volunteers by the audience by Kyle Cassidy), I figured it was fair game.  That's it up above.

I don't think it's yet been decided what will be done with this really cool little bit of rare wonder but I figure that's Kyle's problem, not mine.  It was all his idea anyway.

Anyway, as Lee says, Is there anything more fun than tattooing Tom Purdom?

You can read it all here.

And am I having a great time . . . 

 In Newfoundland?  Yes, I am.  I'm in a bit of a rush today so I won't go into detail.  But allow me to recommend Afterwords , a used book store in St. Johns.  Great selection, very cheap.  I was enthralled.

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