Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 190

The Courage of Pussy Riot

.According to the Guardian , the detention of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alehina, members of the feminist anarchist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot has been extended indefinitely.  Their crime?  Back in February, the group performed (and filmed) a protest song in Christ the Redeemer Cathedral in Moscow.

This was an astonishingly courageous thing to do in Putin's Russia.  Predictably, the police grabbed who they could and slung them in jail, where they remain with no trial in sight, apparently because the government doesn't have much of a case.  Because Pussy Riot performs in masks, it's not even certain that the women they arrested were part of the protest.

You can read about it here.

And you can view the video that has three brave young women in jail, facing charges of "hooliganism" that might result in a seven-year sentence below.





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Just For Happy

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I think this video speaks for itself.  Have a great weekend.

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The Other Supreme Court Decision

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Brief post today.

While all America parses the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act, I find myself moved by their other big decision:  that the Stolen Valor Act is unconstitutional because it's in violation of free speech.

Mind you, I despise the people that the Stolen Valor Act was designed to punish -- those who falsely claim to have won the highest honor awarded to the military, the Congressional Medal of Honor.  They are, let's not mince words, scum.  Often the despicable will benefit from a right which all the rest of us need.

Still, this is important decision.  Lies are now officially a form of free speech, protected by the Constitution.

Which means that my career is street legal!


Above:  An unrelated video.  Because the Supreme Court refuses to post amusing images to go with their decisions.

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An Empty House With Many Doors In Other Worlds Than These

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My story, "An Empty House With Many Doors" has been reprinted in John Joseph Adams' new anthology of alternate universe stories, Other Worlds Than These.  To promote his volume, the editor asked contributors for brief interviews about their stories.  So I sent in a four-question interview, explaining that my piece is a love letter to my wife.

There are seventeen interviews and they're all posted here.  You can read my interview here.

And I went to a picnic yesterday . . .

The Bureau of Laboratories for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania held their annual picnic yesterday, and of course I went.  Thirty-five years ago, back when it was located in Landis Hospital in Philadelphia, I was their single most disgruntled clerk-typist.  That's where I met a rising young technocrat named Marianne Porter.  So every year I go back to see old friends.

One of whom asked me a few questions about my writing.  Did I know the author of the Harry Potter books? she asked.  Well, J.K. Rowling doesn't hang out with working writers much, since she became one of the richest women on the planet.  How about Danielle Steele?  Um... no.  "But I do know George Martin.  You know, The Game of Thrones?  On HBO?"

And it struck me then that it's only common sense to stay on good terms with friends who make it big.  Just so you'll have something to say when somebody asks, "Do you know...?

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Evgenie Kasimov Reads "Ghost City"

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Last month, while I was in Ekaterinburg, I had the pleasure of meeting the poet Evgenie Kasimov.  Marianne and I spent an afternoon in his flat, talking about life and literature.  He also read one of his poems, titled either "Ghost City" or "Ghost Town," depending on how you translate it.

Above is Evgenie, reading the poem in Russian.  I have no Russian at all, but he is a great reader, one of the best I've heard, and something of the poem comes through.  When I told him how much I admire his reading, he recited from memory one of Mayakovsky's poems.  Mayakovsky was an admirable man and a tragic figure, killed by the very regime he believed in and supported.  Hearing Kasimov recite the poem made me aware of how much I miss out on being monolingual.

The video is made public by Evgenie Kasimov's express permission.  Here's a translation of the poem, courtesy of the multi-brilliant Eileen Gunn:

from the series “Ghost Town”
Silver smog! I sing this soot and emerald smoke!
Pearl-grey mist and the carcasses of trees.
A lonely  skyscraper stands, like the king of clubs,
A dull fish speared on a silver trident.

Madly, bravely, I sing the municipal granite!
And at the same time I sing that clear, affectionate word, “Ovsyen."
George, with a golden spear,  defeats a crooked snake .
Bitter air collects on the mountains, and then vanishes.And now into the fray rushes Superman in faded tights --
In an invisible flying lounge-chair pestering the sky.
I sing the oily blue waves of the Iset River!
Their heavy, iridescent light quietly gladdens my soul.

A malachite, jasper city in a magical benzene ring!
We are all pale children of the dragon, sleeping in dark sheds.
Through the asphalt and concrete drives a thin falsetto.
Rubies light up the TV tower. And, in the sky, it’s warm.

September 11, 2005Evgeny Kasimov

Extra points to those who can spot the line that made him think I'd like to hear this poem in particular.
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The Prince Is Dead

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Prince Robin Ian Evelyn Milne Stuart de La Lanne Mirrlees died last Saturday at the age of 87, and while I cannot say the news comes as a surprise -- his health had been failing for some time -- I am tremendously saddened by it.

Robin lived a rich and varied life.  He served in the Royal Artillery in India during World War Two, rising to the rank of captain, and was later the Rouge Dragon Pursuivant at the College of Arms and as such attended the queen at her coronation.  He was a horseman and fox-hunter.  He restored a stone circle and a castle.  He bought a group of islands in the Outer Hebrides, making him the Laird of Bernara.   Ian Fleming had James Bond use Robin's C of A position as a cover in one novel, and the related correspondence between the two men was published in an edition of six copies, making it one of the rarest items of Bondabilia in existence.  He was also, as the Telegraph put it, "a well-known debs' delight."  He fathered a son out of wedlock with Duchess Margarethe of Wurttemberg, and was known for the many glamorous woman he squired about.  In 2003, feuding with Prince Charles, he assumed the title of Prince of Coronata (prior to this he used the title of Count) given to him by the King of Yugoslavia, to prove that there was nothing special about being a prince.  He was a devout Buddhist.

His aunt was the great fantasist Hope Mirrlees.

It was in the last capacity that I made his acquaintance.  When I was working on Hope-in-the-Mist: the Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Career of Hope Mirrlees , I wrote asking for information about his aunt and Robin called me from Greater Bernara to talk about her for well over an hour.  Though we never met fact to face, we exchanged dozens of letters.  One of them, committing memories of Hope Mirrlees to paper, I obtained his permission to have published in the New York Review of Science Fiction as "My Aunt, Hope Mirrlees."

Robin was just a bit of a flake.  He urged me to rewrite Lud-in-the-Mist as a musical, a la Cats .  He send me a photograph of his mother, taken by Man Ray, with a note to please return it when I was done looking at it.  He despised Bertrand Russell but emphatically stated that "Tom Eliot was a true gentleman -- in every sense of the word!"  He had tremendous enthusiasm for all things he deemed meritorious.

He accomplished a great deal in his life, and he had a lot of fun as well.

And he's almost certainly the highest-ranking noble ever to be published in NYRSF .

You can read about him here.  Or here.


And I have a family story Robin once told me . . .

Robin Mirrlees' mother, Hope's sister-in-law Frances de La Lanne Mirrlees, was a strikingly beautiful and of course aristocratic woman.  One of her many friends was Ian Fleming.  Who one day told her that he was writing a novel.

"Oh, Ian," she said.  "Don't write a novel.  You haven't the brains for it."


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Of a Downpour and a Spectacled Owl

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This is how pleasantly odd my life is.

Friday, Marianne and I went into Center City to hear a presentation by our friend, photographer Kyle Cassidy, and just as we stepped out of the parking garage were caught by a sudden torrential downpour.  So we ducked into the nearest doorway, which happened to be that of the Pen & Pencil Club.

Where a batch of our friends happened to be sitting around a table.

So we sat down and ordered drinks.

And it turned out that the club had been taken over for a private party honoring Stu Bykofsky, a Philadelphia Daily News columnist for 35 years and newspaperman there for I think it was five years previously but I could well be wrong. Which means that ordinarily we would have been kicked out, but since we were regulars and well-behaved, Danny the Bartender told us to stay.

So when the testimonials and speechifying began, we were caught in the middle of the bar with no way to slip out without it looking like we were dissing the guest of honor right in the middle of his own self-hosted roast.

Which is how we missed out on the event we'd come downtown to see.  My apologies, Kyle.

But it was extremely cool to be hobnobbing with people who had devoted their lives to reportage.  Foul-mouthed though one or two of them were.

Also, the party had an owl!  From the zoo!  That's it up above, a spectacled owl from the jungles of South America.  Beautiful bird.  It was a pleasure to make his acquaintance.


Above:  I went to Bykofsky's party and took a picture of an owl instead of him.  This says something about my priorities.

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"Talking To Strangers Is Forbidden"

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Even the city government of Moscow agrees this is a good hack.

Pictured above is a prank street sign showing profiles of Woland, Koroviev, and Behemoth from Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece, The Master and Margarita , and the slogan Talking to Stranger is Forbidden.  This was surreptitiously erected next to Patriarch's Ponds, the park where the novel begins.


Moscow being one of the great literary cities of the world, the sign is being allowed to stay.

You can read about it here.

I feel rather moved by this because when Marianne and I went to Moscow a couple of years ago to research Dancing With Bears , Patriarch's Ponds was the second place (after Red Square) we went to see.  After we found the park bench where the action begins and the corner where the old woman spills the sunflower oil, we walked back to our flat on the Garden Ring by a roundabout way -- and came upon Beria's mansion.

The whole time Bulgakov was writing his novel about the Devil wandering about Moscow, he was living only a few blocks from Beria.

Now they're both dead and only one of them has flowers on his grave.  May all such stories end as well.

Above:  If you haven't read The Master and Margarita yet, allow me to point out that Behemoth is a cat who wears a bow tie and carries a Browning automatic.  'Nuff said.

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The Happy Show

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I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art here in Philadelphia recently to see what was showing.  And so I caught Stefan Sagmeister's The Happy Show.

I'm hoping to get some work done today, so I won't go into detail.  But the exhibition title tells the truth.  Sagmeister has created a number of contemporary art pieces which are all about happiness -- ways to become happy, and things that will make you happy.  One of which is video'd above:  A stationary bicycle hooked up to an inspirational message.

The messages are pretty much the sort of thing people post on Facebook when they're trying to cheer themselves up.  But the art is genuinely witty.  I had fun with it.

The Happy Show runs through August 12.  You can read about it here.

And speaking of science . . .

Have you heard of Cambridge's E.chromi project?  No?  Probably that's because it involves human feces.  But it's a pretty cool hack.  Bioengineered bacteria in the presence of specific diseases produce bright color dies, so that diagnosis can be performed by a quick visual of the patient's stool

You can read about it (and see their nifth sample case) here.

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In Which I Bask in Unearned Reflected Glory

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When I was young and mad for fiction and spent half my free time in libraries, it never occurred to me to remember exactly who had written the books I loved. It was only much later that I realized that (smek!) I could have used this information to find more good books.   Similarly, as an adult it has taken me decades of being published to realize that I really should bother to remember the names of the people who make my work look good.
So I'm taking a big chance here by drawing attention to artists who have illustrated things I've written.  It's quite possible I've overlooked people to whom I owe a lot simply because I never bothered to register their names.  And if so, I apologize.

Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel an undeserved pleasure at the fact that at least four people who have illustrated my work are currently up for Chesley Awards.

They are:

Omar Rayyan, who did the cover for Being Gardner Dozois , and is up for Best Color Work:  Unpublished.

Stephan Martiniere, who did the cover for The Dragons of Babel , and is up for Best Cover Illustration: Hardback.

Lee Moyer, who did the covers for A Geography of Unknown Lands and The Best of Michael Swanwick and is up for Best Cover Illustration: Magazine, Best Cover Illustration: Hardback, and Best Product Illustration.

and Julie Dillon, who is up for for Best Interior Illustration for the above artwork illustrating my own story, "The Dala Horse."  

My congratulations to all the nominees, but particularly those listed above.  I hope you felt my work was worthy of your efforts.  Please don't tell me if you didn't.

You can read the entire slate (and click through to see each category's works) here.


And a bit that may or may not make it into the second Darger & Surplus novel . . .

"Murder is the last act a gentleman should commit," Surplus said.  "But you'll note that it is on the list."


Above;  Dillon's illo for "The Dala Horse."  Those who have been following this blog may remember how happy I was when I first saw it.

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