Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 191
June 20, 2012
Introducing Pavel Amnuel
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While I was in Ekaterinburg, I met Pavel Amnuel, a distinguished Russian-language science fiction writer and winner of the 2012 Aelita Award. Amneuel published his first story in 1959, has written a great many books, and has had almost nothing published in English. So I asked him to give a short synopsis of his career.
The translator is a young writer named Kiril Azernyi, and a couple of additional questions are asked by Marianne Porter.
While I have to apologize for the quality of sound of this clip, I'm tremendously pleased that Marianne and I did this. It's embarrassing how little Americans know about Russian SF. At least we've done our small bit to rectify this situation.
I have two or three more clips of other writers I met at the Aelita Science Fiction Conference, and I'll be running them as a sort of mini-series over the next several Wednesdays.
*
While I was in Ekaterinburg, I met Pavel Amnuel, a distinguished Russian-language science fiction writer and winner of the 2012 Aelita Award. Amneuel published his first story in 1959, has written a great many books, and has had almost nothing published in English. So I asked him to give a short synopsis of his career.
The translator is a young writer named Kiril Azernyi, and a couple of additional questions are asked by Marianne Porter.
While I have to apologize for the quality of sound of this clip, I'm tremendously pleased that Marianne and I did this. It's embarrassing how little Americans know about Russian SF. At least we've done our small bit to rectify this situation.
I have two or three more clips of other writers I met at the Aelita Science Fiction Conference, and I'll be running them as a sort of mini-series over the next several Wednesdays.
*
June 19, 2012
A Curiosity
.
This is strange and intriguing. Swedish artist Anders Ramsell has released an animated film in which he renders the first roughly twelve minutes of Blade Runner in 3,285 aquarelles. (An aquarelle -- I looked it up -- is a transparent watercolor drawing.) Which is such an extraordinary amount of work that I'm tempted to give him a pass on the whole copyright thing. This is not the same as downloading a dozen pirated episodes of Speed Racer and then cutting the race scenes to a pirated copy of Highway to the Danger Zone . This is a genuine, if quixotic, accomplishment.
Mind you, by any rational reading of the copyright laws, Ramsell is screwed. He's using the movie's soundtrack, its script, and its visual direction. Plus, he's not paying for the source material, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? All of which are worth serious money, as witness the amount of it that was spent making the movie.
Anders Ramsell plans to render the entire movie in this form, which would be a product valuable enough to make it worth the movie's owner suing the heck out of him
But what a weird and wonderful thing for him to do. Oh, brave new world that has such lawsuits in it.!
*
This is strange and intriguing. Swedish artist Anders Ramsell has released an animated film in which he renders the first roughly twelve minutes of Blade Runner in 3,285 aquarelles. (An aquarelle -- I looked it up -- is a transparent watercolor drawing.) Which is such an extraordinary amount of work that I'm tempted to give him a pass on the whole copyright thing. This is not the same as downloading a dozen pirated episodes of Speed Racer and then cutting the race scenes to a pirated copy of Highway to the Danger Zone . This is a genuine, if quixotic, accomplishment.
Mind you, by any rational reading of the copyright laws, Ramsell is screwed. He's using the movie's soundtrack, its script, and its visual direction. Plus, he's not paying for the source material, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? All of which are worth serious money, as witness the amount of it that was spent making the movie.
Anders Ramsell plans to render the entire movie in this form, which would be a product valuable enough to make it worth the movie's owner suing the heck out of him
But what a weird and wonderful thing for him to do. Oh, brave new world that has such lawsuits in it.!
*
June 18, 2012
Short Fiction Review: "Weep for Day" by Indrapramit Das
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"So it begins," as the narrator says late in this story. Indrapramit Das is a new writer, with a couple of stories under his belt in relatively minor venues. "Weep for Day," in the August 2012 Asimov's , is a big step forward in visibility for him. Here's the first paragraph:
This is as deft a job of world-creation as I've seen since I don't know when. A reader moderately familiar with the conventions of science fiction will immediately grasp that this is a tidally-locked world with a permanent dayside and a nightside of eternal darkness -- and see, too, that the times are in rapid technological flux. A newcomer will have all this spelled out over the course of the story in a way that does not condescend. Das knows his craft.
The plot is simple and almost beside the point. In her youth, the narrator travels with her family to see the Nightmare, a member of a species so fearful that bad dreams are named after them. When young, her father was a knight-errant who had actually slain Nightmares. The narrator's brother, Velag, yearns to be a knight like him. But times are changing and by the time he's old enough to do so, the honor is almost always presented posthumously.
The ensuing plot twists will surprise no experienced reader. But "Weep for Day" is a mood- rather than plot-driven story, so this hardly matters. Indeed, at one key point Das writes "I was seventeen the last time I saw Velag," in order to drain all melodrama what follows. The characters we meet over the course of the story are not actually crucial to the changes their world is undergoing. What matters here is that the world is changing and they are typical of their society in their responses to it.
A word about the actual writing itself. "Weep for Day" is a young man's story, skipping back and forth in time, taking ideas the author has obvious put a great deal of work into and treating them as casual throwaways, at times skimming over very thin ice indeed but never quite cracking it. This is, in a young man, good. The prose reminded me of early Zelazny. It has touches of Gene Wolfe and Mary Gentle and other writers to it as well. Mostly, however, it sounds like Indrapramit Das.
This is an excellent beginning and I, for one, will be watching for more stories by this guy.
I expect good things from him.
*
"So it begins," as the narrator says late in this story. Indrapramit Das is a new writer, with a couple of stories under his belt in relatively minor venues. "Weep for Day," in the August 2012 Asimov's , is a big step forward in visibility for him. Here's the first paragraph:
I was eight years old the first time I saw a real, living Nightmare. My parents took my brother and me on a trip from the City-of-Long-Shadows to the hills at Evening's edge, where one of my father's clients had a manse. Father was a railroad contractor. He hired out labor and resources to the privateers extending the frontiers of civilization toward the frozen wilderness of the dark Behind-the-Sun. Aptly, we took a train up to the foothills of the great Penumbral Mountains.
This is as deft a job of world-creation as I've seen since I don't know when. A reader moderately familiar with the conventions of science fiction will immediately grasp that this is a tidally-locked world with a permanent dayside and a nightside of eternal darkness -- and see, too, that the times are in rapid technological flux. A newcomer will have all this spelled out over the course of the story in a way that does not condescend. Das knows his craft.
The plot is simple and almost beside the point. In her youth, the narrator travels with her family to see the Nightmare, a member of a species so fearful that bad dreams are named after them. When young, her father was a knight-errant who had actually slain Nightmares. The narrator's brother, Velag, yearns to be a knight like him. But times are changing and by the time he's old enough to do so, the honor is almost always presented posthumously.
The ensuing plot twists will surprise no experienced reader. But "Weep for Day" is a mood- rather than plot-driven story, so this hardly matters. Indeed, at one key point Das writes "I was seventeen the last time I saw Velag," in order to drain all melodrama what follows. The characters we meet over the course of the story are not actually crucial to the changes their world is undergoing. What matters here is that the world is changing and they are typical of their society in their responses to it.
A word about the actual writing itself. "Weep for Day" is a young man's story, skipping back and forth in time, taking ideas the author has obvious put a great deal of work into and treating them as casual throwaways, at times skimming over very thin ice indeed but never quite cracking it. This is, in a young man, good. The prose reminded me of early Zelazny. It has touches of Gene Wolfe and Mary Gentle and other writers to it as well. Mostly, however, it sounds like Indrapramit Das.
This is an excellent beginning and I, for one, will be watching for more stories by this guy.
I expect good things from him.
*
June 15, 2012
My Bad!
.
Okay, technically I've managed to post today. But technically is not how I roll. I got caught up in the novel I was working on today and neglected to make a Friday post and for this I apologize.
But as long as I'm here, I'll pose a question. I plan to do a series of original short videos, one a week, each one brief -- maybe one to three minutes. In my judgment (but yours may differ), they should turn out to be the best item of the week.
So. What day should they be on -- Monday, Wednesday, or Friday? Assuming they are, as I hope they will be, something to look forward to, when would you most enjoy seeing them?
Above: The Savoy Company, 111 years old this year, performing music from The Mikado in Gorgas Park yesterday. Gorgas Park is only two blocks from my front door. The performance was free. Yet another reason I live in the city.
*
Okay, technically I've managed to post today. But technically is not how I roll. I got caught up in the novel I was working on today and neglected to make a Friday post and for this I apologize.
But as long as I'm here, I'll pose a question. I plan to do a series of original short videos, one a week, each one brief -- maybe one to three minutes. In my judgment (but yours may differ), they should turn out to be the best item of the week.
So. What day should they be on -- Monday, Wednesday, or Friday? Assuming they are, as I hope they will be, something to look forward to, when would you most enjoy seeing them?
Above: The Savoy Company, 111 years old this year, performing music from The Mikado in Gorgas Park yesterday. Gorgas Park is only two blocks from my front door. The performance was free. Yet another reason I live in the city.
*
June 14, 2012
A Little Less Space on the Wall . . .
.
In interviews sometimes I'm asked if I have any hobbies. "Yes, writing," I'll say. At which point, bang, the interviewer writes me off as a smart-aleck. But it's true. I write stories which I intend to sell as my business and for relaxation, stories I have no intention of selling.
Cases in point: Saturday, I went to an art sale and picked up two pieces: A postcard-sized watercolor for ten dollars, and the above framed print of an out-of-copyright image printed onto a page harvested from an old dictionary for twenty. Over the weekend I wrote a piece of flash fiction, "The North Wind Speaks," to go with the watercolor and then pasted them both into the current instance of the Scribbledehobbledehoydenii , my notebooks. Then yesterday I wrote "This Is My Body," and (disassembling the framed print, wrote it on the front pane of glass with a diamond-tipped pen. Today I rubbed red paint in the glass to make the writing stand out, and reassembled the print.
There it is up above, displayed in my garden.
You'll notice that the writing is extremely difficult to read. I haven't decided yet whether to (a) get a new pane of glass cut and do the story over again, this time with ink designed to be baked onto the glass in the oven, (b) print out the story in very small lettering and paste it to the back of the print, or (c) leave it as it is.
In the meantime, it goes up on the wall of my office, along with other stories you'll have to drop by someday if you want to read.
And originally...
The first draft was titled "Hic Est Meum Corpus," but I changed it to avoid blasphemy. Which just goes to show you how age mellows us all. Forty years ago, I would have altered the story to insert blasphemy.
Above: I'm sorry I can't show you "The North Wind Speaks," but it's a freshly minted image and thus under the artist's copyright.
*
In interviews sometimes I'm asked if I have any hobbies. "Yes, writing," I'll say. At which point, bang, the interviewer writes me off as a smart-aleck. But it's true. I write stories which I intend to sell as my business and for relaxation, stories I have no intention of selling.
Cases in point: Saturday, I went to an art sale and picked up two pieces: A postcard-sized watercolor for ten dollars, and the above framed print of an out-of-copyright image printed onto a page harvested from an old dictionary for twenty. Over the weekend I wrote a piece of flash fiction, "The North Wind Speaks," to go with the watercolor and then pasted them both into the current instance of the Scribbledehobbledehoydenii , my notebooks. Then yesterday I wrote "This Is My Body," and (disassembling the framed print, wrote it on the front pane of glass with a diamond-tipped pen. Today I rubbed red paint in the glass to make the writing stand out, and reassembled the print.
There it is up above, displayed in my garden.
You'll notice that the writing is extremely difficult to read. I haven't decided yet whether to (a) get a new pane of glass cut and do the story over again, this time with ink designed to be baked onto the glass in the oven, (b) print out the story in very small lettering and paste it to the back of the print, or (c) leave it as it is.
In the meantime, it goes up on the wall of my office, along with other stories you'll have to drop by someday if you want to read.
And originally...
The first draft was titled "Hic Est Meum Corpus," but I changed it to avoid blasphemy. Which just goes to show you how age mellows us all. Forty years ago, I would have altered the story to insert blasphemy.
Above: I'm sorry I can't show you "The North Wind Speaks," but it's a freshly minted image and thus under the artist's copyright.
*
June 13, 2012
Jim Young, R.I.P.
.
A good friend died yesterday. I can't say that I knew Jim Young as well as I would have liked. We ran across each other only once or twice or thrice a year. But I enjoyed the hell out our time together when we did.
All careers in science fiction are strange careers. But Jim's was stranger than most. He came into SF from the State Department, where he was in the diplomatic corps. His proudest brag was that, in a classified paper, he had been the only one to call the collapse of the Soviet Union. His highest post was being responsible for three "sandboxes in North Africa," as he called them. His remit, he told me, was to keep the sandboxes' inhabitants from killing each other for no reason at all.
When George W. Bush came into office, Jim quit the corps. "I can't work under Condoleezza Rice," he said, and I doubt that the rest of that administration would have made him happy either. At that time, he was writing well-received science fiction stories, and two novels, The Face of the Deep , which I never saw (it was published long before I met him) and Armed Memory .
I liked the stories and Armed Memory quite a lot. It was one of the first post-cyberpunk novels to successfully move beyond cyberpunk. In it, people could be genetically modified to make themselves half-human and half-shark (or combinations of other animals) in a future so desperate that doing so seems like a good idea. Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about it:
Armed Memory was an extremely promising beginning. If Jim had stuck with SF and put his all into it, he might well have been as good as any of my peers -- and my peers include James Patrick Kelly, William Gibson, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, and brand-new Grand Master Connie Willis.
He didn't, however. Just as he was starting to get somewhere as a writer, Jim decided the time had come to follow his dreams... and went off to Hollywood to become a star.
Spoiler Alert: Jim didn't become a star. And now he's dead, struck down by brain cancer. An ironic end for a man who was so effortlessly smart.
But death comes like the finger of God to draw a line below your life and tot up the sums. All the zeroes fall off. And when the end result is looked at, Jim chose wisely. He could have settled for a good-enough life in the State Department or a distinguished-enough career in science fiction. Instead, he followed his dreams. In this, I believe, he was wise.
Vaya con Dios, amigo. May what you find exceed your dreams.
Above: Jim's publicity shot. He was much more handsome in person.
*
A good friend died yesterday. I can't say that I knew Jim Young as well as I would have liked. We ran across each other only once or twice or thrice a year. But I enjoyed the hell out our time together when we did.
All careers in science fiction are strange careers. But Jim's was stranger than most. He came into SF from the State Department, where he was in the diplomatic corps. His proudest brag was that, in a classified paper, he had been the only one to call the collapse of the Soviet Union. His highest post was being responsible for three "sandboxes in North Africa," as he called them. His remit, he told me, was to keep the sandboxes' inhabitants from killing each other for no reason at all.
When George W. Bush came into office, Jim quit the corps. "I can't work under Condoleezza Rice," he said, and I doubt that the rest of that administration would have made him happy either. At that time, he was writing well-received science fiction stories, and two novels, The Face of the Deep , which I never saw (it was published long before I met him) and Armed Memory .
I liked the stories and Armed Memory quite a lot. It was one of the first post-cyberpunk novels to successfully move beyond cyberpunk. In it, people could be genetically modified to make themselves half-human and half-shark (or combinations of other animals) in a future so desperate that doing so seems like a good idea. Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about it:
Young's writing creates a strong sense of excitement, his future world is familiar enough to be appealing (and distorted enough to be hip) and the mysteries he explores are intense and compelling.
Armed Memory was an extremely promising beginning. If Jim had stuck with SF and put his all into it, he might well have been as good as any of my peers -- and my peers include James Patrick Kelly, William Gibson, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, and brand-new Grand Master Connie Willis.
He didn't, however. Just as he was starting to get somewhere as a writer, Jim decided the time had come to follow his dreams... and went off to Hollywood to become a star.
Spoiler Alert: Jim didn't become a star. And now he's dead, struck down by brain cancer. An ironic end for a man who was so effortlessly smart.
But death comes like the finger of God to draw a line below your life and tot up the sums. All the zeroes fall off. And when the end result is looked at, Jim chose wisely. He could have settled for a good-enough life in the State Department or a distinguished-enough career in science fiction. Instead, he followed his dreams. In this, I believe, he was wise.
Vaya con Dios, amigo. May what you find exceed your dreams.
Above: Jim's publicity shot. He was much more handsome in person.
*
June 12, 2012
Mordor Recruitment Video
.
I confess to finding this funny.
More substantive posts soon, I promise.
*
I confess to finding this funny.
More substantive posts soon, I promise.
*
June 11, 2012
She's Cute, But . . .
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It didn't help that I'd been reading Gore Vidal just before I saw the above video on artdaily.org. But even if I hadn't, I'd have had my doubts. The piece is too clearly a commercial. The people who put it together have identified a suite of things we'd like to believe and are busily selling it to us.
The background is simple. Young Aelita began painting at the age of 9 months and started showing her art at age 2. She has solo gallery shows. Her art looks like a prettier version of Jackson Pollock. It sells for pretty big bucks. And the phenomenon has invited a raftload of uncritical media coverage.
Why not? The story has everything: A Magical Child. The notion that creativity is not only inherent but fun. The valorization of the intuitive over the intellectual. The suggestion that if you or I could only let go of our stuffy accretion of adultness, we could do this ourselves.
I saw a grumpy aside in an article in an art magazine that on one of the films young Aelita appears in, her father can be heard giving her directions. Which, supposedly, caused a major reevaluation of the work downward in the art world. But this fact, if fact it is, seems not to have changed the coverage.
Me, I think she's a cute kid who's having fun. I like children's art, though I prefer it representational and, if at all possible, involving monsters or castles or things normally seen only in dreams. But this is nice too. I wish I'd thought to buy some cheap canvases and let the kid fling paint on them when he was little. He would have gotten a kick out of it.
Still . . . serious art? Not when the suggestion that an adult might be involved invalidates it.
*
June 9, 2012
Another Philadelphia Friday
.So yesterday Marianne and I went to The Secret Garden to buy some plants for the backyard...
And went downtown to the Kimmel Center, where we had a couple of drinks...
While listening to a free presentation by the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra (shown below, setting up)...
After which, it was off to the Pen & Pencil Club for dinner and chitchat with friends.
This is why I live in the city.
*
And went downtown to the Kimmel Center, where we had a couple of drinks...
While listening to a free presentation by the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra (shown below, setting up)...
After which, it was off to the Pen & Pencil Club for dinner and chitchat with friends.
This is why I live in the city.
*
June 8, 2012
If You Give a Robot a Gun . . .
.
People who download books illegally hate it when I point out that they're functional Communists -- and lazy, unthinking Communists at that, because the system doesn't work if you don't have a Communist society in place. Achieving which, history has shown, is a prolonged, messy process involving many, many corpses. They want to bypass all that and get right to the Getting Stuff For Free part.
The self-righteousness these Commies display, however, does prove one thing: Given the opportunity to steal with impunity, a great number of people will spontaneously generate justifications for doing so.
So I view the fact that we're getting very close to having affordable, general-purpose humanoid robots with mixed feelings. Because they won't just be able to wash dishes, vacuum rugs, and mow the lawn for you. Give one of them a gun and send it out into the night and it can stick up gas stations and relieve pedestrians of their watches and wallets.
The first time this happens, it's going to be a major news event. The next few hundred are going to be a crime wave. By the time it's the standard strategy for every teenager who thinks that he or she deserves a bigger allowance, it's going to be business as usual. When it's so common that the police stop responding to calls, armed robbery will be legalized.
Because money wants to be free. It's only fair. If this were a Libertarian (or Communist or Insert Your Favorite Ideology Here) society, I wouldn't need to do this. So, really, you brought this on yourself.
Above: A Terminator with a gun. Not that it needs one.
*
People who download books illegally hate it when I point out that they're functional Communists -- and lazy, unthinking Communists at that, because the system doesn't work if you don't have a Communist society in place. Achieving which, history has shown, is a prolonged, messy process involving many, many corpses. They want to bypass all that and get right to the Getting Stuff For Free part.
The self-righteousness these Commies display, however, does prove one thing: Given the opportunity to steal with impunity, a great number of people will spontaneously generate justifications for doing so.
So I view the fact that we're getting very close to having affordable, general-purpose humanoid robots with mixed feelings. Because they won't just be able to wash dishes, vacuum rugs, and mow the lawn for you. Give one of them a gun and send it out into the night and it can stick up gas stations and relieve pedestrians of their watches and wallets.
The first time this happens, it's going to be a major news event. The next few hundred are going to be a crime wave. By the time it's the standard strategy for every teenager who thinks that he or she deserves a bigger allowance, it's going to be business as usual. When it's so common that the police stop responding to calls, armed robbery will be legalized.
Because money wants to be free. It's only fair. If this were a Libertarian (or Communist or Insert Your Favorite Ideology Here) society, I wouldn't need to do this. So, really, you brought this on yourself.
Above: A Terminator with a gun. Not that it needs one.
*
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