Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 202

Envying George Martin

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I am not an envious man.  Still, if you work in this field long enough, a sufficient number of your friends are going to be successful that you'll feel a momentary twinge of envy every now and then.  One of your pals shows you pictures of the castle he just bought, or you open the Sunday New York Times and there's an editorial about what the latest novel by the guy you used to hang with means to the nation.  You feel a twinge, you take a deep breath, and you move on.

I've known George R. R. Martin since -- my God! can this be true? -- at least the first convention where he was guest of honor.  That was some thirty-plus years ago, and I remember this fact only because I was present when he remarked how tired he was and Gardner Dozois replied, "I warned you -- when you're guest of honor, they work you like a horse."

So that means I've seen him win two Hugos at one Worldcon, write blockbuster novels, create a major television series ( Beauty ), beome a megabestseller, and have a smash hit HBO series based on his work, all without the least twinge of jealousy.  Good to see that, I thought.  George deserves it.  More power to him.  And then... and then... the Onion ran a parody news story on him.  You can read it here.

Twinge.

Okay, cleansing breath.  Square up the shoulders.  Move on.  For a moment there, I was genuinely jealous.  But I'm over it now.

I ran across George at the Worldcon this year.  I was hurrying down a hall headed one way and he was hurrying up it headed the other, both of us rushing to make panels we were on.  I altered course and said, "Hey, George.  I just wanted to say hi before you were too big a success to talk to the likes of me."

"Too late!" he said, smiling, and hurried on.

If you're not from the East Coast, you probably don't get it, but he'd just busted my chops.  It's the way folks hereabouts let you know that we like you.

But that's George, innit?  Unspoiled.


Above:  an image icon I found floating through Facebook.  Didn't make me envious for even a second.  As I said, it takes a lot.


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Asimov's Limericks

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So what kind of guy was Isaac Asimov to work for?  I asked Gardner Dozois, long-time editor of the man's eponymous magazine, this question during an interview at Capclave once.  Here's what he said:

Isaac was great to work for.  For one thing, he didn't really meddle with the editorial content of the magazine at all.  Which from my perspective was fine, because most of the stuff I was buying he would not have liked, if he actually read any of it.  He was smart enough to hire people that he trusted, and then not interfere with them.  Which is very, very rare in today's society. 

He would come into the office once a week to pick up the letters, because he answered the letters for the letter column.  It was always a big event when Isaac showed up at the office.  People from all other departments, crosswords magazines and everything, would get excited because Isaac was coming into the office.  He would arrive and you could hear him whistling and singing down the hallway.  He would do Gilbert and Sullivan songs.  He would do little dances, while he was coming down the corridor.  He would make up limericks on the spot for whoever was in the office.   He would make up often insulting, mildly risque limericks about them, and he would make up little poems which he would recite, and then he would pick up the mail and he would sing off down the corridor.  That would be about it, actually, for our dealing with Isaac.

But he certainly was a good boss to work with.  He left you alone.  He was entertaining when he showed up.  You can't ask more from a boss than that.

Which is, from everything I've ever heard about the man, absolutely true.   But there's a coda to this.  Sometime later, I was talking with someone who knew Asimov well and who said, "When people learn I knew Asimov, they'll gush about how they met him once and he came up with a limerick for their name on the spot!  Well, of course, what he did was to make up a lot of limericks beforehand for all the common names and then just trot one out when the occasion called for it.  But they were all limericks he'd made up himself, and having them on tap in itself shows just how smart a man he was."

And speaking of limericks. . . .

We've received some beauts already.  But there's still time to enter your own in the contest here.  The rules are that that the limerick must be:

1.  Technically correct
2.  Clean
3.  About Isaac Asimov and/or science fiction
4.  and witty.

Multiple submissions are not only allowed, but encouraged.  The world can use more light-hearted wit.  Particularly during an election year.



Above:  A glimpse of the beauty that is Limerick, Ireland.

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In Which I Write Your New Year's Resolutions For You (Via My Pal The Dalai Lama)

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Okay, yeah, I've never met the Dailai Lama.  But I've got to admit that the guy has stuff.  As witness his list of twenty ways to improve your karma.  I'm awfully skeptical about lists of ways to improve yourself and attempts to reduce spirituality to quotable aphorisms.  And yet . . . And yet . . .  I went over his list with my Sarcaso-Meter wide open and I have to admit that he makes a lot of sense.  That would work.  I agree with every word of it.  More than that, I'm going to put it into action.

You can read the list here.


And as always . . .
I'm on the road again.  This time to celebrate the birthday of Mrs. William C. Porter, who happens to be my mother-in-law and who turns 101 today.  A century and a year and still worth talking with!  And still as sharp as a tack.  May we all live as long as she will and with our faculties intact. 

But don't forget . . .
The Isaac Asimov National Science Fiction Day Limerick Competition continues.  Check out Monday's post responses to see exactly how witty the competition is.

Above:  There he is, the man himself.  The only human being who ever resigned the Dalai Lama title while still alive.  If I were still a Catholic, I'd suggest that the Pope take note.  But I'm not, and so my opinion is irrelevant.  I mean that without any sarcasm at all.  Hard to believe though that may be.
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National Science Fiction Day

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I have been advised by Tom Purdom that Gardner Dozois has advised him that today is National Science Fiction Day.  January 2 was chosen for this august celebration because it's Isaac Asimov's official birthday.  Asimov was born in Russia in 1920 (his parents brought him to America at age 3) and since there are no official records of his birth, it's not absolutely certain that this was his birthday.  But right or wrong, the honor remains.

In honor of the event, I'm going to give a copy of the brand-new trade paperback of my own Dancing With Bears to whoever can come up with the best limerick honoring either Asimov or Science Fiction Day. 


Here are the rules:  The limerick must be clean, formally correct, and witty.  The judgment of the Blue Ribbon and Not at All Nepotistic Jury of Family will be final.  You can post your entry here or in response to any other blog entry for the rest of the month.  And I'll announce the winner on February 1.



And speaking of the paperback release of my novel . . .


Andrew Wheeler gave Dancing With Bears a splendid review on his blog, The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.  Where he wrote (among other things):

Dancing With Bears is a splendid romp, a tour through a strange future, and an enthralling adventure -- I won't recommend it to any readers looking for morals in their novels, but for all of the rest of us, it's a great way to spend a few hours. (And reading about them is the only way I'd recommend spending time with Darger and Surplus!) 

So that was very pleasant for me.  Those of you who are curious can find the whole thing here. 

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A Final Quiet Thought for the Year

.Tomorrow is New Year's Eve, a day on which we traditionally deal with the fact that we and everything we know are getting older by making resolutions to spend this precious gift, our lives, better.

But mortality doesn't bother me.  I came to grips with it twenty-eight years and seven months ago, when Sean was born.  After Marianne had held him for a while, the midwife picked him up and placed him in my arms.  I looked down at his little lavender goblin face and a tremendous wave of emotion washed through me and I burst into tears.  Someday, my son, I thought, you're going to grow up and turn me into an old man and then I'll die.  But that's okay.  It's a small price to pay for you.  This sounds like the sort of thing a writer would make up after the fact, but it's not.  Those really were my thoughts, word for word, at the time.

Every year on New Year's Eve, I pause to reflect on the ticking of the clock.  And my original judgment holds true: a good life, a small price.

Happy New Year, everybody!  Spend your lives wisely.  But if you can't do that, waste them well.

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'Tis The Season To Be Gemutlich

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It's party season!  And dinner season!  And lunch with friends season!  So Marianne and I have been going to events pretty much every day and enjoying them all.  I won't bore you with the details, other than to say that shown above is literary superstar John Kessel, who generously allowed me to wear his fez.  Alcohol may well have been involved.

So happy party days to us all.  Which is all I have to say, except:  Good Lord, look at John and me -- we're neither of us anybody whom anybody would trust with anything.


And, just because this is America . . .

Let us never forget that peculiar American genius not for art or science or literature (since other nations have been known to do these things well too) but for the misappropriation of categories.  As witness the brilliant accomplishment documented in the following  video.  Enjoy!


      

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And the Godless Atheist Christmas Card of the Year Is . . .

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The year has wound gracefully to an end and so we are come once again to that moment of reflection and summing up when I and my Not At All Nepotistic Jury of Family choose the Godless Atheist Christmas Card of the Year.

And what a competition it's been!  First, perpetual front-runners and frequent winners John and Judith Clute in a stunning turn of events, disqualified themselves by using as artwork for their card a piece by Judith Clute entitled Penates .  Penates were, as you know, the household gods of ancient Rome, which knocked the "godless" requirement right out the window.  Further, the artwork itself, showing two stylized and overlapping faces reminiscent of shamanistic masks, was undeniable spiritual. Thus rendering the card shockingly appropriate to a season when one turns away from the material and reflects upon those things that matter in the face of eternity.

With the field wide open, impressive entries flooded in from a host of friends.  (Allen and Linda Steele, as usual, comported themselves with a -- dare I say it -- steely lack of religiosity.)  But then, right out of left field, Henry Wessells pointed out to Marianne and myself that our own homemade card was a leading candidate for the honor.  (That's it above, with a gold border added so the scanner would recognize it.)

It was a thunderbolt.  "I had no idea it would be received that way," Marianne said.  "I just thought that the punched snowflakes would look lovely against white paper.  And I added a light sprinkling of glitter."  There was no getting around the fact, however, that black snowflakes against a featureless white strongly suggested a bleak and Godless winter.

But then the noble Jason Van Hollander stepped up to the bat . . . and walloped one out of the park.  Not only did his card contain a welter of demonic  -- some would say Satanic -- imagery, but it also bore the legend JASON VAN HOLLANDER ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN on its front.  Suggesting that it was less a holiday card than a piece of self-advertisement.  Nor did the wonders of the card stop there!  For on the inside, Jason had written, "Dear Folks -- How Can A Christmas Card Be More Godless Than This!"

(That's it -- or most of it -- to the right.  Damn that scanner!)

In any other competition such a blatant acknowledgment that he had cold-bloodedly set out to win the competition would have disqualified Jason immediately.  However, in context, this only made his card more Godless and Atheist than ever.

With a sigh of relief (and a feeling of having ducked the bullet) my Blue Ribbon And Not At All Nepotistic Jury of Family declared that this surely must be the winner.  That evening, in fact, I saw Jason, and assured him that, short of a miracle, he would be taking home the honors for the second year in a row.

And then . . .  And then . . .

Oh, dear God.  A dark miracle occurred.  The very next day, on Christmas Eve itself, we received the card below from Rob Price.  Taking no chances, he enclosed it in a second envelope and signed it with a post-it note so we could reuse it ourselves next year .  As if we would!

The horror!  The horror!  It was a Christmas card so Godless and Atheist that his own wife refused to sign it.  So, with all apologies to Jason, we had no choice but to give the honors to Rob.

The card itself is titled Sketch in Men's Room, Hotel Restaurant Gottfried Moos, Constance, Germany .  It's available from Shutterfly.  You can find their website here.





Above at Top:  The scanner didn't do justice to Marianne's card, which was smooth white with a very light sprinkling of glitter and three elegant black snowflakes glued to it.  A lot of work went into that.


Above:  Are those two dogs on the left hitting on each other?  There can be no bottom to the depths of this card.


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Unwritten Stories: Antiheroes in Hell

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I don't contribute to many theme anthologies simply because it's rare that I can come up with an appropriate story idea on a schedule.  I like to tell editors that I've learned how to ride my imagination, but not how to tell it where to go.

But occasionally I get invited and, if it's an interesting theme, I always look inside myself to see if there's an appropriate idea simmering away.  So, long ago, when I was asked to contribute to the Heroes in Hell series, I gave it some thought.

There were a lot of top-notch writers playing in Janet Morris's sandbox in those days.  Robert Silverberg penned a H-in-H tale wherein  Robert E. Howard met Gilgamesh.  As a result, I'd read many maybe even most, of the stories.  And it seemed to me that a formula had spontaneously developed:  Two famous people meet in Hell.  They have a conversation.  Then they travel hundreds of miles, hiding whenever one of the Armies of Hell go by.  Then they have another conversation.  And so on.  The traveling-and-hiding parts were the least interesting ones.  Wouldn't it be better, I reasoned, if instead they sat in a room and, whenever the Armies of Hell marched by, hid behind the couch?

Of course it would.  So the next question was which two famous people to choose?

The obvious choice, given the mileu, was the author of "No Exit" -- Jean-Paul Sartre.  So I needed somebody -- an intellectual, of course -- who would drive him right up the wall and in return be driven mad by him.  Who?

Again, the question answered itself:  John W. Campbell.

I pictured the two men sitting in overstuffed chairs, sucking on their pipes.  Suddenly Campbell jabs the stem of his pipe at his opposite.  "Sartre!" he says.  "It seems to me that two smart cookies like us ought to be able to put our noggins together and come up with a way out of this Hell place.  I once put a problem very much like this to a couple of my writers and their protagonist managed to cobble together a glider and use the thermals from the infernal fires to fly out!  Now, I'm not saying that's the solution ... but its the kind of thinking we ought to do."

In response to which, Sartre mutters, "Merde alors!" and retires into a sullen funk.

And at this point I realized that I had both summarized and exhausted the fun to be had from this idea.  Yes, I could have written it, and Morris would probably have bought it.  Editors are better sports about writers subverting their instructions than you'd expect.  But the amount of research it would have taken to get both Campbell's voice and Sartre's pitch-perfect was far greater than I was up for.

So the story was never written.

I look back on that unwritten story with a touch of tristesse, sometimes.  But for every work of fiction that gets written, there are a dozen that don't.  There are a million stories in the naked city . . . but most of them never reach print.

And come back tomorrow . . .

I'll be announcing the winner of this year's Godless Atheist Christmas Card competition on Wednesday.  Be there or be square!  As the young people used to say.

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Soft! Kitty! Klingon! Yikes!

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I've written novels.  I've written stories.  I've posted blogs.  I've done lots and lots of things with words.  But I've never launched a meme that went viral.

Klingon language maven Lawrence M. Schoen, however, has.  Potentially.  His Facebook video of himself singing "Soft Kitty" in Klingon (his own translation!) hasn't yet ripped through the blogosphere (or whatever it is that you young kids call it these days) like a bat'leth through soft butter, even though it's been up for days.

What's wrong with us?

C'mon, guys.  Let's put our shoulders behind this.  Blog, forward, reblog, tweet, and faceboo.  I won't be satisfied until Lawrence has a guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory .


And on Wednesday . . .

We're coming up on the conclusion of this year's Godless Atheist Christmas Card competition.  And, oh dear God, what a roller coaster it's been this year.  Thrills! Tears!  Last minute turnarounds!  It's been such an amazing year that the Blue Ribbon And Not At All Nepotistic Jury of My Immediate Family decided we'd have to wait two days after Christmas to see if something even more Godless and Atheistic than what was already received might yet pop up in our mailbox.

In any other year, that would seem impossible.  Given what today's front leader is.

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Unca Mike's Christmas Story 2011: Herald Angels

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Time for a new tradition!  Every year, on Christmas Eve, I tell my family a story I've made up for the occasion.  Sometimes it's serious, like "Honkeytonk Angels" or "Christmas in Winooski."  Other times it's very, very silly, like last year's "A Chrismoose Carol."  Some are throwaways and others in retrospect I probably should have written down.  But what the heck.  I can always write more.

Anyway, it occurs to me that all my friends out there in cyberspace deserve a Christmas story too.  So here for your entertainment is . . .


Herald Angels
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It's a job, heralding is, nothing more.  Oh yeah, sometimes you get a prestigious gig announcing the birth of God or the end of the world.  More usually, it's just a supermarket opening or the invention of a new flavor of toothpaste.  You pop in, announce, "You've got lung cancer," and then pop out again.  Mission accomplished.            A moron could do your job.  Provided that moron had the gifts of precognition, heavenly radiance (so the marks know you're not a hallucination), uncanny beauty, instantaneous teleportation, and a deep and resonant speaking voice.  It's the rarity of these qualities being found all together in a single individual that keeps you from farming the work out.            Sometimes you meet a fellow heralder and then the two of you wax nostalgic about the old days when angel heralding meant hanging in the inky vastness of nonexistence, trumpets ready, to announce the sudden and inexplicable emergence of a universe from the invisible confines of a non-dimensional monoblock.  Or the rare and inexplicable beauty of a single hydrogen atom pulling itself up out of the quantum foam into the realm of being.  You remember heralding the creation of concepts that are the building blocks of reality:  Love!  Beauty!  Electroweak Interaction!            But then break time's over and back to work you go.  You don't have to like it, you just have to do it.  And do it you will, because an angel is faithful, one hundred percent.  Horton has nothing on you.            "Troy's decided to invite you to the prom," you tell a temporarily ecstatic teenage girl.  "Also, your zits are back."
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