Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 206

Down at the Tardis Bar

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I''m reading tonight as part of the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza at the Way Station in Brooklyn, along with N. K. Jemisin and a stage combat demonstrator.  I lead a strange life.

The Way Station is a steampunk/Dr. Who themed bar and has its very own tardis (pictured above).  One of the websites I found claims the tardis is also their toilet.

I lead a very strange life.  I keep coming back to that observation.

Anyway, if you're in the area and your evening is free, why not drop by?  I'm very eager to hear Jemison read, and I'm looking forward to the stage combat demo.  Also, I'll be reading something good.  It ought to be a hoot.

Strange, mind you  But a hoot.

And here's their press release . . .

Arriving at an EXCITING NEW LOCATION, The Way Station, Brooklyn's greatest Steampunk and Doctor Who themed bar, will be multiple Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy award winner Michael Swanwick, whose new book _Dancing with Bears_ is about con men in a delirious future Russia.

With him will be recently Hugo nominated and critically acclaimed NK Jemisin, in honor of the release of the final book of her Inheritance Trilogy, _The Kingdom of Gods_, which is about deities as weapons of mass destruction, a city on a spire and one hundred thousand kingdoms.

There will also be an exhilarating stage combat demonstration by stage combat instructor, stunt man and kung fu master Mike Yahn. Books will be sold by the Community Bookstore.

WHEN: Thursday, November 10 @ 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: The Way Station
683 Washington Ave
Prospect Heights
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Part reading series, part carnival, the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza is a speculative fiction event held at The Way Station bar that promises to change the way you look at readings forever and to call you in the morning. It may actually deliver on one of those promises.

http://waystationbk.blogspot.com
http://woldnewtonreading.com

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Paul McAuley's "Bruce Springsteen"

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I used to nominate a lot of stuff for the Nebula, before they changed the rules.  If I admired a story and thought it worth being on the ballot, I nominated it.  Then, at the end of the year, I used that informal list to help me decide what to vote for.  Nowadays, you get only so many nominations (five, I think) per category, and you have only a few months out of the year in which to make them.  Which is to say, you have to keep track of what you read through the year and then, when it's over, go through your notes to determine what you think are the five best works per category before you nominate any.

Alas, I'm just not that organized.  So the nominating process has to go on without me.  However, I do like recommending good stories.  So I thought I might occasionally review one here.

Let's hope the following off-the-cuff review is the first of many.

"Bruce Springsteen" by Paul McAuleyAsimov's Science Fiction, January 2012Novelette
"Bruce Springsteen" pretends to be set on another planet but is actually an exploration of the myth of the American West.  The West of the high desert, I mean, not that of cowboys and gunfights and genocide.  The roads out there are empty and go on forever.  You turn the nose of your car into the Great Lonely and pray to an untenanted sky to dissolve your self and make you into something you are not.  I was on Route 50 in Nevada, "the loneliest road in America," recently and I can testify to the pull of that myth.  You want to just go down that road forever.

But there's a dark side to the myth.

The nameless protagonist of this story is a working stiff in a dead-end job at the edge of town who may or may not be aware that he's reached the end of his rope, when a woman crosses his destiny.  "Rachel was definitely my type," he says.  "Older than me by five or ten years, easy with what she was.  Someone who'd lived a little and taken some hard knocks, who knew how to look after herself.  Someone, I thought, who was passing through.  A change from the waitresses and kitchen staff."

The fated pair go the Stardust Hotel and fuck.  Then they hit the road, intending to pull an easy and bloodless heist that will be the key to some vast and unspecified alien treasure.  Two dead guards later, they're in a car and on the run, carrying an ancient soul stone back to the tomb from which it was stolen.  They talk.  They steal another car and accidentally kill another person.  Along the way, McAuley rather cunningly conflates Bruce Springsteen's work (particularly his Nebraska album) with Samuel Beckett's.  One of the two is betrayed.  The other is gunned down by the police.  The survivor winds up in jail and speaks the epitaph for them both:  I thought we'd have a bunch of adventures until the law caught up with us.  I thought we'd be together right until the end . . ."

There is a kind of coda at the end of the story which, with the help of a useful alien, makes it clear that the story is about the uncanny power of stories to ride us and make us do their bidding.  And here I have to hesitate because I'm not entirely sure the story has earned its own ending.

But I'm also not entirely sure that it hasn't.  This is one of those stories you have to think about for a long time.  Someday, years from now, most likely, I'll come to a conclusion and turn thumbs up or thumbs down.  Either I'll conclude that "Bruce Springsteen" managed to not say but imply something deep . . .  or I'll decide that it was a noble attempt.

Good story, either way.

Back when I was in college, I was riding in a pickup truck driven by a young woman who, I realized abruptly after the truck nearly went off the road, was a lot drunker than I had realized.  So drunk that, she being who she was, I knew there was no chance of talking her into slowing down or stopping.  So, realizing there was a good chance I was going to die, I leaned as far out the window as I could and laughed.

This is a story that happens every day in America.  In Zen Buddhism, it's called the koan of the strawberry.


Above:  According to its YouTube caption, this is the only film footage in existence of Mark Twain.  I didn't have anything appropriate to the review, so I threw it in.

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VOTE!

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I'm a pretty reasonable guy about most things.  But not about voting.  Charlton Heston will voluntarily turn in all his firearms to the Enemy long, long before they're able to pry the vote from my cold, dead fingers.  Patriots died to give me this right.  I'm not going to give it up just because there are some ballots that fill the soul with dismay.

In all the time since I came of age, I've failed to vote in exactly one election -- and that's because my college roommate put the absentee ballot atop the furnace, where he figured it would be safe, and by the time I got home a hole had been burned all the way through the center.  Every single other election, primaries included, I'm there at the front of the line.

The reason I'm so enthusiastic about representational democracy is that where it counts most -- the presidential election -- my candidate usually loses.  And yet, because there's always hope, and because the system confers a strange kind of legitimacy (the kind that has you muttering that people get the kind of government they deserve), I have never once been tempted to pick up a gun and participate in the violent overthrow of a government that sometimes appalls me.

That's worth a lot.

Above:  I picked that image off of the Web.  I sure hope that those tiny little words I can't render decipherable don't say anything hideous.

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And Now For a Commercial Break . . .

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Mea culpa.  I've missed two days' blogs -- and it's been a long time since I've done that. (I've got a case of the Grunge, and it's sapped my energy entirely.)  So to make it up to you in part, here's a genuinely demented work of advertising art.

See how long it takes you to figure out what they're selling.


And is it just me or . . . ?

Does it seem to anybody else that this is Paprika , played as it if were a good thing?

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Celebrating Murray Leinster

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I'm off to the Big Apple for A Tribute to Murray Leinster at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art.  If you're in the area, why not drop by?  It's only seven dollars and these New York Review of Science Fiction reading series events are always lots of fun.

That's 138 Sullivan Street  (between Houston & Prince St.).  The doors open at 6:30 tonight.


And because I'm traveling . . .

This will be a short blog.  But I thought I'd share the above photo with you.  I took it at the Occupy Philadelphia site and it shows some of the protesters' tents with, looming above them from across the street, Jacques Lipchitz's statue Government of the People.

Government of the People is one of Gardner Dozois's favorite statues.  He likes to point out that it's a graphic portrayal of human beings being crushed by an enormous load of shit.  Over the years I've come around to the viewpoint that that may have been the sculptor's intent.

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Boo!

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It's Halloween!  So Marianne and I went down to City Hall to donate  a case of water, a box of granola bars, and some M&Ms (for the seasonality) to the Occupy Philadelphia people.  Then we went to XIX and ordered martinis and raw oysters for lunch.


A rich life defies convincing synopsis.

And if you're in NYC tomorrow . . .


I'll be making yet another public appearance, this one not to promote myself but to pay homage to the late, great Will F. Jenkins at A Tribute to Murray Leinster, part of the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series.


Among the celebrities present will be Billee Stallings, the daughter of Jenkins/Leinster. With her sister, Jo-an Evans, she has written a memoir about her father titled Murray Leinster: The Life and Works, published by McFarland & Co.  (Copies of the book will be available at the reading.)


I'm assuming you know that Leinster was probably the single most important SF writer between H. G. Wells and Robert Heinlein.  But if you don't . . . well, here's your chance to find out why.


At the Soho Gallery for Digital Art, 138 Sullivan Street  (between Houston & Prince St.)  Seven dollars suggested donation.  The doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the event begins half an hour later.

Above:  This year's pumpkins, huzzah!  I like a bit of plot on my porch at this time of year.

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John Mortimer Remembers the Sixties

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I was reading John Mortimer's memoir, Clinging to the Wreckage the other day, and right there near the beginning I ran into the following passage:

The end of the sixties, Flower Power and Children's LIb, the Underground Press and the Alternative Society seem as remote as the Middle Ages; 'Make Love Not War' as dusty an apothegm as some saying of the Early Fathers of the Church.  Childhood requires no effort of memory, but it is hard work to recapture the feeling of 1971, a year when Richard Neville, a young Australian writer, asked some vaguely liberated children to help him produce a 'Schoolkids' number of his magazine Oz, thereby promoting an obscenity trial which lasted for six hot weeks of that summer at the Old Bailey.  As the trial started the children demonstrated in the street, carrying, as I remember it, banners bearing the legend 'An Orgasm A Day Keeps the Doctor Away'.  The front row of the public gallery contained girls whose T-shirts were decorated with a portrait of the Inspector in Charge of the case.  He stared up from his position of power in the well of the Court at a repeated view of his own flushed features strained between the small breasts of teenaged girls.  The adult editors of Oz, Richard Neville, Jim Anderson, and Felix Dennis, wore, for their first day in the dock, gym-slips and long blonde wigs, treating the proceedings with an apparent levity far removed from the respectful stance and deferential silence of the more acceptable prisoners at the bar.  Among the witnesses called was the comedian Marty Feldman, and I remember him whispering to me, on his way to the witness-box, 'Great to be working with you at last.'

     What, I now wonder, did everyone think was going on?  A children's revolution, the dawn of a new world when long-haired headmasters would chant Bob Dylan songs at assembly and an adolescent House of Commons would rap away in perfect love enveloped in a pungent smell like slow-burning Turkish carpets; and war, shamed by a poem of Allen Ginsberg's, would vanish from the face of the earth?  The dream, whatever it was, has faded more rapidly than most, and the schoolkids of the Oz age are no doubt now paying their mortgages and driving their Ford Cortinas with a nodding dog in the back window, and holding down tough jobs as chartered accountants.  Even the trial became calmer after its dramatic beginning, and the great majesty of the Criminal Law of England bent itself to a careful consideration of, among other things, Rupert the Bear, an animal long beloved for his docility and innocence, who was unusually portrayed, in Oz magazine, with a gigantic erection.

Which is the best summation of the Sixties I've ever come across.  When the old-timers joke that "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there," we're not implying that you were doing massive amounts of drugs -- though you almost certainly were -- but that the reality of what we were doing and the subjectivity of what we thought we were doing were so strange as to be almost unfathomable today.

What were we thinking?  I despair of coming up with a logical answer to that question.


And incidentally . . .

Did you notice how well-written that passage was?  How every sentence was inherently interesting and how smoothly it all read?  That's very fine indeed.  John Mortimer has received oodles of praise for his writing.  But, honestly, he hasn't received a fraction of his due.


And you may remember . . .

I was on a panel about Ursula K. Le Guin at the Center for Fiction in NYC recently.  It was a good panel -- everybody participated equally and we all had intelligent and interesting things to say.  But what struck me most was the crowd.  It was a more "mainstream" group than I usually speak in front of, so a great deal of this information was new to them and they were really interested.  It's not hard to do a good job in front of an audience like that.

In the crowd, as it turned out, was Ryan Britt, who wrote an account of the panel for Tor.com. 

You can read what he had to say about the panel here.

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Blogging Vs. Facebook

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I've got this blog and I've also got a Facebook account, and they couldn't be more different.  If I say something serious on Facebook, I rarely get any response whatsoever.  But post a photo of my breakfast?  Twenty to thirty responses.  Not to mention the fan letters.

Seriously.  I get fan letters.  For my breakfasts.

They're good breakfasts, admittedly.  But still.  I think we can all agree that there's a certain . . . gravitas that's missing from the Facebook experience.

Lately, I've noticed  that, increasingly, people are making and posting humorous photo posters, like the above.  (Is there a name for them?  Thumbnail posters, maybe?)  Sometimes they're serious, and when they are, they're usually political.

Here on Blogger, things are the exact opposite.  I don't think I'll be posting very many political messages here.  But if I do, they almost certainly won't be serious.


Above:  Case in point.

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More Stories!

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I'm in print again -- both virtual and trad.  The virtual reprint is my story "The Dead," which originally appeared in Starlight 1 and which is now available on Tor.com.  Click here to read it.

Every time "The Dead" is reprinted, I think back to a conversation I had with the late and sorely missed Jim Turner, editor at Arkham House and later Golden Gryphon Press, which he founded.  He called me, as he did from time to time, and said, "Listen, Swanwick, I don't have the time for any of your nonsense.  I just have a quick question to ask you."

"I just finished a zombie story, Jim," I said.

"That's nice.  What I have to ask you is --"

"I'm really pleased with it."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah.  The reason I called is --"

"Aren't you going to ask me what the title is?"

A long silence.  Then, testily, "All right.  What's the title?"

"I called it 'The Dead.'"

In tones of pure outrage, Jim said, "You can't use the title of the single most famous short story in the English language for a zombie story!"

"Well, it was a really good zombie story, Jim."

And so it was.


And on the trad front . . .

"A Midwinter's Tale" has just been reprinted in Alien Contact , edited by Marty Halpern and published by Night Shade Books.  A very cool anthology, with stories by the likes of Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stephen King, among others.  You know.  My peers.

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Kyle Cassidy Rides Again!

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My favorite Philadelphia photographer, Kyle Cassidy, is at it again!  Kyle, for those of you who don't know his work, lives to photograph people.  There is a basic decency to Kyle's photos.  Whether he's photographing science fiction fans or gun owners sitting in their living rooms holding guns, he manages to show the human being behind the essential eccentricity (the fans, mostly) or normalcy (the gun owners, in the main).  So when I heard he'd gone up to New York City to photograph the Occupy Wall Street protesters, I thought it was a really cool idea.

And it was.  You can see a selection of his photos at the Huffington Post here.


And, as always . . .

I've been on the road.  But I have hopes of spending three or four days at home before the month ends.  Which is good because Autumn has arrived and I have work to do! 

Details as they happen.

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