Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 210

A Bad Idea (With Step-By-Step Instructions)

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HOW TO CUSTOMIZE YOUR PENZEY'S SPICES BUMPER STICKER




1.  Visit your local Penzey's Spices store.




2.  Pick up one of their FREE bumper stickers.




3.  Assemble your tools:  Cutting board, scissors, and Sharpie pen (black).




4.  Cut up the bumper sticker as shown.  Throw away the superfluous parts.




5.  With your Sharpie, change the period to a question mark.




6.  Affix the top half of your modded sticker to your car's bumper.




7.  And now the bottom half.


8.  Seek help immediately.  No rational person would do something like this.  There's probably something wrong with you.


And I'll be making appearances in TWO cities this week . . .



Here's the nitty-gritty:



Wednesday, September 21
FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series.  – Michael Swanwick & Andy DuncanAndy Duncan is one of the great readers in science fiction, so this should be great.7pmKGB Bar 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave)New York, NY 10003
Baltimore Book Festival:  All Events at the SFWA Booth (I believe)
Friday, September 23
3:00-3:30 pm Reading: Michael Swanwick
Acclaimed science fiction author Michael Swanwick will read from his works and talk about his science fiction and fantasy.
4:00 pm. Group signing, chat, raffles
Join authors Rosemary Edgehill, Toby Devens, John Maclay, Michael Swanwick, Michael Sullivan, and Cindy Young-Turner to chat, have your books autographed, and win prizes.

6:00 pm Publishing as a professional writer in speculative fiction
Panelists Michael Swanwick, Catherine Asaro, and Toby Devens offer tips and answer questions about how to get started in genre fiction and conduct a successful career.
Saturday, September 24
2:00 pm 1984--Are we there yet?
Panelists Brenda Clough, Don Sakers, Alan Zendell, and Michael Swanwick discuss the social and political themes in science fiction, as in the tradition of the novel "1984" Science fiction offers a unique vehicle for examining the consequences of various political and sociolical phenomena by extrapolating them into the future.  Just how provocative can you make such ideas?  Is it ever too much? Come share your thoughts and ideas with our panelists.




Above:  Kids, don't do this at home!  Or anywhere else for that matter.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 183

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Another collage.  I rather like this one.

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SA Saturday Non-Blog

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I got up this morning to discover a robotic killer-hunter predator at my back door.  Then I went out to see some Fringe theater and bought a fedora at a flea market.

Life is good.

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Dinofeathers

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It's astonishing the stuff you can find, once you start looking for it.  It was only a few years ago that the first feathered dinosaur fossils -- other than Archaeopteryx, of course -- were found.  I remember that clearly, because I was researching my dinosaur novel Bones of the Earth when the fossils first came out of China.  Now Ryan C. McKellar, Brian D. E. Chatterton, Alexander P. Wolfe, and (one almost adds "of course") Philip J. Currie have published a paper in Science stating that they have found an assemblage of dino and bird feathers in Canadian late Cretaceous amber.

That leaves us a long, long way from the late Michael Crichton's dream of resurrecting dinosaurs from their DNA and then letting them escape into the suburbs where they can eat our children, of course.  But it's a start.

You can read the paper's abstract here.  Or you can read a good summary article (with lots of pix!) here.


And I'm back in print again . . .

Or, rather, still in print but in a different format.  Anyway, I just received a copy of the trade paperback of The Dragons of Babel in the mail.  Even in the cheap scan to the right, it looks good.  That's because of the Stephen Martiniere cover.

Note also that they put the blurb from Michael Moorcock on the front.  That's the guy who wrote Gloriana, the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy and the Elric books.  To say nothing of his work as editor of New Worlds or . . . well, if you get me started, we'll be here all day.  In brief, he's a man whose good opinion is worth having.  So you can imagine how happy I am to have it.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 182

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Jeff Ford it says and then (crossed out) write the hardest story you know how.  

I can only speculate that this is some piece of writing advice I heard from Jeff, that I was going to try it myself, and then that I decided that this was what I do pretty much every time anyway.

Mysterious Benedicts Society (YA -- recommended by Peggy Rae)

Then a shopping list.

Then a picture clipped from an alternate art magazine, with a post office sticker on it, simply so I'd have made a change on it.  No improvement, really.

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People Vote For Washing Machines

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Some years ago, in China, I was met at the airport by a man who was taking me to a speaking engagement.  In the parking lot, before unlocking his new and meticulously cared-for automobile, he placed a hand on its roof and said with quiet pride, "This is my car."

In that instant, I saw two things:

First, that my contact had earned that car with his own honest labor and had good reason to be proud of his accomplishment.

And second, that any hopes we may have of solving the energy crisis that involve China or any of the poor countries of the Earth voluntarily curbing their desires for American/European levels of prosperity are nothing but pipe dreams.

I've been thinking about that moment ever since.  In the video above, Hans Rosling expands quite movingly on this same basic insight.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 181

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I would like to apologize to George W. Bush. 


This was a rather obvious notion for an essay in which I would say he was right about the WMD's, right about the Iraq war not costing us a penny, and so on and on -- and then at the end say, But I can't.  Because he was wrong on all counts.

I didn't write it, though, because it immediately revealed itself to be mean-spirited.  It would have been a depressing exercise.

I honestly wish he'd been right on all counts.  I would have been happy to apologize for real.

Down at the bottom is an old photo for A. I. Poland Jewelers in Manayunk, down the hill from me.  Alas, Poland's closed recently after something like ninety years in the hood.  Visiting it was sort of a combination of going back in time and visiting the cave of Ali Baba's thieves.

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A Diamond As Big As Our Dreams

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I played hooky today.  I went to Chestnut Hill with Marianne and had lunch on the front porch of the Chestnut Grill.  Then I went to Big Blue Marble and browsed through the books with no specific intentions at all.  Nothing I wanted to buy for research.  Nothing I had to read to keep up with the field.  I just bought something for pleasure.

So, all in all, it was a day well and pleasantly wasted.

Okay, yes, I did take the experiment that physicist John Cramer kindly provided me and fit it into what I believe is now the absolute final draft of "The Woman Who Shook the World Tree."  But that was fun, so it hardly counts.


And speaking of the poetry of science . . .

If you haven't heard this already, you really need to know about it.  Scientists have discovered a new planet.  Made entirely out of diamond.  F. Scott Fitzgerald's fantasy ain't even in the running.

Check it out here.


Above: What a pleasant place and way/Where and how to waste one's day!

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 180

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This is how we appearto the unsentimental eye of God.I doubt our interiorsare any better.
This was torn from a Taschen Books catalog.  As I said before, their art books are wonderful and their smut books purely a matter of taste.  This one was a photo book of working class swingers and I can't help but suspect they're being presented for our scorn rather than admiration.

Nevertheless I have to admire this pair's willingness to publicly display normal human bodies.  That hideous smiley-face is a device Taschen uses to keep their catalog clean and make readers more anxious to buy the uncensored book.

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The End of the Heptology

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I've posted the seventh and last excerpt from my conversation with James Patrick Kelly at Renovation.  This one is titled A Quiet Place to Work While God Finishes Eating Our Brains .  In it, we discuss what we expect to accomplish in what remains of our careers.


Oh, and speaking of Dragonstairs . . . 

I am not going to be overblogging Marianne's Dragonstairs Press because that would make her enterprise look like a subset of my own.  However I thought I should mention that A Midwinter's Tale is sold out, and that she only has four complete sets of the Darger & Surplus chapbooks left.  This is one of the advantages of being a nano-press -- you don't have to devote a lot of space to storing the inventory.

I just wanted to let those who moved fast to buy the items they wanted know that their alacrity was not wasted.

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