Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 24

E-Book Three-Book Sale! Vacuum Bones of the Drift! Friday Only!

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As happens on an irregular but kinda frequent schedule, Open Road Media is having a sale of some of my work in e-book format. This time, it's a bundle of three novels: Vacuum Flowers, Bones of the Earth, and In the Drift will be available for purchase this Friday, September 15, for $3.99.  (US only.)

That's a pretty good deal if you a) read e-books, b) don't have those three of my novels, and c) would like to read them.

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A Time-Line for Slow-Starting Gonnabes

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Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, who labored long and hard to create a book-length series of interviews with yours truly,  Being Michael Swanwick, shared with me a solicited blurb from John Clute recently

“Some authors refuse to talk about themselves or their work. Others do so, but run out of new things to say. Only a few have the fertility and the mental legs to go deep and long. J. G. Ballard and Samuel R. Delany and Robert Silverberg are three who’ve done so, at great length: but the books containing interviews with them, which take up hundreds of pages, end too soon. And so it is with Michael Swanwick. The 300 pages of Being Michael Swanwick are not enough. It is only the beginning of a fractal journey into the art and artifice and accident and fatedness inspiring his work that make almost every story Michael’s written over the near half century of a brilliant and prolific career so much worth talking about. The more we read, the more we want. The more we want from him, the more we gain.”

This is heady praise. But I don't quote it in an attempt to win your admiration. Ignore all that.

 By a coincidence, over on Facebook, in response to a comment that surely I was always a good writer, my old friend Jay Schauer, himself a very good writer and a much earlier-bloomer than me, posted in response to a comment that I was surely always a good writer:

As Michael's former next-door dormmate, I'd like to mention that he was NOT always a good writer. I read some of his early fiction, and it wasn't that good. But his determination to learn and improve was hugely present. I honestly thought he didn't have the chops, and told him so. He proved me wrong -- hugely wrong. Now I look to him for inspiration and guidance. I have no hope of ever being as good a writer as Michael, but I can learn from his outstanding stories, and more important from his complete devotion his craft. I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel gratitude for his work.

 After which, Marianne Porter, the owner-editor-proprietor of Dragonstairs Press (and by sheer coincidence my wife) wrote:

I met him a few years later. By then he was writing concentrated, intense, dazzling ... fragments. But always writing.

Now let's put together a timeline:  1966: One night, my junior year of high school, after finishing my homework, I read The Lord of the Rings. I determine to become a writer. 1972: The last year of college, Jay still believes my work is hopelessly bad. He is right. 1975: I get a job working as a clerk-typist for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Health, Bureau of Laboratories in Landis State Hospital, where I meet Marianne. I have progressed all the way to writing interesting fragments. 1979:  I finish my first science fiction story. It's not very good. Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann show me how to fix it.  1980: I publish my first two stories, "Ginungagap" and "The Feast of Saint Janis." They both place on the Nebula ballot. And lose. 1990: Stations of the Tide wins a Nebula, my first major award after a decade of losing I forget how many. 2023: John Clute's kind and generous praise of my work.
 So I dedicated my life to writing at age 16 and might be judged a success at age 40. Some of us are just slow starters. But I am still going, still writing, at age 72. I spell all this out for the sake of any gonnabe writers who are feeling discouraged but won't quit anyway. (As a rule of thumb, if you can quit, you should; this is a rough way to earn a living.) There are writers who start young and are first-rate almost immediately. That's not all of us. Sometimes it takes a big chunk of your life to get anywhere. Sometimes that's just the price of admission. End of sermon. Go thou and sin no more. * 

The Best of Me, Volume Two

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Look what came in the mail a week or so ago! A do-it-yourself Bookhenge kit.

Okay, it's not a very original joke. You probably made one of these yourself when you were a kid. If you're a published author, you definitely made one of these as an adult.

Nevertheless, I am extremely pleased with the Subterranean Press volume.  It's beautifully made, has a terrific cover by Lee Moyer, and it's chock-a-blck with stories that are, if I may apply the soft sell, well worth reading.

So I'm happy. As witness the fact that, like every other author in the world, my first impulse was to create Bookhenge.

 

And since you ask . . .

Here's the Table of Contents:

Introduction: The Apple Tree, the Vacuum Tubes, and All the World BesidesThe Mongolian WizardThe Man in GreyAncient EnginesStarlight ExpressUrdumheimTin MarshDragon SlayerSteadfast CastleNirvana or BustThe Last GeekOf Finest Scarlet Was Her GownEighteen Songs by DebussyThe She-Wolf’s Hidden GrinMoon DogsHuginn and Muninn—and What Came AfterThe Dala HorseLibertarian RussiaDreadnoughtAn Episode of StardustThe Skysailor’s TaleGhost ShipsAn Empty House with Many DoorsAnnie Without CrowPassage of EarthThe New PrometheusFor I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back AgainThe Beast of TaraPushkin the American“Hello,” Said the StickThere Was an Old WomanThe Bordello in FaerieCloudThe Woman Who Shook the World TreeGoblin LakeThe Last Days of Old NightThe Scarecrow’s BoyUniverse Box

 Not a bad bunch of stories if I do say so myself.

You can buy the book (if you wish) at your local independent bookstore or direct from Subterranean Press. It costs $50.00 for the signed, limited edition hardcover but only $6.99 for the e-book. Click here if that's what you want. Or just go their website and wander about, daydreaming about having enough mad money on hand to buy literally everything here.

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The Christopher Morley Wine Challenge

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Christopher Morley, newspaperman and middle class bon vivant, wrote an essay about wine and the Prohibition which contains the following partial paragraph, eulogizing wines that were no longer legal in the United States:

There are names that I am selfish enough to enjoy rehearsing. Musigny, rich in bouquet and ether; Romanee-Conti, d'une delicatesse. Clos Vougeot, potent and velvety, Richebourg with esquisite power and aroma. Hospice de Beaune, strong but a touch acrid; Pommard that tickles the cheekbone; Pouilly, the perfect luncheon wine. Nuits St. Georges, bright and gracious. Chambertin, which seems to me just faintly metallic, bitterer than the soft Musigny. Meuralt, which I ran above Pouilly, and the adorable Chablis Moutonne, clear and fine as the lizard's bell-note when he rings, like an elfin anvil, softly under the old stone steps in the mild French dusk.

Sounds good, doesn't it?  A delightful mouthful to reproduce at home over the space of a year or so, I thought. So I set out to see how much it would cost to sample those wines. Not his vintage, of course. But whatever was contemporaneously available. 

And the answer? Choosing always the cheapest bottle in the category... It came to a little over four thousand dollars.

Even allowing for inflation, Morley couldn't possibly have spent so much on wine. Clearly, wine used to be a lot cheaper back when than it is now;

There is no moral to this post. I just thought you'd find it interesting.

E-Book Sales Today & Sunday! Also B&N!

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 I have three promotions to announce today! Wow. I don't think that's ever happened to me before.

First up is the e-book of  Bones of the Earth, my hard-science dinosaur novel and easily the single novel that was most fun to research. It is available TODAY ONLY for only $1.99. Available in the US only.

Second up is Vacuum Flowers, often mistaken as a cyberpunk novel. Actually, it's a bright and inventive tour of a future solar system, when human brains can be easily reprogrammed. Available this Sunday, September 3, again for $1.99 and, again, in the US only.

And then there's the third . . .

Here's what Barnes & Noble has just recently informed me:

B&N will be running a pre-order sale between 9/6 and 9/8, exclusively for B&N Members and Premium Members. Members will receive 25% off all pre-orders (print, eBook, audio), and Premium Members will receive an extra 10% off print pre-orders. All TPG titles available for pre-order at that time (titles with pub dates between 9/12/23-8/27/24) will be eligible. This means Stations of the Tide in its Trade Paperback edition!

So there you have it. If e-books are your thing or if you're a B&N Member or Premium Member, this is your chance. 

Enjoy!

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Red Fox Blue Moon on Sale this Wednesday from Moonrise to Midnight

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There will be a blue moon this Wednesday, August 30th, which means that Marianne Porter's nanopress Dragonstairs Press will be selling 69 lovingly crafted and scandalously affordable copies of Red Fox Blue Moon starting at moonrise--and then burning any unsold copies at midnight.

Here's Marianne's press release:

Red Fox Blue Moon is another of Dragonstairs' blue moon projects.  This is a 5 1/2” by 4 1/4” hand-stitched chapbook, numbered, and signed by author Michael Swanwick. 

Roxy first appeared in Little Narnia, the publisher's Roxborough back yard,  in April, 2023. She had nipples like daggers, strongly suggesting that she was eating for a family of youngsters. Always, she came through around 2:30 a.m. Very quickly, the neighborhood's feral cats learned to stay away at that time. This is the story of how she saved the world. Well, her world.

As with Dragonstairs' previous blue moon projects, Red Fox Blue Moon is issued in an edition of 69, available only briefly, during the full, blue, moon.  After that time, all unsold copies, and all other physical relics (drafts, paste-ups, rejected designs) will be burned.  The fire will be recorded and shown on the web.

Sales will span the blue moon, the second full moon in August.  Red Fox Blue Moon will be available August 30, 2023 from 7:48pm (moonrise) to midnight.  Time given is specific to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is Eastern Daylight Savings Time.  Visit www.dragonstairs.com to purchase.

Shipped Domestically, Red Fox Blue Moon, $11

Shipped Internationally, Red Fox Blue Moon, $12

And you may well ask . . .

Why publish on a blue moon? Why 69 copies? Why burn the unsold copies?

Simply put, this is done in emulation of  Tunglið forlag (The Moon's Publishing Company), a Reykjavik publishing house that publishes books in editions of 69 during a full moon--and then burns all copies that don't sell that day.

The complete story can be found here.

Above: Three of the chapbooks with selfie by Roxy, employing a Cabela trailcam.

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Jack Dann on Alternate History

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Look what came in the mail yesterday!
Jack Dann, who lives in Australia where summer is winter and people walk upside-down on their hands, some time back decided to get an advanced degree in literature. God knows why. It's not his job to write academic analysis of other writers. It's academics' job to write academic analysis of his work.
But never mind that.
An offshoot of that quixotic literary enterprise is this book. I haven't read all of it yet. But I did, with the aid of its index, read every bit of it touching upon me.
I'm a modest man, but human nevertheless.
The heart of this book is a long virtual interview Jack did with a number of writers he quite reasonably thought would have worthwhile thoughts about the literature of alternate history.
And so we did. I'm going back immediately after posting this to read Jack's synopsis of the whole. But the richest parts of this fruitcake, it seems to me is in the clash of opinions as to exactly what alternate history is and should be . The opinions are vivid and expressed without self-censorship.   Sometimes the juxtaposition of voices is actively comic. As here: 

Michael Swanwick: Speaking only for my own work, not anybody else's, I feel strongly that the deviance from actual history should be both colorful and comprehensible to the reader. As familiarity with history declines not only in America but around the world, this last becomes increasingly more difficult to achieve.

Harry Turtledove: Thou shalt not bore the reader.

Ouch. 

(Although if you have to be one-upped on this particular subject, having it be by the King of Alternate History takes some of the sting out.)

Literary theory is my guilty pleasure. So I'm going to enjoy the heck out of this book. It's possible you will too. You already know which side of this particular fence you're on..

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A Quick Visit to See Whistler's Mother

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Marianne and I made a quick jaunt to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see James McNeill Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. Better known as Whistler's Mother, it's a painting you normally have to go to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris to see.

And, yeah, it's a great painting. The flatness and stillness of the composition are striking, and it seems to me to be a work that recognizes that abstraction is on its way. The old woman's face--you can see that she's thinking, but there's not the least clue as to her thoughts--makes this a very mysterious work. 

The PMA has made a small and very interesting show of the painting's visit to Philadelphia, its first since the late nineteenth century, by pairing it with paintings and etchings by Cecilia Beaux, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Dox Thrash, Alice Neel, and Sidney Goodman of their mothers (or, in Beaux's case, of her sister, since their mother died when they were young). All were artists with Philadelphia connections and some of them were definitely in dialogue with Whistler's painting. Tanner's painting in particular benefits from seeing how brilliantly he contrasts his portrayal of his own beloved mother with the painting which he definitely saw in person. It's a beautiful and moving painting that you could look at for a long, long time.

But what's most interesting about the show is that all the other portrayals of mothers are portraits, meant to convey a great deal about their subjects' personalities. But not Whistler's. His mother is an element in a composition, much like a bunch of grapes in a still life. In fact, she was a last-minute addition, drafted into the picture when the scheduled model fell ill and couldn't sit for it.

A terrific little one-room show and one I highly recommend if you're in the area. It runs until October 29.

And I wish I knew . . .

 I wonder what the original model, the one who fell ill, was like. Was she as old as Whistler's mother? Or was she a woman in the prime of her life? Whistler was baffled that everyone wanted to know about his mother. But that fact, and the unreadability of her expression, were definitely factors in its popularity. Would the painting be as famous today if the model had showed up? I have no idea.

If you happen to know, I'd be grateful for your posting the information in the comments below.

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The Buildings Are Barking: Diane Noomin in Memorium by Bill Griffith

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A couple of decades ago, I was in the waiting room of the Jiffi-Lube with the pervasive smell of free coffee and well-fingered copies of Sports Illustrated while my car's oil was being changed when an  ordinary-looking man struck up a conversation. He was a widower and he wanted to talk about his late wife. What a remarkable woman she was. How much she meant to him and they to each other. And, finally, how their time together, over so many years, made life bearable for him now that she was gone.

Then the mechanic came in to tell him his car was ready. He smiled and shrugged and apologized for boring me. Then he was gone, taking his ordinary story with him.

What an extraordinary thing a good marriage can be!

Which brings me to this review of The Buildings Are Barking: Diane Noomin in Memorium by Bill Griffith. Noomin and Griffith were both underground cartoonists back in the day. Griffith is best known for Zippy the Pinhead which, improbably, became a daily newspaper comic strip. Noomin was best known for Didi Glitz, a loud-mouthed, abrasive, transgressive, big-haired, short-skirted portrait of everything the cartoonist ever feared becoming... and yet possessed of a humanity that is hard to deny. I had no idea before picking up this 24-page comic that the two of them were married.

The book is heartfelt.

It is first of all a convincing portrait of grief. It is also a paean to Griffith's wife and an acknowledgement of all she meant to him and to his work. It is a recognition of Noomin's importance as a pioneer feminist cartoonist--and a major one. And it is a prayer by a heartbroken man that he may someday find solace. 

But to me the most moving part of the work is the last panel of page 18 when Griffith is about to write about what his wife was like when they first met... and cannot. He is interrupted by one of his regular characters, Koko the Clown, who leads him into a final fantasy that closes the book quite nicely. The caption reads: '"She was... um... she was..."

Here I must insist on my authority as a professional writer for most of my life. I read this panel as the author reaching to describe who his wife was, independent of him, and failing. Not because he couldn't put it in words but because if he did those words would go on forever. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, as Wittgenstein said.

So Griffith cut to the conclusion. As a fellow husband, I have to respect that.

This is a short work, only two dozen pages long. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, then by my count this is something like 140,000 words long. Which is to say, it is a novel.

Oh, and as for what Diane Noomin was like? Griffith's portrait of her on the cover says it all: She was a talented, competent, confident, and attractive woman who knew her husband loved her.

And here, in parvum, is her ordinary/extraordinary story.

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Remembering the Monday Morning After the Death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Movingfrom Vermont to Virginia at age 17, back in the sixties, was like suddenlybeing teleported to an alien planet.

My parentshad rented a house for a year in Highland Springs, just outside of Richmond, togive them time to search for a permanent home. The day after we moved in, ournext-door neighbor—a pleasant young man with a blond buzz cut, a policecadet—moved out and the FBI and the State Troopers promptly showed up to gothrough the house. He was, it turned out, a violent white supremacist and therewere slogans and symbols painted on all the interior walls, and that’s all we everlearned. Friday and Saturday nights, moonshiners of violent repute sold cheaphootch to broken-down alkies in a patch of scrub woods not two blocks away.Some of my new friends paid a visit to a radical rightwing Mom & Pop storeand brought back Minuteman stickers and anti-Catholic newspapers for me.

I was aCatholic. It had never occurred to me that there were people who would likenothing better than to kill me for that.

And thenthere was race.

Back inWinooski High, there were roughly two hundred students. Only two of them wereBlack because there was only one Black family in Winooski and they only had twokids. Vermont was very white back then. But in Highland Springs HighSchool, there were something like six hundred students. It had just six Blackstudents and those only because the school was under a court order tointegrate. Exactly one percent in each case, but for very different reasons.

I neverdid get to know either of the two Black students in Winooski. They wereextremely popular, and it was hard to get anywhere near them. But in Virginia Idid become friends with one-sixth of the school’s nonwhite population. His namewas Ron and I quite liked him. He was smart, forthright, optimistic, and whenthe two of us competed for the same summer job at the weather station at theairport, he won. It was a close thing. But he was just a little overall betterthan me.

Then,on Thursday, April 4th 1968, a gunman namedJames Earl Ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

My friends Daphne and Robert were outbowling that evening, when the news was patched into the intercom system.Everybody but they two cheered. Then one man began to sing God Bless Americaand all the rest joined in. Robert hustled Daphne outside. She barely made itinto the parking lot before throwing up.

Thingswere pretty solemn at school the next day. All I remember of that, other than Daphne’sstory, was that at the end of classes, I casually said, “See you on Monday,” toRon.

“Oh,I won’t be here Monday,” he said. “I’ll be in jail.”

“What?!”

“Allof us are going to riot this weekend. It’s the only thing we can do to makeourselves heard. The police will arrest everyone. So I’m not sure exactly whenI’ll be back.”

Ronsaid that so casually, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

Andwhen I came back to school on Monday morning, for the first time in my life Iwas attending an all-white high school.

 

Above: The image of the old Highland Springs High School building was taken from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I'm sure the new building is much better integrated than the old one was when I was a senior there.

 

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