Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 36

Brief Essays on Genre, Part 14: True Crime

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On True Crime

 

People like this genre. Let them.

 

My wife’s Aunt Catherine, a woman I admired a great deal, was murdered by a serial killer.

 

When I mentioned this to my agent, she asked if I’d like to write a book about it.

 

“God no,” I said.

 

--Michael Swanwick

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Jack Faust e-Book Sale! Wednesday Only!!!

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 I am informed by Open Road Media that the e-book of my novel Jack Faust will be on sale this Wednesday, July 3, 2022. That's $1.99  and, alas, in the US only.

 I came down with the determination to write my own version of the Faust legend when I was 16  years old and it took rather a long time before I was capable of tackling that great theme. At some point during that long wait, it became a meditation upon half a millennium of scientific progress.

So you are warned.

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One Day Tales of Old Earth Sale! Also, My Confluence Schedule

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 As they do rather a lot, OPen Road Media is having a one-day sale of one of my books. This time it's Tales of Old Earth, a rather splendid collection of my short fiction. It will be available for $1.99 only in the US on Friday, July 29th. 

Here's what they told me:

We are pleased to let you know that the following ebook(s) will be featured in price promotions soon.

ISBN13 Title Author Promo Type Country Start Date End Date Promo Price 9781504036511 Tales of Old Earth Swanwick, Michael ORM - 1K Sale Weekly US 2022-07-29 2022-07-29 $1.99

 

And as always . . .

I'm on the road again. This time I'm off to Confluence, the venerable Pittsburgh-area science fiction convention. It runs from Friday afternoon to 3 p.m. Sunday. At:

Sheraton Pittsburgh Airport Hotel
1160 Thorn Run Road
Coraopolis, PA 15108

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And here's my schedule:

Saturday 10 am: What You Might Have Missed: Books and Movies (SF/F and otherwise) that Many Fans Would Like But May Not Have Heard Of [Commonwealth East]

Charles Oberndorf, Michael Swanwick, Lesley Wheeler (M), Jim Mann

 

The title says it all: which books and movies have you read or seen that you feel that many of those around you might have missed? 

 

Saturday Noon: Reading Short SF: Why You Should Be Reading Short Fiction, Both Classic and New [Commonwealth West]

Neil Clarke, Michael Swanwick, Vera Brook (M)

 

Short fiction has long been at the cutting edge of the SF field. Our panel recommends works you may not be familiar with but should be. 

 

Saturday 4 pm: Reading [Solstice]

Michael Swanwick

 

Saturday 5 pm: Autographing [Near Registration]

Michael Swanwick

 

Sunday 10 am: Kaffeeklatsch [225]

Michael Swanwick 

 

This will be a fun weekend! If you see me, be sure to say hi.

 

 

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Brief Essays on Genre, Part 13: On Narrative Hooks

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 On Narrative Hooks

Narrative hooks ought to work, but they don’t.  Instead of drawing the reader into the story, they prepare him or her for a terrible disappointment. There is a very simple reason for this. They—

 

See what I did there?

 

--Michael Swanwick

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Honoring Gardner Dozois at the Pen & Pencil Club

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Last Friday, I had the honor of unveiling the Gardner Dozois plaque at the Pen & Pencil Club with Gardner's son Christopher Casper. The Pen & Pencil being a press club, the plaque was veiled with pages from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Gardner is, of course, best known for his 19 years as editor of Asimov's Science Fiction and his 35 years editing The Year's Best Science Fiction. But he began his literary career as a military journalist for The Rolling Review and then Stars and Stripes. His training as a journalist formed the foundation for his subsequent careers as a writer and an editor.

The plaque was paid for by Gardner's friends and fellow club members (known among ourselves as "the cronies") with the support of the officers of the Pen & Pencil Club.

Not shown are the many friends of Gardner who showed up for the dedication. But their presence was greatly appreciated. After the unveiling, they lingered for a celebratory party in which we all exchanged our favorite stories about Gardner. 

Though I did not say it at the time, I could not help thinking of Dr. Watson's words about Sherlock Holmes, "I shall ever regard him as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known."

And, yes, even unsaid, I could hear Gardner scoffing at those words.

 

And because I know you want to hear one of those stories. . .

 When he was a military journalist, Gardner was sent to take a picture of a crashed helicopter.

He went to the airport and waited for the helicopter sent to take him to the crash site. He was standing on the tarmac when Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! the copter came down and CRASHED! right in front of him.

So, figuring that one crashed helicopter looked like any other, Gardner took a photo of the ruined helicopter and went back to base.

 

 

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TALES OF OLD EARTH! One!! Day!!! E-Book!!!! Sale!!!!! Saturday Only!!!!!!

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I've been informed by Open Road Media, my e-book publisher that my collection Tales of Old Earth will go on sale tomorrow, Saturday July 23, for one day only, in the US only.

 Here's what they sent me:

We are pleased to let you know that the following ebook(s) will be featured in price promotions soon.

ISBN13 Title Author Promo Type Country Start Date End Date Promo Price 9781504036511 Tales of Old Earth Swanwick, Michael ORM - Portalist NL US 2022-07-23 2022-07-23 $1.99

 

So if you'd like to read some of my extremely good short fiction, and you like e-books... Well, here's your chance.

(I believe in the soft sell. It's much less rude.)

 

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Pondering "Eshat's Temple"

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This is not a review, exactly. It’s more of a speculation on “Eshat’s Temple,”a story by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro that begins:

 

In the shimmering white settlement of Belaqua, there lived a woman named Eshat who was said to be the most just Mistress of a House of Books who had ever lived in the nine realms. Rumor claimed that her skills with the Translator’s Almanac were so magnificent, and her attunement to the Goddess Ayfer so strong, that not once during her decades of service had Eshat failed to match up a reader with the text that would prove most life-changing to that particular person.

 

In quick order a picture is drawn, and drawn well, of a fantasy world ruled (at least in the nine realms) by librarians.

 

I think we can all agree that this would be a fine thing.

 

With wisdom and a ready supply of reference works, Eshat has made her town as just and happy a place as is humanly possible. This being a story, however, and stories requiring conflict, a series of events transpire that strike at the center of the town’s happiness.

 

At which point I must ask you to go directly to Beyond Ceaseless Skies to read “Eshat’s Temple” by clicking here.

 

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You’re back! Did you read the story? All the way to the end? That’s good because I’m going to stop synopsizing now and go straight to the conclusion of the story. There are nothing but spoilers from here on.

 

Here goes:

 

Eshat is a Muslim name meaning Love. The name of the Goddess, Ayfer, means Moonlight in Turkish. So it’s not much of a stretch to say that Belaqua has been ruled by love and that when Eshat consults moonlight in a vision, she is accessing her creative imagination. When she returns to reality, she no longer needs the fossilized rules codified in a single Almanac and by freeing herself from a single story, inherits all the stories that exist within the near-infinite ocean of streams of stories.

 

So on the surface, this seems to be a story about a woman who trades one story for all stories, authority for freedom, dogma for a world of possibilities. And, yes, it's all of that. But I wonder. It seems possible to me that this is a story about one particular story, and that that particular story is Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”

 

Omelas, you will recall, is a city of perfect happiness which rests upon the misery of a single child. On reaching adulthood, each citizen of the city is shown the child. Most manage to live with the fact. But some few cannot, and walk away to create a city which Le Guin confesses is beyond her imagining.

 

Eshat, it seems to me, is that child grown to adult stature. It is not necessary to explain why she is no longer miserable. Perhaps that misery was fleeting. Maybe Le Guin exaggerated. Perhaps she has merely swallowed back her pain. But in any case, she leads the most constricted of existences. She can only do as the Almanac directs. She has no agency.

 

Then, in the end, Zinos-Amaro grants her that agency. And she walks away from Belaqua/Omelas, the only one in the history of the city whose desertion really matters.

 

Anyway, that’s my theory. What’s your take on the story?

 

 

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Brief Essays on Genre, Part 12: On Naturalistic Fiction

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On Naturalistic Fiction

 

Fiction was full of absurdities: men turned to asses, women finding true love, boys riding geese. It was time for a cleansing. The proper business of literature, it was declared, was recording ordinary lives exactly as they were lived.

 

No one thought to ask why, in four thousand years of recorded fiction, this had never been done before.

 

--Michael Swanwick

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Brief Essays on Genre, Part 12: On Naturalism

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On Naturalism

 

Fiction was full of absurdities: men turned to asses, women finding true love, boys riding geese. It was time for a cleansing. The proper business of literature, it was declared, was recording ordinary lives exactly as they were lived.

 

No one thought to ask why, in four thousand years of recorded fiction, this had never been done before.

 

--Michael Swanwick

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Claes Oldenurg's Clothespin

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Claes Oldenburg died the other day and the world is a little less fun than it used to be. 

 Oldenburg's best-known works, often created with his wife Coosje van Bruggen, were enormous sculptures of everyday items. There are four such sculptures in Philadelphia--a broken button on the University of Pennsylvania campus, a four-way plug in the sculpture garden of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a paintbrush with a daub of fallen paint on the sidewalk below in front of the Pennsylvania Academy of fine art, and a clothespin directly across from City Hall.

That's it up above.

When the Clothespin went up in 1976 (Oldenburg denied that the spring, shaped like a 7 on one side and a 6 on the other, had anything to do with 1776 or the Bicentennial it was commissioned to celebrate; but few Philadelphians believed him), street vendors tried selling framed souvenir photos with a real clothespin glued over the sculpture. But they didn't work and they didn't sell. Because Oldenburg didn't create a realistic clothespin but an idealized clothespin. It looked no more like a real clothespin than Michelangelo's David looks like your typical schlub of a couch potato.

 If Claes Oldenburg had never existed, Philadelphia would not today have a 45-foot tall heroic statue of a clothespin.

I think that says it all.

You can find NPR's memorial to Oldenberg here.

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