Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 37

. Claes Oldenberg died the other day and the world is a ...

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

 Oldenberg'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 (Oldenberg 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 Oldenberg 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 Oldenberg 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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Sunday Morning Transport FREE

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Sunday Morning Transport, I am informed, is having a sale. Or, rather, something better than a sale because they're giving away a 60-day subscription to anyone who wants one.

So what is Sunday Morning Transport and how am I involved in it? Easy answer first: I was asked to submit a story of less than I forget how many thousand words, but it wasn't many. So I decided to see just how much classic adventure SF I could fit into that small space. Quite a bit, as it turned out. So they bought it and "The Warm Equations" will be made available on August 7.

Now for the tough question. Sunday Morning Transport is sort of a magazine--only not. It's more of a kind of streaming service. You subscribe to it and in return, every Sunday morning, you receive a science fiction story in your email. Editors Julian Yap and Fran Wilde put a lot of work into finding and editing a varied selection of science fictional experiences, and now you get to try the service out without risking a penny.

 You can get your free subscription here.

 

Here's a more detailed description:

 

Stories help us connect — with each other and with the future. They transform us. Subscribing to Sunday Morning Transport means bringing an outstanding speculative short story to your inbox every week, fifty weeks a year.

Sunday Morning Transport readers are authors, thinkers, scientists, artists, dreamers. With a single science fiction or fantasy short story each Sunday, we connect across space and time. We deliver, right to your inbox: a moment of whimsy; a deep dive into an unknown world; a single illuminating transformation; a vibrant community of readers and writers built around the best new speculative stories each week.

Free subscribers receive one story a month. Paid subscribers receive one story each week, fifty weeks a year.  For paid subscribers, there’s more: the opportunity to join in a conversation about story, to ask questions, and to help build a year’s worth of moments with authors including Max Gladstone, Karen Lord, Elwin Cotman, Kij Johnson, Kat Howard, Elsa Sjunnesson, Kathleen Jennings, Sarah Monette, Juan Martinez, E.C. Myers, Maureen McHugh, Tessa Gratton, Sarah Pinsker, Yoon Ha Lee, Michael Swanwick, Brian Slattery, Malka Older, and many more. 

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. Sunday Morning Transport, I am informed, is having a sa...

.

 

Sunday Morning Transport, I am informed, is having a sale. Or, rather, something better than a sale because they're giving away a 60-day subscription to anyone who wants one.

So what is Sunday Morning Transport and how am I involved in it? Easy answer first: I was asked to submit a story of less than I forget how many thousand words, but it wasn't many. So I decided to see just how much classic adventure SF I could fit into that small space. Quite a bit, as it turned out. So they bought it and "The Warm Equations" will be made available on August 7.

Now for the tough question. Sunday Morning Transport is sort of a magazine--only not. It's more of a kind of streaming service. You subscribe to it and in return, every Sunday morning, you receive a science fiction story in your email. Editors Julian Yap and Fran Wilde put a lot of work into finding and editing a varied selection of science fictional experiences, and now you get to try the service out without risking a penny.

 You can get your free subscription here.

 

Here's a more detailed description:

 

Stories help us connect — with each other and with the future. They transform us. Subscribing to Sunday Morning Transport means bringing an outstanding speculative short story to your inbox every week, fifty weeks a year.

Sunday Morning Transport readers are authors, thinkers, scientists, artists, dreamers. With a single science fiction or fantasy short story each Sunday, we connect across space and time. We deliver, right to your inbox: a moment of whimsy; a deep dive into an unknown world; a single illuminating transformation; a vibrant community of readers and writers built around the best new speculative stories each week.

Free subscribers receive one story a month. Paid subscribers receive one story each week, fifty weeks a year.  For paid subscribers, there’s more: the opportunity to join in a conversation about story, to ask questions, and to help build a year’s worth of moments with authors including Max Gladstone, Karen Lord, Elwin Cotman, Kij Johnson, Kat Howard, Elsa Sjunnesson, Kathleen Jennings, Sarah Monette, Juan Martinez, E.C. Myers, Maureen McHugh, Tessa Gratton, Sarah Pinsker, Yoon Ha Lee, Michael Swanwick, Brian Slattery, Malka Older, and many more. 

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ROT Fest! Tire Tossing! Phantom Soup! An Ordinary Saturday at the Bookstore

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My friend Alex Dawson recently built a dieselpunk used book store atop a '59 flatbed truck, which he calls the Rac-On-Tour (years ago, he used to own a bookstore named The Raconteur). And since he was already deep into Whimsy Country, he decided to have a monthly event, ROT Fest, with various attractions, including a fire eater. 

So that's where I'll be tomorrow. I'll be doing a brief reading and a question-and-answer session and there will be a selection of my books that you can (but don't have to) purchase. The event runs from noon to six p.m. But I'll be reading at 3:15 p.m.

Mostly because: How often do I get to do a reading at a used book store with a fire eater?

That's at:

Highland Park Farmers Market

Main Street Highland Park

212 Raritan Avenue

Highland Park, NJ

Noon to 6:00 p.m.

July 16, 2022  

 

And here's Alex's official pitch and schedule:

What is ROT FEST? It's Ren Fair and Wasteland and Comic Con and The Highland Games. It's sword-fighting and fire-spitting, It's winning an award for the most extravagant beard or for throwing a truck tire farther than anyone else. It's author readings and live music. Collectibles, antiques, vintage clothing, and trading cards. It's cosplay. It's taxidermy and outsider art. Pre-war motorcycles and hot rods. It's blacksmithing and glass blowing. It's raconteurs and roustabouts. Rotgut and goblin pulp. It's Neil Gaiman and Dr. Who, Hellboy and Spirited Away. It's Mad Max. It's Diagon Alley meets Burning Man. It's books, books, and more books. Why just R.O.T., when you can R.O.T. (&) FEST(er). ***ROT FEST II (July 16) roster: VENDORS/ARTISTS: The Rac-On-Tour (of course): curated used book caravan built on the back of a '53 International flatbed. Bongo Dave: vintage vinyl (outlaw country, jazz, funk/soul, soundtracks, international, 80's). Chris T. (The Nihilistics, Missing Foundation, CBS, NPR, SiriusXM, WFMU, WNYC, Writer/Producer) brings you THAT CAVE: Man Cave & More! Antiques • Books • Collectibles • Electronics • Guitars/Amps/Effects • Hand Tools • Hi-Fi • Lighters • Old Paper • Vintage Toys • Vintage Clothes, etc. Many cool, interesting & useful items – no junk.  Jerviks: authentic Viking Reenactment. A Living History Display with an educational emphasis on daily life of the period, games, stories, combat demonstration, and wares for sale. Apex Primate: Simple, dark designs inspired by the natural world and the ancient human animal. On t-shirts. Joe Recchia: An artist who makes beautiful monsters to cope with real ones. Plushies w. zombie teeth. Eyeballs in weird places. Think (Francis) Bacon meets (Rick) Baker. Pan's Labyrinth in oil, resin, and shag.  Jack Shergalis: artist, illustrator, comics creator; psychedelic imagery, intricately inked line work over saturated colors. Roots in Peter Max and Adventure Time. Celia Sanchez, a multidisciplinary artist based out of New Brunswick.  Michael Jarmus: sci-fi/fantasy vendor, selling swords and a range of fantasy/science fiction memorabilia. Soup Phantom Food Truck: Don't let the name fool you, they do much more than soup: BBQ Pulled Pork over Mac 'n' Cheese, Jambalaya, Chicken and Shrimp Gumbo, Pepper Steak over Rice, Seafood Paella. Plus fresh, green salads! Food so good, it's scary.x PERFORMANCES: 12:45 PM - Karnevil Side Show: Classic carnival feats of pain proof daring and wonder (including bed of nails, ladder of blades, human blockhead, straitjacket escape, and more). 1:00 - - Joe Galuppo, folk singer/songwriter.  2:00 PM - Karnevil Side Show 2:15 PM - Keith McCarthy, an award winning Asbury Park alt-country/Americana singer/songwriter; front man for the Sunday Blues. 3:15 PM - World Fantasy Award winner Michael Swanwick. A master of fantasy/science fiction and "one of the country's most respected authors" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Swanwick's work has been called "marvelous" (New York Times) and "extraordinary" (Wall Street Journal). His stories have appeared in countless magazines (and Best of Year anthologies) and have been translated into dozens of languages. His novels include the New York Times Notable Book The Iron Dragon’s Daughter and the Nebula Award-winner Stations of the Tide. He is only author to win five Hugo Awards in six years. Check out the adaptation of his story Ice Age on Netflix's Love Death + Robots. 3:30 PM - BELIEVE: Tales From the Crypt(id). Join me, and nine talented young writers/former students as we "crack that cryp" and declaim brand new, original stories about fearsome critters that may or may not exist. We'll make you believe. With Tyler Gamba, Devon Borkowski, Melissa Cecchina, Michaela Schwab, Gregory Giovannini, Ben Rivera, Benjamin Rivera Torres, Mason Springer-Lipton, Julian Lance, and yours truly (Alex Dawson). Plus special guest Stoker Award nominee Carol Gyzander reading from her new book, Forget Me Not, a new cryptid novella in the Systema Paradoxa series from NeoParadoxa. 4:45 - Karnevil Side Show. 5:00 - Needlez: Fire performance, includes eating, spitting, and other skills based on juggling, baton twirling, poi spinning, and object manipulation. CONTESTS: The Unshavian - George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion) was a playwright with a big badass beard. His fans were called Shavians. Got a big badass beard? Come be judged by Justin from The Pogo Beard Company. The Unshaviest wins bragging rights and ROT bux.  Tire Toss - How far can you toss a sixty pound tire with a 5-lug rim? Farthest throw gets bragging rights and ROT bux. Darts - Hit the cork on the side of our truck and win ROT bux. Galaga - Beat the ROT's high score on our Galaga arcade cabinet and win, you guessed it, ROT bux. Plus (fingers crossed): vintage motorcycle/hot rod show, taxidermy, and toy collectibles.  *

Brief Essays on Genre, Part 11: On Defining Genre

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 On Defining Genre

The problem with defining a genre—science fiction, for example, or fantasy—is that once you’ve declared what it is, you’ve also declared what it can’t be. And if it can’t be anything but what it has already been, it’s of no interest to any serious artist.

 

--Michael Swanwick

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"The White Leopard"

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Look what came in the mail today! It's the hardcover limited edition of the newest iteration of New Worlds, edited by Nick Gevers and Peter Crowther.  It has a great lineup of stories but I wasn't able to find an easily paste-able table of contents online, so here's a description from PS Publishing's website:

In the 1960s and 1970s, New Worlds magazine, edited by Michael Moorcock, became famous for its avant garde approach to SF, energising the genre’s New Wave with exciting innovations in style, content, and presentation. Here J G Ballard and Brian Aldiss shared pages with Samuel R Delany and Norman Spinrad, Pamela Zoline with M John Harrison, Charles Platt with Harlan Ellison. Hilary Bailey with Thomas M. Disch.

Now PS Publishing, with the enthusiastic endorsement and participation of Moorcock himself, presents the first in a revived New Worlds anthology series. Award-winning co-editors Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers have gathered brilliant new stories by the finest short fiction writers in SF. A sampling:

Continuing his topical yet timeless Jerry Cornelius sequence begun during the heyday of New Worlds, Michael Moorcock delineates ‘The Wokingham Agreement’.Alan Moore, titan of the graphic novel, artfully explores surprising and hilarious events immediately after the Bing Bang in ‘The Improbably Complex High-Energy State’.Gwyneth Jones ventures to the outer solar system and probes the perils of posthumanity in ‘The Ploughshare and the Storm’.Ken MacLeod explores the subtle dangers of a very wired future Europe in ‘Cold Revolution Blues’.Margo Lanagan brings her cunning sidewise sensibility to another England in ‘Tell-Tale Tit’.Michael Swanwick slyly and movingly contemplates combat-machine fetishism in ‘The White Leopard’.

Add tales by Ian R. MacLeod, Lavie Tidhar, Ian Watson, Paul Park, James Lovegrove, M T Hill, Robert Edric, John Grant, a reprint story by Peter Crowther, the first in a series of columns from Steve Aylett, and a knowledgeable Introduction by the noted SF scholar Mike Ashley, and here is New Worlds reborn in all its fabled glory.

This is a wonderful lineup of writers and stories. And Mike Ashley's introductory essay on the history of New Worlds is fascinating. I had known that it had a long and tangled history, but not that it began as a fandom. It is a feast for geeks. Like (ahem) me.

The 200-copy hardcover is sold out. But there are still trade paperbacks available here. Or you could just go to the website here and poke around. I'm sure they have books that you need. 

And because I know you wonder . . .

 My own contribution is a story called "The White Leopard" which is about faded glory and a past that almost--almost!-- cannot be retrieved. Also about repairing a combat land drone. Here's how it begins:

 

He found it in five cardboard boxes in the basement at a suburban estate sale. Ray went to estate sales almost every weekend. It got him away from his wife. Weekdays he spent fixing things in his garage workshop.

 

Doris didn’t like estate sales, consignment shops, or secondhand anything. “I don’t buy used crap!” she often said. “I want to be able to return something if I get tired of it.” Yet she clung to Ray mercilessly, only God knew why.

 

Four of the cartons were marked twenty dollars each. The fifth, which had gotten separated from the others and which he had scoured the basement to find, was ten. He would have paid all he had for them. But because it was Sunday afternoon and the sale was almost over, they knocked half off the price without even being asked. It was clear the sellers had no idea what it was.

 

What it was, was an RQ-6G Leopard.

 

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Brief Essays on Genre, Part 10: On Critics

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On Critics

 

What is there to say that has not already been said?

 

--Michael Swanwick

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Brief Essays on Genre, Part 9: On Alzheimer's as Muse

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On Alzheimer’s as Muse

 

When I was sixteen, my father contracted early-onset Alzheimer’s. A year later, he was no longer recognizably himself.

 

When I was sixteen, I knew I would be a scientist, though not what kind. A year later, I was determined to be a writer.

 

When I was twenty-nine, I sold my first story. I never became a scientist.

 

--Michael Swanwick

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"Reservoir Ice"

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I'm in print again! The July/August 2022 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction has my new story "Reservoir Ice." Here's how it begins:

 

The problem was, they didn’t meet cute. Anything but. They were brought together by Zipless, an app that combined a deep reading of the user’s sexual desires and a wristbit that chimed if they neared the edge of the partner’s comfort zone. “Hello, I’m—” Matt began to say when Laura opened her apartment door and, “I don’t care who you are,” she replied, grabbing his shirt with both hands and ripping it open.

 

But, believe it or not, the story is not about sex. It's about love and romance and relationships and how difficult these can all be when you and everybody else have the ability to go back in time to undo your and their mistakes.

 

That opening paragraph, by the way, is one of the worst possible ways to begin a story. If I had the time, I'd tell you why.

And because I know . . .

 

Oh, what the heck. Some of those reading this blog are looking for writing tips. So I'll make the time to explain.

 

A quarter century ago, when I sold "Wild Minds" (one of my favorite stories, by the way) to Asimov's, its editor, Sheila Williams, told me that opening a story with a sex scene--even a mild one such as I'd written, with no explicit verbs nor any mention of body parts--was almost always the sign that the story was written by an amateur and not at all publishable. She was amused to find herself actually buying one.

 

So that's it in a nutshell. Open a story with a sex scene and you'll negatively impressed its editor at a time--the beginning--when you most want to positively impress her

Why did I do it, then? It's a character fault. I don't respond well to even the most benevolent authority. In second grade my teacher told me I couldn't begin a sentence with the word "and." And I've been doing it ever since. To such a degree that one of my final chores with any story is going through it to take out as many of those constructions as I can.

 

So don't learn from my example. Listen to Sheila. And watch those "and" sentences!

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"Reservoir Dogs"

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I'm in print again! The July/August 2022 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction has my new story "Reservoir Ice." Here's how it begins:

 

The problem was, they didn’t meet cute. Anything but. They were brought together by Zipless, an app that combined a deep reading of the user’s sexual desires and a wristbit that chimed if they neared the edge of the partner’s comfort zone. “Hello, I’m—” Matt began to say when Laura opened her apartment door and, “I don’t care who you are,” she replied, grabbing his shirt with both hands and ripping it open.

 

But, believe it or not, the story is not about sex. It's about love and romance and relationships and how difficult these can all be when you and everybody else have the ability to go back in time to undo your and their mistakes.

 

That opening paragraph, by the way, is one of the worst possible ways to begin a story. If I had the time, I'd tell you why.

And because I know . . .

 

Some of those reading this blog are looking for writing tips. So I'll make the time to explain.

 

A quarter century ago, when I sold "Wild Minds" (one of my favorite stories, by the way) to Asimov's, its editor, Sheila Williams, told me that opening a story with a sex scene--even a mild one such as I'd written, with no explicit verbs nor any mention of body parts--was almost always the sign that the story was written by an amateur and not at all publishable. She was amused to find herself actually buying one.

 

So that's it in a nutshell. Open a story with a sex scene and you'll negatively impressed its editor at a time--the beginning--when you most want to positively impress her

Why did I do it, then? It's a character fault. I don't respond well to even the most benevolent authority. In second grade my teacher told me I couldn't begin a sentence with the word "and." And I've been doing it ever since. To such a degree that one of my final chores with any story is going through it to take out as many of those constructions as I can.

 

So don't learn from my example. Listen to Sheila. And watch those "and" sentences!

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