October 1, 2004

Chapter 6, "Crossing Faerie Minor," is done at long last! Faerie Minor is actually Susanna Clarke's invention, lifted from her story "Tom Brightwind, or, How the Fairy Bridge was Built at Thoresby" When her book tour is over I'll have to get in touch with her to see if she'll extend permission to use it. And if not, I'll have to come up with something else, hopefully not far inferior in inventiveness, to replace it.

October 4, 2004

In the mail today, a copy of Hayakawa Publishing's SF Magazine with my short-short "Under's Game" in translation, along with a short note from Hiroshi Hayakawa himself. We really have very little to say to each other - we've never met - but it's always pleasant to hear from Mr. Hayakawa. His dealings with me have been uniformly courteous and professional. And of course it's good to see something I've written in a Japanese magazine.

October 6, 2004

My contributor's copy of Lou Anders's anthology of nonfiction Projections: Science Fiction in Literature & Film arrived today. It opens with a reprint of my "Growing Up in the Future" and closes with the first publication of my "Letter to a Young Science Fiction Writer." In between, there are essays by the likes of Robert Silverberg, Jonathan Lethem and Michael Moorcock. Moorcock writes movingly on Mervyn Peake and Leigh Brackett, both of whom he admired and both of whom he knew. You have to envy him that - particularly after reading his essays. Wonderful stuff. I like them almost as much as I like my own.

October 8, 2004

Didn't go to see Jonathan Lethem's public appearance at Temple yesterday because I was so exhausted. But I feel bad about it - that's something, anyway. And I've finished a draft of my appreciation of Eileen Gunn.

October 10, 2004

Received my contributor's copy of Panorama illustre de la fantasy & du merveilleux, containing "Amos Tutuola: hommage a la magie d'un griot", a translation of the appreciation of Tutuola I wrote when he died. It's a beautiful book, but a sad thing that in this field I'm able to pass for an expert on the admirable Mr. Tutuola. His work deserves so much more attention.

October 14, 2004

Lunch with Rebecca Ore and Chip Delany, and very pleasant too. We discussed Gene Wolfe's new books, The Knight and The Wizard, with particular emphasis on what Nick Gevers and I have begun calling "the Wolfe trap" - the tendency of critical types to get so lost in analysis of his subtexts that they never do find solid ground. Chip observed that Henry James's The Turn of the Screw was also a trap for the analytical, that no matter how deep into it you delve, there's always one more turn of the screw. He also mentioned that he'd solved the question of what the eponymous figure in James's "The Figure in the Carpet" was - "It's the figure in the carpet!" he said. "There is no referent to be discovered; it's just a device that makes the story work." His friends in Academia were not, however, amused.

October 16, 2004

A quick day-trip down to D. C. for Capclave. It was depressingly small this year, but next year's GOH will be Howard Waldrop, and you've got to figure a lot of people will want to see him.

On the bright side, I dropped a bundle on books. That's what happens when you have hucksters for friends, and they're conscientious about stocking the newest stuff.

October 17, 2004

Bob Walters, Tess Kissinger, and David Axler drop by for a "scary wine" tasting party. Scary wine is the stuff that people give you that goes into the wine cellar and never comes out, because you're afraid to open it. Stuff with labels like Happy Holidays From Peacock Keller 2001, and Our Lady of Carmel Parochial School. Bottles you received because they were called Vampire Merlot or Winosaurs.

We laid out the wines on the potting table on the back porch, where the French drain would be handy, and started opening. The very first bottle was shaped like a cat, a German wine I picked up in Finland just because it looked so tacky. It was dubbed "bland but marginally drinkable."

Things went downhill from there. Several bottles were corked - but they were far from the worst. Typical tasting comments ran the gamut from "It tastes like rancid turpentine" to "Oh my God, I put it in my mouth!" But those weren't the worst either. The worst were so extremely foul that the mere smell of them - like nothing remotely resembling wine, even of the rancid turpentine variety - was enough to get the bottle consigned to the French drain. Which by the end of the tasting foamed up and refused to take any more. I am not, as Dave Barry would say, making this up.

The moral here is that you should trust your gut judgment when it comes to wine. If it looks so dubious you don't want to open it, it's probably far worse.

Afterwards, we had a pleasant dinner with real wine and good conversation. We had a lot to talk about.

October 22, 2004

Sent "A Celebration, an Appreciation, a Meditation and Possibly Even a Shamelessly Blatant Promotion But by No Means a Review of Eileen Gunn's Stable Strategies and Others" to the New York Review of Science Fiction." I couldn't review the book, of course, because, as I wrote,

"But there's no way I can possibly review it. It's not just the poem or my inclusion among the eighty-some entities (the Fugs, Bill Gates, and the Holy Modal Rounders among them) in the acknowledgments or my blurb on the front cover or my twenty-five percent contribution to a collaborative story included herein or the story that the two of us are working on even as I type these words. Though taken together they do constitute a serious conflict of interest. No, I am disqualified simply because I so desperately love Eileen Gunn's fiction that I can make no pretense of objectivity."

Fair warning to the readers, I think. Who should rush right out and buy the book anyway.

October 24, 2004

Interviewed Tom Purdom for his Philcon Program Book profile.

October 29, 2004

A beautiful evening for the Friends of the Wissahickon fund-raiser. But, oh, man! As it turns out, the guy organizing it had very little idea of what he was doing. He'd talked me into deliver two talks/stories, one on the hermit Kelpius and the other on Poe, both of them local literary figures. But when I showed up at the fire pit for my first appearance, I discovered an audience made up entirely of children and their parents. Not a group that was going to like what I'd spent much of a week preparing. So I told them one of my children's stories, "Free Moose!" and made a hasty exit. There were a real storyteller and a banjo-playing entertainer lined up as well, so I skipped my second scheduled item with a clean conscience. I doubt anybody noticed.

It was a classic, though. As I was heading for the fire pit, I nabbed the guy who'd talked me into this and said, "Go up front and introduce me."

"Oh no," he said. "I don't do introductions."

"You do now."

"Um... your name is Michael Porter?"

"No, I kept my maiden name when I married. It's Michael Swanwick."

"Michael Swanwick-Porter?"

"Not Porter. Swanwick."

"Swanwick Porter."

"Just... Swanwick."

So he went up front and mangled my name, and I got through the story without disgracing myself. Luckily, I never get stage fright. I'm a trouper.

But I'm not going to agree to anything like that ever again. Not on so short a deadline.

October 31, 2004

Sent the New York Review of Science Fiction my introduction to Andrew Matveev's "Walking the City With an American Writer." His article, which originally appeared in the Russian magazine Banzay, was an impressionistic (and in places surreal) interview/profile of me, made on a drizzly day while we strolled about the city of Yekaterinburg on the border between Europe and Asia, with a big black umbrella overhead and two photographers dancing backwards before us, snapping photos. Matveev has had a hard life. As I explained in the intro:

During Soviet times, Andrew Matveev was a dissident writer, not because he wanted to write about politics but because he hung out with rock and roll musicians and his literary models were writers like William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. When he submitted his first novel for publication, the editor called him into his office and, tapping the manuscript with one finger, said, "This will never see print."

Subsequently, Matveev was sent into internal exile. He was given inappropriate jobs such as night watchman at the zoo, in order to punish and isolate him. "The world was grey," Andrew told me, speaking of those years. "Everything was grey. Don't let anyone tell you that there was anything good to say about the Soviets. They stole my youth, and a part of what I might have become."

I liked Matveev a lot. Our tastes in literature and music are surprisingly similar. A day after the interview, I had dinner with his family in their flat, and neither of us had to worry for an instant that he might be denounced to the KGB. I can hardly put into words how happy that made me.

November 2, 2004

Finished "Tom Purdom in Philadelphia: Starry Nights With Harpsichord and Atomic Airplane" for the Philcon Program Book. They gave me a little over a week to write it, and doing so ate up almost all of that time. There are very few people I would have done that for, but Tom deserves recognition and it would have been wrong to deprive him of that just because the Philcon people have no idea of what is and isn't a reasonable deadline.

But I'm not going to agree to anything like that ever again. Not on so short a deadline.

August 26, 2004

In the mail from Jacob Weisman at Tachyon, the Sidney Bechet chapbook Omar, and an advance Reader's copy of The Best of Xero, selections from Pat and Dick Lupoff's fanzine.

August 30, 2004

In the mail - a trophy for the Theodore Sturgeon Award that "The Edge of the World" won back in 1990. At the time, they had only the one trophy which they ceremoniously took out each year and showed to the winner before putting it back in storage again. I forget whether I actually got to touch the thing or not.

This may be the delayed fruit of a suggestion Fred Pohl made at the time that individual trophies - "or at least pins," I believe he said, should be given out so the winner would have something to take home. That was the first time I ever met Pohl, and he was a real gent. I remember him quietly seeking me out to give me a few reassuring words (the ceremony was in the University of Kansas, and I knew nobody there, and it was a strange and alienating experience all around), and I later overheard him trying to wrangle up a university job for a Chinese academic who wanted to pursue his studies in the U.S but didn't have an independent income. It was clear to me that he spent his time more of less continually trying to make matters better, to keep the world moving, to do what he could for the common good. I'm still impressed.

August 31, 2004

Two books of poetry arrived today from Mario Milosevich. Milosevich wrote some short stories ten years ago or so that I was quite impressed by, including one that may never have been published, titled "Will," about a monkey who became a celebrity when he typed out the complete works of Shakespeare. Now he's on the talk show circuit trying to chat up his new book, dealing with mediocre reviews, and worrying that he hasn't lived up to his early promise.

The stories never got the attention they should've, so Mario moved over to poetry. These poems - those I've read - seem good to me. But there was something special about his stories, and I'm glad to hear he's going to be returning to them soon.

Also another Best of the Year volume.

September 1, 2004

Going through the Noreascon program, I ran across a panel whose description began "Some stories have scenes which are so right they just stick in your mind. (E.g., The paleontologist being handed a cooler containing a freshly frozen dinosaur head in Swanwick's Bones of the Earth, or Hari Seldon appearing in the Time Vault, 'I am Hari Seldon.')" So I seem to have a fan in Boston programming circles.

September 2, 2004

While I was packing for Noreascon, I noticed there was a message on the answering machine, and discovered that Gardner Dozois was in the hospital. The taxi from the airport had an accident and Gardner broke his shoulder blade in three places. Susan was shaken but not seriously harmed. As of a few minutes ago, Gardner was out of surgery, with a new Teflon shoulder socket. But, Susan says, it'll be some time before he regains use of his arm. It was his right arm too.

September 5, 2004

After the Hugo ceremony, Marianne and I went up to the Hugo Losers Party. It helps to remember that the HLP was invented by George R. R. Martin with help by Gardner Dozois because there was nothing scheduled for after the awards were given out. So, because one of them was the Bull Goose Loser (a useful term invented by Gardner for the guy who's been nominated for the most major awards without ever winning one) and the other was the runner-up, they organized a party for the losers.

The HLP used to be a pretty rag-tag affair, the highlight of which was turning away the Hugo winners when they showed up, awards in arms, and, because there's no such thing as a Hugo Winners Party, tried to get in. The ritual was that everybody would boo the winner and shout "You can't get in here - you're not a loser!" until the hapless winner explained why he was a big enough loser to be allowed in. I forget who it was - Roger Zelazny? Larry Niven? - who triumphantly explained that he was the biggest loser of all... because he'd broken his Hugo! But it went over big and he (and his broken Hugo pieces) were welcome in warmly.

This year's HLP was a big deal, with techno music and a lavishly decorated suite, and engraved invitations without which you weren't allowed in. Except, as it turns out, if you won. Marianne and I came waltzing up, Hugos in our arms, and were literally bowed into the party.

George R. R. Martin was probably spinning in his grave. No, wait... he's still alive. I didn't see him at the party, though. Maybe he wasn't sent an invitation.

September 11, 2004

Eileen Gunn shows up at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society for a reading and talk. Afterwards we all went to an extremely noisy restaurant to plot the overthrow of everything that is decent in contemporary literature.

September 12, 2004

Saturday. Eileen and Ellen come by for drinks and dinner and we all sit in the backyard with Marianne and a couple of bottles of wine, laughing and talking. At one point everybody had their laptops out, and we were all swapping pictures and accessing the Web by wi-fi at the same time. It was a very science fiction moment. Mostly, though, that was great conversation. Lafferty would have said: "Folks, that was talk with the hoofs and horns still on it! They had to cart away the sky and shove the stars to the side to make room for it."

September 13, 2004

Went to the Free Library to hear Susanna Clarke read & discovered that her husband was there too and was Colin Greenland! So Colin and I got to talk some, while his wife signed and signed and signed her enormously popular first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel.

Chris Edwards was there too, so I hung out with him. Chris's small press, Tiger Eyes, published my collection A Geography of Unknown Lands, years ago, and did a beautiful job of it too. He was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for that. Which was not bad, considering it was his first book!

September 14, 2004

Eileen & Ellen Klages were back in town for a reading at the Bryn Mawr Barnes & Noble. The turnout was hurt by her appearance at PSFS three days earlier, but it was pleasant seeing her and those who showed up were greatly appreciative.

September 18, 2004

To George Mason University for "Fall for the Book." Marianne and I drove up early so we could hear Michael Dirda, and consequently got to talk to him for an hour or two. He told us he'd gafiated from science fiction several years ago. When I mentioned this to Stan Robinson, Greg Frost, and John Kessel, they were horrified to learn he'd used such a word.

Dirda found the group and hung around to talk and hear our first panel. But then he had to go. Later, we five writers-and-Marianne went out for dinner and then bought a couple of bottles of wine and held a room party, talking big and kicking around the literature. A highpoint had to be John Kessel noisily kicking several overrated sixties-era writers out of the pantheon. It was a great evening and made me nostalgic for old days when we did this sort of thing all the time.

September 19, 2004

Breakfast together and then gone. We discussed Geoff Ryman's Air, which most of us had read, and Paul Park's total output to date, since I seem to have been the only one who'd read A Princess of Romania.

September 21, 2004

I was printing out a letter to Gene Wolfe when the phone rang and who should it be but Harlan Ellison? How the lowly have been elevated in this world!

September 27, 2004

I was one of several "local celebrities" reading from banned or challenged books at the Free Library for a Banned Books Week event. The others read from extremely serious books - the reading from Richard Wright's The Invisible Man was particularly good - but I chose Bruce Coville's Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher. Twelve years ago, when my son was nine and I needed all the good YA books I could find, I was involved in the defense of that book after it was removed from an elementary school library in Iowa. I wrote a letter for the hearing that was a model of its kind: polite, calm, and furious. You couldn't feel good about censoring books after reading a letter like that.

At the time I felt extremely good about myself. Since then, though, I've learned that the battle had already been won by the time I heard of it. It was won when a librarian or teacher (so many of the real heroes in this world are librarians or teachers!) let the local newspapers know that the book had been taken off the racks. The furor that followed, the hearing, and all the impassioned testimony that followed were simply steps on the way to a foregone conclusion. Because censorship is a shameful act and, like most shameful acts, is usually performed in the dark.

Bruce Coville's books have been challenged several times, despite their containing nothing any sensible person could object to, and he's always won. But, as he points out, he doesn't know how many times one of his books was simply quietly removed from the shelves.

July 15, 2004

My Russian visa arrived today! Everything is Go for Yekaterinburg.

In the mail from David Hartwell: paperbacks of the Year's Best SF and Year's Best Fantasy, with a story by me in each. The Year's Best SF intro to "Coyote at the End of History," says, "Here, though ... Swanwick is stepping into Le Guin's turf." Small wonder. The original impetus for the story was a collection of Northwest Indian tales collected by Le Guin's father.

I sent out a blurb for Paul Park's A Princess of Romania, for which I wrote:

All the world in a book! A Princess of Romania is wildly original and simply wonderful, a phantasmagoria or wicked women, dangerous men, and seductive magic. Paul Park is one of the most original and delightful writers in fantasy today.

It's a terrific book and deserves better praise than I had the time to donkey together for it.

July 21, 2004

I finally broke down and got a cable modem for the computer. After tinkering with it for hours, I called the company and got a rather testing recording saying they were aware the system was down and were working on the problem.

July 23, 2004

Cable problems persist. Going from dial-up to broadband is like graduating from a radio to an unplugged television set.

July 25, 2004

An unexpected call from Lucius Shepard today, to thank me for the intro I wrote for his collection Trujillo. He was a little embarrassed, I think, because my praise was so effusive. But every word I wrote - I was particularly careful about this - was true. The trouble with being a writer is that it's so difficult that you have to believe it's the most important thing in the world in order to achieve it. And if you succeed, you deserve praise so great you have a hard time accepting it.

July 26 - August 7, 2004

Yekaterinburg! I'll put together an account and post it as soon as I can find the time to pore through the indecipherable scrawls in my notebook.

August 9, 2005

In the mail today: The mass market paperback of Live Without a Net, with "Smoke and Mirrors," The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, with "King Dragon," and Crossroads, with the first publication of "The Last Geek." Of course, I've been away for almost two weeks. Still, it's immensely satisfying.

August 11, 2004

PDF galleys arrived in the email today of Projections, Lou Anders' anthology of essays about science fiction and fantasy, scheduled to be published soon by Monkeybrain Books. It contains two pieces written by me, "Growing Up in the Future,"originally a con speech, and "Letter to a Young Science Fiction Writer," which will see print here for the first time.

August 16, 2004

Contracts from Jack Dann for a reprint of "Ancient Engines" in an Ace anthology titled Robots. "Ancient Engines" has a special place in my heart because it was inspired by a story that my late father-in-law, William Porter, used to tell about admiring an ancient steam locomotive in a museum and then learning that he was two years older than it was. Bill Porter was a fine man and a respected lawyer, and is very sorely missed. Inexplicably for such a quiet story, "Ancient Engines" made it onto the Hugo Ballot that year.

August 17, 2004

I'm mentioned in "The Discovery of Secondary Worlds: Notes on the Aesthetics & Methodology of Heterocosmic Creativity," an essay by Brian Stableford in the current NYRSF, discussing the difficulty of defining fantasy. He writes "Some attempts to solve the problem - including John Clute's elaboration of a new typological scheme in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Brian Attebery's careful contrasting of fantasy as 'mode, genre, [and] formula' in Strategies of Fantasy; and Michael Swanwick's analogy likening fantasy to a literary archipelago rather than a continent - have been heroic and have assisted their authors to provide many useful insights. But these are themselves rather reminiscent of a pattern of islands, each more or less entire unto itself."

Even if I was thrown in primarily to round out the examples to a classical triad and secondarily so the archipelago metaphor could be borrowed, it's flattering to be mistaken for a serious critic.

August 23, 2004

Contracts arrived today from Asimov's for "Girls and Boys, Come Out and Play," my new Darger and Surplus story. Another blow for those who were hoping that with Gardner Dozois gone, Sheila Williams would demonstrate a preference for second-rate work by unknown writers.

August 24, 2004

In keeping with Operation Full Disclosure (the details of which are at www.democracymeansyou.com/columns/chasman/index.htm#ashcroft) I've sent my current reading list to Attorney General Ashcroft. That should keep me safe for another month.

Attorney General John Ashcroft
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General Ashcroft,

As I understand it, in order to show my support for the forthcoming Patriot Act II, which will give you and anyone else who works for the government the authority to determine what I'm reading by accessing library and bookstore records, I'm supposed to help you create an American citizen reading data base by providing a list of what I've been reading recently. So here it is:

1. A Princess of Romania by Paul Park. This was actually provided me in galley form by the publisher, which was looking for a blurb, so technically I could have read this under Patriot II without your ever finding out! I hope you'll make a note of how cooperative I'm being when you write out your report.

2. The Wizard by Gene Wolfe. Another galley. That's a loophole you may want to close.

3. Straws and Prayer-Books: dizain des diversions by James Branch Cabell. This is for an essay I'm writing covering everything Cabell ever wrote. Since that's over fifty books and some of them are pretty rare, you'll probably want to wait until I'm finished and then just subpoena the essay.

4. The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod. Not to be confused with Ken MacLeod, the British socialist sf writer. Though I've read his novels too. Just not this month. Oh, and speaking of British socialists, just so you don't think I'm hiding anything, I should mention that I've read books by China Mieville too. And admired them. But that's okay, right? I mean, this is still a free country?

5. The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque by Jeffrey Ford. Actually, I've just begun it. But it looks pretty good so far.

6. Appleseed by John Clute. If you don't have a firm handle on what we call the "reading protocols" of science fiction, you may find this a tough slog. It can get pretty dense. I urge you to persevere, though. It's worth it.

7. The Malachite Casket by Pavel Bahzov. This was recommended to me by friends in Yekaterinburg (see below). They're essentially reworked folk legendry of the Ural Mountains.

8. Secret Life by Jeff Vandermeer. Actually, I've been dipping in and out of it. It's a collection, and the pieces tend to be a little rich, so you wouldn't want to read it all at once.

9. Phantoms and Fairies from Norwegian Folklore by Tor Age Brilgsvaerd. The truth is that I've been reading, scanning, and sampling more folklore books lately than I can readily list for you, because I'm working on a fantasy novel. So I thought this one could stand in for the rest.

10. Vathek by William Beckford. Yes, it's decadent. But it's kind of an innocent decadence, the decadence of a boy who never grew up. I mean, it's not exactly Au Rebours, now is it?

11. A book whose title and author I forget on the building of the Brooklyn bridge. I looked for it but couldn't find it readily. It's around here somewhere. If you absolutely must know, write and I'll make another search.

12. Who Says Paranoia Isn't "In" Any More? Cartoons by Alexis Gilliland. This really is the title. I swear I'm not making it up. Pretty funny, if you think of it, though.

So I guess I should be reading more nonfiction, shouldn't I? And I seem to be short-changing women authors too! That's extremely peculiar. I hope it's just a statistical anomaly and not a genuine bias in my reading. I'll have to look into that.

But back to business. All of these were books bought in bookstores or over the Internet - but you already have the authority to track those, don't you? I haven't had the time to visit the library since I got back from Russia. It's not what you think, though! I was a guest of honor at a science fiction conference in Yekaterinburg. Anyway, they're not Communists now, they're capitalists. Slightly disillusioned capitalists, admittedly. Sadder-but-wiser capitalists, I'd say. But by no means plotting world revolution. Most of the Russians I met are hoping to visit Paris someday.

So there's my recent reading. Please don't arrest me.

Sincerely,
Michael Swanwick

May 5, 2004

I turned in my introduction to the Tachyon Publications reissue of James Tiptree Jr.'s Her Smoke Rose up Forever. Thank God that's over! It's the brilliant writers who are hardest to praise, because their work needs no explanation. From now on, I'm only going to write introductions to works by idiots.

May 6, 2004

Two California fans dropped by my house to do a video interview of me, in conjunction with Baycon. They apologized profusely for taking me away from my writing. Little realizing how much more I'd rather talk about writing than actually do it.

May 8, 2004

Went to my post office box and discovered two packages, one containing copies of two issues of Spin and the other an issue of Futura.

Futura contains "Kojot na kraju povijesti," the Croatian translation of "Coyote at the End of History." Spin continues that Finnish SF magazine's serialization of "The Periodic Table of Science Fiction."

I feel simultaneously terribly international and horribly undereducated.

May 14, 2004

From out of the email comes a request from Eileen Gunn to reprint a bit of light verse I don't remember having written in her forthcoming collection, Stable Strategies and Others. I am of course willing to let her do so, and I am of course tickled to discover something totally new to me from the pen of Michael Swanwick. I thought I was familiar with all his work, but it turns out not.

Here's the poem:

May 14, 2004

I turned in my introduction to Lucius Shepard's Trujillo, coming soon from PS Publishing. Thank God that's over! It's the brilliant writers who are hardest to praise, because their work needs no explanation. From now on, I'm only going to write introductions to works by idiots.

In the mail today, a framed certificate for the Asimov's Reader's Award for "Coyote at the End of History." This is how being a writer should always be: You sit around doing nothing, and they mail you awards.

May 15, 2004

Chinese contracts! Bones of the Earth is going to translated by Science Fiction World in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. This is especially pleasant to me because in recent years China has become a major world power in paleontology. Confuciusornis alone would have done that. But throw in Caudipteryx and Sinosauropteryx and you've got a great time to be a Chinese dino-hunter.

May 24, 2004

I've finally finished "Girls and Boys, Come Out and Play," the latest Darger and Surplus story - and just in time for Baycon! This story finds the lads in Arcadia where, briefly, they find a home for themselves. But will they ever reach Moscow?

June 2, 2004

Home at last from Baycon - five days of being larger-than-life. Bill Gibson told me once that after a convention he had to lie down in a dark room with a damp cloth over his face until the swelling in his ego went down. I know exactly what he means.

There were, of course, the obligatory, "I really hated The Iron Dragon's Daughter" and "I've been reading SF for twenty years - how come I've never heard of you?" and "I didn't mean that as an insult, The Iron Dragon's Daughter is a great work of literature, it's just that I hated it and wish I'd never read it" comments. But the Darger and Surplus story went over well, so it all balances out.

June 3, 2004

In the mail come contracts for a reprint of "The Dead" in Gardner Dozois' The Best of the Best: Twenty Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction. Which is a good piece of ego-boo, as they say. But I'm far more thrilled by my other piece of mail - a copy of Innocents Aboard, Gene Wolfe's new collection, autographed by the man himself. I sincerely believe that Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today, so I'm happy as happy can be.

June 4, 2004

Finished the final polish on "Girls and Boys," and sent it out to Asimov's. Signed the contracts for "The Dead" and sent them out to Gardner.

June 14, 2004

I called Sheila to nag her to read "Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play," which had been in her office for a week, and discovered that she'd already decided to buy it.

June 22, 2004

Two bits of news today. Marty Shapiro called to say that the movie option for "Dogfight" has been renewed for another year and that he thinks there's a decent chance it's going to be made. And SpaceShipOne made it into orbit! Making it the first privately-funded vehicle to leave the Earth's atmosphere (albeit by only four hundred feet). Robert Heinlein must be resting well tonight.

June 23, 2004

Uncle Dan's funeral. Daniel Brassil was born in County Kerry, Ireland in 1907, and came to the United States when he was twenty years old. Two years ago he went back to Ireland and, my cousin Donna tells me, knew where every road went and recognized people he hadn't seen for over seventy years. In between, he led a full, rich life. God bless him. He was a hell of a good guy.

July 5, 2004

A quick jaunt to the Russian Consulate in NYC to get a visa for my trip to Yekaterinburg. Suspecting this wasn't going to be an easy piece of paper to get, I made several phone calls beforehand about items on the application. At the Consulate, I found myself fifth in line - and every single person in line ahead of me got turned away for inadequate documentation! When my turn came, the functionary looked over the application and then informed me that the faxed invitation from the Mayor of Yekaterinburg was on the incorrect form. "I am going to let it go through," he said sternly. "But next time get the right form!"

July 12, 2004

Interviewed this morning by Julie Phillips, who is finishing off the last small details of her biography of James Tiptree, Jr. and wanted a few quotes about Tiptree's reputation and influence. I felt quite chuffed about this, as our Brit cousins would say, even before she mentioned that she was calling from the Netherlands.

July 14, 2004

In the mail come copies of the Czech SF magazine Ikarie with my own "Pomaly zivot" (I will not attempt the accents). And what's that when it's at home, you ask? "Slow Life."

As ever, I feel simultaneously terribly international and horribly undereducated.

Not much news to relate. It's been a quiet month. But I'm getting caught up on a raft of quotidian writing chores. Maybe next month I can devote exclusively to fiction!

April 13, 2004

Spent the morning signing book plates for Trujillo, the new Lucius Shepard collection for PS Publications, and then off to New York City for the New York Review of Science Fiction reading at the South Street Seaport Museum. I had dinner with Ellen Datlow, then took a cab to the museum where, because almost all the local editors were in Seattle for the Nebulas and it was a rainy night to boot, attendance was slight. Henry Wessells read first, and I after him.

I spoke with a writer who probably wouldn't appreciate me telling his name, who had written an introduction free of charge for a reissued science fiction classic, only to be told that they'd discovered that the text filled so many signatures to the exact page - so they weren't going to use his intro. "I found then," he said, "that the difference between nothing and the hundred dollars I would normally have gotten for an introduction, was far greater than the difference between a hundred dollars and the seven hundred or so I could have gotten for the same amount of work applied to something commercial."

April 18, 2004

An afternoon appearance at a Free Library of Philadelphia event marking the Nebula Awards. Unfortunately, it was the first perfect day of spring and most people chose to leap into their cars and spend the afternoon in traffic jams, rather than sitting indoors listening to writers rumble on and on. Still, it was a good event, and a receptive audience. Greg Frost did a reading. Tom Purdom gave an appreciation of newly-minted Grand Master Robert Silverberg, and it was unquestionably the most graceful of its kind I've ever heard. And I told "Free Moose," the children's story I used to entertain a hall-full of award nominees who walked out on Newt Gingrich, the guest speaker at the Nebula banquet the year I won for best novel back in the early nineties.

April 21, 2004

Today I logged on to Locus Online and discovered that it's official: "Coyote at the End of History" has won the Asimov's Reader's Poll for best short story of 2003, and Gardner Dozois is stepping down from his position as editor. Can you say "conflicted," boys and girls?

It's the end of an era, and very bad news for science fiction.

April 26, 2004

Another event at the Free Library, this one an evening appearance by James Morrow. Alas, this time it was a cold, wet and blustery evening that kept people at home. He got an adequate audience, but they were most of them science fiction readers, folks who'd already read pretty much everything he'd written. It's a pity because Jim gave a talk that would have won him new fans if there'd been people unfamiliar with him present. He spoke of his forthcoming novel The Last Witch-Finder and the shift from the witch-haunted Renaissance world-view to our contemporary, rationalist world-view.

It really made me want to read his book. Which, alas, doesn't have a publication date yet set.

April 30 - May 2, 2004

Attended the Fantastic Genres conference at SUNY-New Paltz, which turned out to be the semi-official Interstitial Arts conference. The Interstitial Arts movement took something of a hit during a panel devoted to it, however, when nobody could define exactly what it was.

I was sitting in the back row near the door, waiting for another panel to begin, when Rachel Pollack entered. Waving a hand at the panelists -- John Clute, Farah Mendelsohn, et al. -- she said, "Everybody's a critic."

"That's quite good," I said.

"I came up with it last night," Rachel said. "I just came down here to deliver it."

Then she left.

May 3, 2004

I finally finished my introduction to Tachyon Publications' reissue of James Tiptree Jr.'s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. Tiptree was one of the best short fiction writers the field has ever produced, and the book is probably the best single-volume collection she'll ever have, so it was particularly daunting trying to do justice to the task.

When Jacob Weissman, the owner-publisher-editor of Tachyon, asked me to write the intro, I agreed immediately but said, "Honesty compels me to admit that there are people out there who are far more qualified to write this."

"Yes," he said, "but I'm saving them for the series of Tiptree Award volumes that Tachyon is planning."

So I have the honor of being considered the very best writer who wasn't actually qualified to write the introduction.

I made it onto the Hugo ballot once again. "Legions in Time," my Asimov's story in which Eleanor Voigt conquers the universe, is up for best novelette. And in answer to your question: Nope. Having won the award before doesn't make me feel one bit jaded about the honor. It's still a hoot and a half to have something up on the ballot.

That and my news about Aelita (covered briefly in "Appearances") are the only big items I have to impart. But partly because the "News" section has always been rather weak and I've felt guilty about that, and partly because I've been meaning to get around to keeping a writer's journal ever since I began writing, I've started jotting down writing-relating incidents in my life as they happen. Here's what's been going on in the last month or so:

March 5, 2004

I finished "The Word That Sings the Scythe" and then ran a copy of it down to Gardner Dozois' house because the last thing I mailed him (a second set of contracts for a reprint of "King Dragon" in his best-of-year anthology) never got there, and the next-to-last-thing I mailed him (the first set) took three weeks to travel from one side of Philadelphia to its center. After a pleasant visit with him and Susan Casper, I went home and emailed him:

Dear Gardner:
An rtf file of "The Word That Sings the Scythe" is attached, as requested. I note that you've had my story for over an hour and you haven't bought it yet. GET OFF THE POT, DOZOIS!

Cordially,
Michael

That evening he wrote back:

Dear Michael,
I like "The Word That Sings the Scythe," and I'll take it.
Sorry for the delay, but I had to have dinner first.

--Gardner

My God, I thought. How struggling new writers must hate me.

March 6, 2004

In the mail today, from Piper in Munich, two copies of the very beautifully produced translation of Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist with a reprinted introduction by Neil Gaiman and my own biographical article, "Hope-in-the-Mist," as an afterword. So why was the novel translated as Flucht ins Feenland - literally "Flight into Fairyland?" Because "mist" in German means "dung." Type the English title into Babelfish and you'll get "Load-in-the-Muck." My own title became "Hope-in-den-Nebeln," or "Hope-in-the-Nebulas." Nebel also means fog or mist, of course, but I like that rendering quite a lot.

March 10 - 22, 2004

On vacation in New Mexico. A beautiful and involving state, but if I were to attempt to synopsize even the highlights of the trip, this entry would last forever. Top moments included attending the Jack Williamson Lectureship in Portales, New Mexico, and seeing three Grand Masters (Jack, Fred Pohl, and Robert Silverberg) all in a row, and finally getting to meet Pete Tillman, who squired Marianne and me about for a day. Pete is ungodly tall, and crammed with lore. It was terrific spending time with him. Oh, and Silverbob told me he was horrified by how much fiction I'm currently working on. Even though he meant it facetiously, it was still a thrill. I may arrange to have his words written on my tombstone.

March 25, 2004

Following a link at Locus Online, I discover that I'm in five best-of-year anthologies this year. "King Dragon" will be in the Dozois Best SF, the Datlow, Link and Grant Best Fantasy and Hartwell and Cramer Best Fantasy, while "Coyote at the End of History" will be in the Hartwell and Cramer Best SF and "Legions in Time" will be in the Haber and Strahen Best SF. I'd lost track of how many Year's Bests I was in and, to be honest, that's been one of my ambitions for a long time. It's not a patch on Joe Haldeman's accomplishment, though. We were talking about awards and he said, "To tell you the truth, I've lost count of how many Hugos and Nebulas I have. I'm pretty sure it's six of one and seven of the other, but I have no idea which is which." Then he grinned wickedly and, leaning forward, said, "Fans hate it when you tell them that."

March 27, 2004

Here in the mail comes the February issue of Galaxia, a handsome Spanish SF magazine with what looks to be an intelligently-truncated email interview with myself. When the interviewer mentions that one of the problems for science fiction in Spain is that the critics deem fantastic literature inferior to realism, I reply Estamos hablando del pais de Cervantes? No creo que El Quixote se pueda considerar una historia realista, o por lo menas es tan extrana como puedo llegar a serlo la fanasia. Ademas, esta a realismo magico. To my lasting shame, I can't speak Spanish, but that looks like a pretty good answer to me.

I went looking for the original interview, thinking to post it, but, alas, couldn't find it. And now, transcribing the above passage from the dreadful scrawl in my notebook, I can't find Galaxia, so I'm pretty sure some of the words are misspelled. My mistake, not Galaxia's - it looks like the kind of labor of love where typos are rare.

March 30, 2004

Received contracts for a Mike Resnick reprint anthology titled This Is My Funniest. And he's given me carte blanche to choose which story I want in it. (Shrewdly enough, Resnick specifies that each author will receive equal payment, rather than a pro rata share based on the length of the story provided, thus preventing me from submitting "Griffin's Egg" and saying, "Well, I thought it was funny!") But will the story I'm submitting be perceived as funny by the readers? I'll have to wait for the reviews to find out.

March 31, 2004

Marianne spoke on "Catfish and Waffles" tonight at a Friends of the Wissahickon meeting at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. The Wissahickon is a local creek that flows into the Schuylkill River, and catfish and waffles was a regional meal hereabouts in the nineteenth century, which was available in the inns and roadhouses along the Wissahickon. Exactly what catfish and waffles was turned out to be extremely elusive, but Marianne tracked it down. It turns out that, like spaghetti and meatballs, this meal involved a lot more than the foods in its name: A relish such as gingered pears to begin with, followed by butter-fried catfish, steak, veggies, stewed chicken over waffles, and coffee. With various flourishes to render it a feast for gluttons. Her talk went over very big with the fishermen in the audience, who snorted and grunted with appreciation at the sheer quantity of food, and chuckled with approval when she mentioned that it was best washed down with large volumes of beer.

I do so much public speaking that it's good to be reminded occasionally that I'm not the only one in the family who can do so.

April 1, 2004

One of Locus Online's April Fool's Day items is a mock announcement that habitual Hugo winners will be retired from eligibility while, in a sop to their egos, the awards are named after them. So that Best Editor will become the Gardner Dozois Hugo for Excellent Editing, and so on. Best Short Story, it says, will become the Michael Swanwick/Connie Willis Hugo for Spectacular Short Fiction.

Flattering though it is - and it made my day - all I can think is, "How soon they forget!" Not only does Connie have enough rockets to justify a preemptive strike by the US military on WMD grounds, but there were have been a lot of folks who've won more short-fiction Hugos than I. Samuel R. Delany, for example, and the aforementioned Bob Silverberg, to name but two. Years ago, when I was on the Nebula award jury (which has the power to add one work per category, for reasons which are too complicated to explain here), I discovered that if there was a short fiction in which we couldn't find anything else worth promoting, there was always a Silverberg story in that length that could be put onto the ballot without cringing. So we always had a fallback position.

April 2, 2004

Into the aether go five story introductions for Jack Dann's collection of collaborative stories, The Fiction Factory. I wrote four stories with Jack and Gardner Dozois ("Touring," "Afternoon at Schrafft's," "The Gods of Mars" and "Golden Apples of the Sun") and one solo with Jack. The intros were short, but they were tough to write because I'd already covered most of the same ground for Gardner's collection of collaborative stories Slow Dancing Through Time.

April 3, 2004

Out of the aether comes a request that I temporarily post "The Dragon Line" online for a few weeks because professor and author Laura Vasconcellos is going to be talking about it at the "First Literary Meeting on Fantasy and Science Fiction", which is being held at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. It seems a reasonable enough request. I'll ask Vlatko if it can be done.

Merlin's tale of the origin of Arthur was my own invention, but the psychology of Mordred and his reasons for hating his father were put together in an unpublished story by my good friend Anna Quinsland, back when I was in college over thirty years ago. Anna had genuine talent, significantly more than I demonstrated back then. But she was murdered only a few years later, struck down from behind one night on the way back from the library, before she could develop that talent. Her killer was never found, and only those who remember her personally have any idea how great was our loss.

April 4, 2004

Contracts day! Into the mail go contracts for "The Word That Sings the Scythe" for Asimov's, a reprint of "The Dog Said Bow-Wow" for Resnick's This Is My Funniest at BenBella Books, a translation of "Slow Life" for Ikarie in the Czech Republic, and a translation of "The Edge of the World" for a Klingon language anthology. Payment for this last is nominal because the number of people on this planet who speak Klingon as their native language can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Two if you're from Rigel.

April 7, 2004

Off to Hewitt, NJ, to meet Keith Brooke, here on a whirlwind business trip. He was staying with Paul and Pam Barnett who, it turns out, live near the stunningly beautiful Greenwood Lake in a house that is infested with books to a degree that even I found unnerving - review copies, mostly, which made their presence even more terrifying. But Pam and Paul were gracious hosts and I liked their company quite a lot. Keith is quiet, alert, and observant -- the sort of guy who, in the movie version, would solve the crime while louder types are still blustering about. Again, it was great finally getting to meet him. Can Nick and Vlatko be far behind?

April 9, 2004

Signed and sent out option extensions for "Dogfight" to my Hollywood agent. "Dogfight" was co-written with William Gibson and has been on option ever since he struck it big. If Johnny Mnemonic had been the movie it wanted to be (The Matrix, basically), "Dogfight" would have been made ages ago and I'd have lots more money than I do. Alas, the sinister unseen powers who are paid to sabotage movies decided that the transsexual muscle would be too threatening for the fragile sexual identities of the viewers unless they were played as men in drag, that for similar reasons Molly Millions should be an abject wimp rather than a major kick-ass woman in leather skintights (like Trinity, come to think), that ... Well, everything that was bad about that movie was the exact opposite of what Bill wrote. I was busy the afternoon Johnny Mnemonic was playing in movie theaters, so I rented it when it came out on VHS. The guy behind the counter looked at Marianne and me compassionately when we returned it and said, "You poor people."

April 10, 2004

In Pittsburgh on family matters, I jacked in Marianne's laptop to check my email. (And what would John W. Campbell have made of that sentence?) Only to discover a note from a friend congratulating me on making it onto the Hugo ballot. Did I really? I hopped over to Locus Online and discovered that yes, I did.

April 12, 2004

Well, not surprisingly, that one email was the totality of congratulations I received. Everybody assumes I have so many of these suckers that making the ballot no longer excites me. Not true. But it does remind me of the time, back in 1992, when I won my first major award, the Nebula, for Stations of the Tide. Bill Gibson called long distance from Vancouver to burble happily at me. He said then the single best thing anybody has ever said to me about awards: "Now you don't ever have to want one again. That little 'Nebula-award-winning' tag will follow you around like a puppy dog for the rest of your lifetime. They can't take it away from you for bad behavior, and winning twenty more won't make it any larger or better."

Was that cool or what? Thank you, Bill. Thank you for freeing me from that pressure.

Writing life has been hectic:

"Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Gibbon?" So said the Duke of Gloucester to the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and I know how the poor ink-stained wretch must have felt. I was feeling overwhelmed with work the other day, so I decided to get organized by sticking up post-it notes with the title of everything I was actively working on. Which turned out to be two novels, four stories, two essays, three introductions (one for Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction, forthcoming from PS Publications, and the others for collections to Lucius Shepherd and James Tiptree, Jr.), and six separate collaborative stories. "Well," I said. "There's my problem."

As problems go, though, it's a good one. And I'm anxious to get all these books and stories written and out of the way so I can get to all the other stories I've been meaning to write. As my wife says to me, from time to time, "Type faster, Swanwick!"

My most recent book, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures (Tachyon Publications), a collection of short-shorts or flash fiction, has been garnering uniformly glowing reviews. Which is cause for speculation and wonder. After all, no book, no matter how good it is, will be liked by everybody. So why no dissenting voices? My theory is that short-short fiction is an inherently modest form. It has neither pretense nor sub-text. It's only there to entertain you. So panning a collection of the stuff would be like kicking a puppy. Any critics with an animus toward my work will be patiently awaiting my next novel.

My newest publication is the introduction to Henry Wessells' Another Green World, which has been posted here so you can read it. It's been published by his own imprint, Temporary Culture, in an edition of two hundred and fifteen copies, so most of you will never even see the book. And yet it has three blurbs, one taken from my introduction, and the other two by Hugh Kenner and William Gibson. Henry works in the rare book trade, and he's definitely created a rarity here.