Five Seasons (Winterthaw)

.

I was in a consignment shop the other day and bought a cheap frame suitable for holding five small pictures.  I figured I could write five short-shorts for it, just as soon as I found a theme. Almost immediately, I thought, "Five Seasons," and shortly after that, I asked Marianne how the year could best be divided into five.

Together, we came up with Winterthaw, Greengrowth, Summerdeep, Autumnbright, and Darkwinter.  Then, when I got home, I wrote five closely related (but amoral, alas, quite amoral indeed) works of flash fiction.  A little fussing with the word processing program, and all was done.

Here's the first season:

Winterthaw

I crave thy pardon, mistress, that I did try to eat thee.  It were the Darkwinter, when we all do what we must to survive.  I understand why thou dost flinch from my touch.

Still.  Didst thou not kill thy sister, who did love thee, when the foodstuffs ran low?  Not that I disapprove.  It were the right thing to do, God wot.  Hunger knows no morals.  I did the same with my father, poor soul.

Those dire times are behind us.  The snows are melting at last.  We can scrabble in the mud for last year’s roots, and perhaps a small rodent or three.  We keep our knives sharp and close to hand, of course, because we each know what the other is capable of.

Now the ice turns back into pond water.  The air is warm.  Desperation falls a day, a second day, a third into the past.  Now at last – though I grip my blade as firmly as thou dost thine – I am free to say . . .

I do love thee.

*

Our First Third Of A Century

.

Saturday, Marianne and I reached a milestone in our lives -- thirty-three years and four months of marriage.  We have now been man and wife for over a third of a century

We had been thinking of having a large party.  But because Marianne's mother died in January (at age 103, so it didn't come as a surprise) and Marianne's still in mourning, we had a smaller gathering of close friends whom we've known for many decades.

In keeping with the low-key nature of the celebration, I commissioned something simple to give my beloved:  A silver coin cut into a one-third piece and a two-thirds piece.  Why a coin?  Well, in The Iron Dragon's Daughter, there's this explanation by Jane's one true love:

“… you know how if you take a coin and break it in a vise and throw half in the ocean and keep the other in a dresser drawer, they'll yearn after each other? One day you're taking out a pair of socks and you knock the drawer-half onto the floor without noticing. Somebody kicks it toward the door. A week later, it's half a block away. And the other half meanwhile, a fish swallows it and is caught and gutted and the entrails thrown into the trash, half-coin and all. So that maybe a couple of months later, it might take a century, you'll find the two lying in the sand at the verge of some nothing-special stretch of country road, nestled together. 

"That's kind of how I think we are."

I was thinking of Marianne when I wrote that, and it still seems true to me today.


And since you're wondering . . .

The coin was cut by master jeweler Janet Kofoed.  Her usual work is much more extraordinary (and, for what it is, scandalously underpriced) and can be seen here.

*

Random Annotations: The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O

.

It's a quiet Friday and I have no news.  So I thought I'd begin an occasional series called Random Annotations, comments about aspects of my own fiction.  Here's the first:

The last paragraph of "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O" contains two elements worth noting.  The paragraph, in its entirety, is as follows:

He kick-started the Harley and with a roar they pulled out into traffic.  Crow cranked up the engine and popped a wheelie.  Off they sped, down the road that leads everywhere and nowhere, to the past and the future, Tokyo and Short Pump, infinity and the corner store, with Annie laughing and unafraid, and Crow flying the black flag of himself.

Short Pump:  A small town outside of Richmond, Virginia.  When I lived in Seven Pines, not far away, it was an easy joke, the ultimate small town.  Since, alas, it has grown considerably.

. . . and Crow flying the black flag of himself:  This is the only line in my entire body of work which exists in two forms, one written and the other oral.  When I do a reading of the story, the word Crow is repeated three times: ". . .  and Crow, Crow, Crow flying the black flag of himself."  Why?  Try reading it out loud.


Above:  I saw this road in rural Maryland a few days ago.  Annie and Crow are archetypes, of course, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that they cast shadows and echoes throughout reality.

*

Elephants and Icebergs

.

Monday I gave a lecture at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.  Are you terrified yet?

Before you make a run for the Canadian border, I should clarify that.  I was lecturing Herbert Gilliland's science fiction writing class, which he titled How to Sell to Analog.  As I have indeed on various occasions sold to Analog (a friend told me that Stan Schmidt once said to him, "I've just bought a story from Michael Swanwick -- and it contains real science!"), I was qualified to be there.

The French have a useful expression, l'esprit d'escalier, which translates as "staircase wit," which is what happens when you think of the clever thing you shoulda said on the way out of the party, when it's too late to say it.  Inevitably, I've thought of something I should have said then but didn't.  So I thought I'd share it with you here.

One midshipman asked me a question about the use of science in the story.  My answer was solid.  But I should also have said that a great deal of science fiction is knowing the science but explicating it as little as possible.

The example I like to use is that if you're writing a story about elephants, you must know that it is physically impossible for an elephant to lift all four legs off the ground at the same time.  You should not have one character turn to another and say, "As you know, Raj, an elephant can never..."  But you need to know this fact because when you write that exciting scene in which your elephant is being chased by timber wolves, the moment it leaps effortlessly over a ravine, you're going to lose every elephant lover in your audience.

So, any gonna-be writers reading this take note:  Get your science right.  Explain only as much as the reader needs to know to get the story.  Research is like an iceberg -- nine-tenths of it goes unseen.

Oh, and if any of your writing buddies are midshipme n, be sure to pass this along.


Above:  Yes, they have bespoke Coke machines at the Academy.  I have no idea if the franchise is lucrative enough to justify the cost of the graphics or if it's just that somebody in the graphics department was feeling patriotic

*

Movie Legos

.

At the urging of my son, I went to see The Lego Movie yesterday.  And it was, yes, both witty and entertaining.  I do not regret going to see it.

But it was also . . . How shall I put this? . . . absolutely predictable.

Did anybody doubt for an instant that Emmet would get the girl?  That just before the good guys could save the day, they'd all be captured and it would look like the bad guys had triumphed?  That the villain would be reformed?  That father and son would be reconciled?

Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  As if you needed it.

I have no complaint about the movie.  The small children for whom it was made clearly loved it.  And that's good.  What grinches me is that every big-budget movie these days seems to be constructed on the same grid, with the same plot twists.  It's as if they were all given a huge tub of Movie Lego pieces and told, "Go to it!"

You can make all kinds of things with Legos.  But you can't make a working cyclotron.  Or a human liver.  Or a suit that you'd care to wear.  And with Movie Legos, you may be able to make many admirable entertainments.  But you couldn't make a Casablanca, a Citizen Kane, a Vertigo.  

I may have to swear off big budget movies for a while.

And as always . . .

I'm on the road again.  See you when I get back!

*

Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown

.

I'm in print again and so I am happy. "Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown" appears in the current (April/May) issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, along with what look to be a very good array of fiction by writers I like.  Including fellow Philadelphian Fran Wilde, making her Asimov's debut.

I say "look to be" because it's a working day and I haven't read any of the other stories yet.  But I do note that Fran understands titles.  Her story is called "Like a Wasp to the Tongue."  Try getting that one out of your mind!

My own story is about a girl named Su-yin whose father is taken away by the Devil.  So of course she follows him to Hell to get him back.  Alas, not only is Hell an unpleasant place, but she's forced to go out on dates, as part of her own personal deal with the Devil.

Will Su-yin triumph?  This is a Michael Swanwick story!  Of course there'll be a happy ending.


And on a completely different subject . . .

Three of my friends are up for an Audie Award -- and in the same category, Multi-Voiced Performance.  Janis Ian is one of the performers in Ender's Game Alive, an adaptation of the Orson Scott Card science fiction classic, and Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman are up for The Fall of the Kings, an adaptation of Ellen's fantasy classic.

The fourth friend is Gardner Dozois, whose audio anthology Rip-Off! is up against the Ender's Game adaptation.

So . . . congratulations to all four.  I'm rooting for you all.

*

  

Librarians And Fans

.

My friend Kyle Cassidy recently did a photo essay titled This Is What A Librarian Looks Like.  It appeared in Slate and I admired it a lot.  Kyle likes to discover a subset of humanity (roller derby women, gun owners, whatever) and photograph them as they are.  I've watched him work.  He sets up the screen, tells his subjects to stand before it, and then dances back and forth, finding the right angle, before taking two photos.  He looks at them both, chooses the better, and shows it to the photographee.

Instant smiles.

Somehow -- and I've never been able to figure out how -- Kyle lets people pose themselves and then takes pictures that make them look both very cool and absolutely like themselves.  In the Middle Ages, he would have been burned as a witch.

Weirdly enough, his photos of librarians (click here to see) raised a firestorm of controversy.  He shouldn't have photographed librarians but their work!  By including various minorities, he made librarians seem more inclusive than they actually are!  He photographed some wearing glasses!

Eek.

Kyle also did a photo essay of science fiction fans.  He set up his screen, photographed anybody who came by, and then put the results up on the Web.  (Click here to see.)  They look fabulous.  Every one of them.  While simultaneously looking like the extremely eccentric people that fans are.

Reaction?  Nothing but good.

If you'd told me that librarians, who are the guardians of civilization and the representatives of God's best thoughts on Earth would be crankier than science fiction fans (who are at best, let's face it -- and I got my picture taken then too, so I don't exempt myself  -- umm,"eccentric") I'd have laughed  in   your face.

Yet, inexplicably enough, they are.

I have no moral to end this post with.  But go and look at both groups of photos.  Don't the subjects look great?  This is  what human beings really look like if you look at them without preconceptions.  It turns out we're a pretty neat batch of people.


Above: Ingrid Abrams, a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library.  

*