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After something like two years of neglect, my web page, Michael Swanwick Online, has finally been updated!
I've added two pieces of flash fiction that were earlier posted here, an essay originally published in the New York Review of Science Fiction ("The View from the Wharf Rat," my musings on attending the anime convention Otakon), a new batch of serious answers to serious questions in The Squalid Truth, and two pieces of bad advice to new writers in Unca Mike. Plus a more recent photo, so it doesn't look like I'm in denial about my age.
It's a good site, if I do say so myself. Beautifully created and maintained by Vlatko Juric-Kokik and Peter Tillman. You can check it out here.
Meanwhile, back at the Thon . . .
Chapter One gets off to a rocky start as Eileen Gunn tries to name the protagonist Nokia Fryingpan or somesuch nonsense. I brush aside her transparent attempt to avoid plotting by subjecting the book's premises to the same rigorous moral standards she holds reality to, and introduce a man with a pistol, a crystal Maguffin, living gargoyles, and the world's most unlikely parents.
Will Eileen rise to the challenge? Or will she find complex reasons to decide that the matriarchal structure of the gargoyles is incompatible with their implicit biology? Stay tuned and find out here.
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4 comments:
"The night Nokia before became a woman, she was almost killed by an arrogant groundhog." Has Ms Gunn been listening to Megan Hicks's Groundhogs Meet Grimm, I wonder? [grin]
The thieves / rooftop concept reminds me of Jame's learning the rooftops blindfold in P.C. Hodgell's Godstalk. Just my imagination, or a faulty memory of a book I read and loved two decades ago?
Anyway, greatly enjoying the collaboration, thanks for letting us plebes listen in on it.
I haven't read Godstalk (mea culpa) but the thieves/ rooftop thing certainly has lots of precedents. It's almost a sub-genre in its own right.
The idea was put into my head by a friend whose apartment was robbed by a thief who came across the rooftops and through a window -- so, obviously, I don't approve of thieves in real life. But I know I'd encountered the idea in fiction long before that.
There's also a lovely rooftop chase in one of the books in Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles -- I think it's Queen's Play. No thieves, though.
I actually logged back in to erase my comment -- it occurred to me too late you / Eileen might not want people kibitzing ... Sorry if it irritated either of you.
I don't mind. It's only an exercise in world-creation. I doubt anybody will even bother to write it.
But it's fun while it lasts, eh?
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