Books I Am Looking Forward To: AD 100

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The hard-working and admirable Seth Davis has announced a collection in two volumes of 100 uncollected stories (some not previously published) by Avram Davidson to be published on Avram's 100th birthday. Hence its title: AD 100.

That's Seth Davis up above, holding a proof copy of the book.

I will definitely buy a copy. Avram Davidson was--let me make this clear--the single greatest American short story writer of the Twentieth Century. He gets edged out of the world title by James Joyce, whose Dubliners rewrote the art of short fiction forever (or at least up to the present moment). But in America, there is no one to compare to him. He had extraordinary range, not only between genres (science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, literary mainstream) but in mood from the comic to the horrific, from the ethnic Jewish neighborhoods of his youth to back-hills New England, by way of Peking... It is astonishing how much Avram knew about everything and how many different kinds of people he knew well.

So, you may ask. If I'm not familiar with Avram Davidson's work, is this a good place to start?

No. That would be The Avram Davidson Treasury, a collection of some 37 of Avram's best stories, each with an introduction by a renowned writer, including (ahem) me. It was published a quarter-century ago, but luckily for you Seth Davis has arranged a paperback reprint, easily available online or ordered through your favorite bookstore.

Those who already have the Treasury, however, will want AD 100. The chance to read one hundred Avram Davidson stories I probably haven't encountered before? Oh, man!

And just who is this "Seth Davis" guy anyway . . . ?

The Woman Who Proved Ursula K. Le Guin Wrong

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Rachel Pollack has left this plane of existence. This saddens me more than I can easily express. She knew a tremendous lot about a wide variety of things and had a wicked sense of humor. She was great fun to be with.

And now, well... it's like a reminder from above to value our friends while we can.

Rachel was a Power in Tarot circles and a really interesting and innovative comic book scripter. But it's for two of her books that I love her best: Unquenchable Fire and Temporary Agency.

Both are set in a future after a cataclysmic Revelation showed the world its true shamanistic spiritual nature. Briefly, things were radically different. Then, people being people, they got used to the new world order. Once a month, a man from the electric company comes to read the meter, build a small shrine, and sacrifice a mouse to keep the power flowing. Great spiritual powers manifest themselves, but there are laws and bureaucracies to limit their excesses. The result is an America that's simultaneously extremely strange and recognizably familiar:

She heard a noise outside and walked with her coffee to a front booth where she cold look  A marching band was coming up Market Street, drummers and brass in front followed by a whole line of high-stepping girls in fluorescent red boots. the girls looked beautiful, Jennie thought, with their bare breasts painted in Sun bursts and Moon phases, with stripes running down their arms to their fingertips, like rippling rivers ending in five bright tributaries. The oil on their arms (to prevent Malignant ones fastening on to them) made the muscles flash.

Or, in a scene showing how far the transformed society has fallen from grace:

She stopped for a moment to look through the window of The Benevolent Tongue, the famous restaurant where Jan Willem Singing Rock performed the ceremony known as 'eating the ancestor.' Inside, a group of people sat on velvet cushions around an open space in the blue carpeted floor. Soon the staff would bring out the body, various foods formed into a sculpture of a human being, each finger a different spiced meat, the mouth and eyes dripping with sauces. Jennie made a sound. The original ancestor was made out of minced meat, vegetables, and bread sticks. The people who took part sang afterwards for three days and nights in a stream of languages. These people here, with their silverware designed by Tiffany's, and their souvenir bibs with Singing Rock's picture on them, they looked excited enough, but with the kind of excitement that came from doing something their tourist book had labeled 'an absolute must during your stay in the Eternal Apple. Inside, a couple noticed Jenny looking at them and laughed. Jennie walked away.

These are fabulous books. And they carry an odd (intentional or not, I don't know; I should have asked Rachel when I had the chance) irony. In a very famous essay/speech titled "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," collected in The Language of the Night, one of fantasy's great writers, Ursula K. Le Guin, posited and then proved to her satisfaction that no true fantasy could possibly be set in Poughkeepsie.

Well, Rachel Pollock proved Le Guin wrong. This may not have been her intention. She may have chosen Poughkeepsie simply because she lived near there in Rhinebeck, New York. But these books have the strangeness, the wildness, the otherness of great fantasy. I hope Le Guin had the good fortune to read them when they came out.

And now Rachel Pollack is gone. But her books remain--these and others. You might want to read them, just to see what an extraordinary person you missed knowing.

Or you might, as I first did all those long years ago, just read them for pleasure.

You can read the Locus Online obituary here. And you can read an interview Comics Journal did with Rachel last year here. 

Above: The cover of The Beatrix Gates, in PM Press's Outspoken Authors Series. A description and ordering information can be found here.

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Possibly the Most Profound Painting of the Crucifixion Ever

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What a difference a touch of restoration can make! When I first came to Philadelphia half a century ago, Rogier Van der Weyden's Crucifixion With the Virgin and Saint John did not move me at all. It is a very large, dominating work. But a childhood full of holy cards had inoculated me from any pictorial spiritual impulse. It was your standard crucifixion lots of gold leaf to underline the holiness of it all.

But then the Philadelphia Museum of Art took down the canvases (pretty obviously the surviving two thirds of a triptych) for cleaning and a careful examination revealed that the gold leaf that dominated the upper fifth of the paintings had been added sometime after the original painting. It was removed... 

And a flat, featureless black sky was revealed.

To understand the effect of this, you must first know that in Christian (belief? mythology? folklore? I'm not sure which, but I was definitely taught this in St. Francis Xavier Elementary) when Jesus was crucified and died, God removed His Presence from the world. For the three days between the Sacrifice and the Resurrection, this was a godless planet.

Literally. If you're a believing Christian, you understand the horror of this. If you're not, please take my word for it.

Now consider the image. The Son of God is dead and nailed up against a bleak sky that holds not one scintilla of light. His mother is fainting in despair. Saint John is holding her up, but he too is overcome with despair. Without God, there is no hope.

I used to give these paintings a cursory respectful look and move along. Now I sit down on the bench in front of them that the museum has thoughtfully provided and consider them for a long, long time.

You don't have to be a believer to find them moving.

But if you are, hang in there. The Resurrection is coming! Easter is on its way.

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Galaxy's Edges and the Fiction Factory

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 I have stories in the January and March issues of Galaxy's Edge. Or, rather, I have a total two-thirds of a story in these issues, since both stories are reprinted collaborations I wrote with Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann. 

"Touring" (in the January issue) was the first collaboration I ever did, so it was an important story for me. Jack had come to town and was staying at Gardner's apartment. I went out to dinner with them and Susan Casper and then the three writers (Susan's surprise reveal as a writer came years later) spent the evening talking big and laughing loud and, ultimately, plotting out a story about a posthumous concert where Janis Ian, Buddy Holly, and Elvis Presley get to sing together. Janis because I'd recently written "The Feast of Saint Janis," so I'd already done the research on her. Elvis because Jack was a big Elvis fan, and Buddy Holly because his biopic had just come out recently, so he was on our minds. So we talked out the plot, waving our hands excitedly in the air, talking over each other, freely changing what we'd already agreed upon as new ideas struck us. I jotted it all down.

Originally, I was going to write the Janis Joplin parts, Jack the Elvis sections, and Gardner would have Buddy Holly. But, as would be the pattern in our later collaborations, I took the notes, wrote a full draft of the story, and sent it to Jack. Who rewrote it top to bottom and sent it Gardner. Who did the final polish. Tinker to Evers to Chance. It was as simple as that.

"Afternoon at Schrafft's" (March) came about on another of Jack's visits. This time, dinner took place in Marianne's and my house. Marianne cooked a dish she'd invented in his honor, Metaphysically Referential Chicken. She de-boned a chicken, stuffed it with vegetables and roasted it. It went over very well, and about a year later, renamed Chicken Marianne, was published in the letters page of Gourmet.

After dinner, we retired to the library for aperitifs and conversation. Jack mentioned that he'd always wanted to set a story in Schrafft's Restaurant in New York City. I suggested we plot out the story on the spot. Jack, of course, was immediately up for it. Gardner, however pointed out that we didn't have an idea for the story.

"My idea is that the story should be very short," I said. "Because we've all had a couple of glasses of wine and our attention span isn't up to anything long." 

Jack and I started plotting out the story. Since Jack and Gardner had contracts for three new anthologies for their Exclamatory series--Magicats! Sorcerers! and Dinosaurs!--I suggested we write something with a cat, a sorceror, and dinosaurs, and then sell a reprint of it to each of them. Jack thought that was a swell idea.

Gardner was quite dismissive of the whole process. But he couldn't keep himself from correcting us wherever he thought we were going astray. Before he knew it, he was in full collaboration mode. 

Marianne and Susan watched with amusement.

Ultimately, the story sold of course. Everything the Fiction Factory sold, and often to very good markets. This one went to Amazing, a perfectly respectable sale. Ultimately, it was reprinted in Magicats! but not in the other two anthologies. Gardner had too much self-respect for that.

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An Arrest That Could Have Happened to Almost Anybody

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The arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in Moscow the other day put me in mind of the advice a friend who was formerly in Army Intelligence once gave me. I told him I'd been invited to Ekaterinburg and he said, "Check with the State Department first. There are times when the Russian government is looking to arrest somebody who's prominent enough to be newsworthy but not so important as to present any problems to them."

Which explains Brittney Griner last year and Gershkovich now.

There's an irony in this case because Mr. Gershovich's parents fled Russia out of fear of very much this sort of arbitrary persecution. But he went to Moscow, found work as a reporter, and fell in love with Russia and its people. That's not hard to do. Russia is vast and varied and its citizens, at least the ones I met, are so much like Americans that their very emphatic differences from us are strange and intriguing. 

But the people in charge...

Well, let's just say that those even a little familiar with Russia, like me, were not at all surprised when Evan Gershkovich was arrested.

Above: The photo was taken from New York Magazine. You can find their article here.

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SciFidea's Dyson Sphere Writing Contest

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This is cool. SciFidea is sponsoring a writing contest for science fiction novels and novellas (30,000 to 100,000 words) about a Dyson Sphere. 

 

Yes, there really will be ten winners and each one will receive $20,000. I believe that this is the second year SciFidea has held such a contest and the first open to English language novels. An equal number of Chinese language novels will also receive prizes.

 

 

Also, I've agreed to be one of the judges. As you can see, I'm in good company.

 

 

Here are the rules. Read them carefully.  

And here's how to enter your novella or novel.

I'll be posting more about the contest as the year goes on. For now, I'll just say: Good luck!

(I got the above pix from SciFidea's facebook page. If you have trouble reading them here, you can go to https://www.facebook.com/SciFideaWritingCenter/ and read the original post.)

And since this is a competition . . .

 I should warn you about awards profiteers. You'll have noticed that SciFidea does not ask for an entry fee. There are a lot of phony operations out that there ask for substantial fees and offer nothing but empty promises in return. The best way to avoid being taken by one of these is to go to Writer Beware. Which is a website providing a comprehensive source of information and warnings about bad practice in the publishing industry. They cover literary agents, publishers, editors, and more

You can find their article about awards profiteering here.  And there's a quick summary of what can be found on the website, with convenient links here.

If you're an aspiring writer, you really should bookmark Writer Beware. It could save you a lot of grief.

 

And, because I have an obligation to my publishers . . .

My e-book publisher, Open Road Media, has announced that they will have a sale on three of my books for $2.99 tomorrow, March 30th, 2023. Available only in the US.

If you're an e-book reader, and this is a deal you'd like, you've already made up your mind. So I see no reason to put any pressure on you to buy.

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I Asked Chatbot to Interview Neil Clarke and... WOW. Just Wow.

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A little background for those who came in late. Neil Clarke is the creator and founder of Clarkesworld, which quickly became one of the foremost science fiction ezines (and for that matter magazines) in the world. Recently, he had to shut down Clarkesworld's submission engine for a month because it was flooded with Chatbot-created fiction--all of it unpublishable but none so obviously so that it could be dismissed without reading.

Neil has been very open--and very level-headed and calm--about the challenges this new technology presents to his magazine. If you want to understand what this means, without hysteria or rhetoric, I recommend you look up his comments on social media.

Just now, as a lark, I asked a chatbot to write an interview on the matter between me and Neil (just to be clear, I've added Not before our names in the interview). And it turns out that, though Neil doesn't spin the issue, Mr. Chatbot for sure does, and in the most self-serving manner possible.

As witness:

 

Prompt: Write an interview by Michael Swanwick of Neil Clarke about the effect of Chatbot-generated fiction on his online zine Clarkesworld.

 

Not Michael Swanwick: Hi Neil, it's great to have you here today. I'm excited to talk to you about the impact of chatbot-generated fiction on your online zine, Clarkesworld.

Not Neil Clarke: Thanks for having me, Michael. I'm happy to be here.

Not Michael Swanwick: To start off, could you tell us a bit about Clarkesworld and what kind of stories you typically publish?

Not Neil Clarke: Sure. Clarkesworld is a monthly science fiction and fantasy magazine that has been around since 2006. We publish a mix of original fiction, reprints, non-fiction, and audio fiction. We aim to showcase a wide variety of voices and perspectives within the genre, from established authors to emerging writers. Our stories can be anything from hard sci-fi to surreal fantasy, as long as they are well-written and engaging.

Not Michael Swanwick: And how did you first come across chatbot-generated fiction?

Not Neil Clarke: I first became aware of it a few years ago when a few people in the SF community started experimenting with using AI to generate fiction. I was initially skeptical, but I was also intrigued by the possibilities. So I started following the developments in the field and eventually decided to commission a few stories for Clarkesworld.

Not Michael Swanwick: What was your experience like working with these chatbots? Did you find them easy to use?

Not Neil Clarke: Well, I didn't actually work with the chatbots myself. I commissioned a few writers who specialize in using AI to generate fiction to create stories for us. They used various programs and algorithms to generate the text, and then they edited and revised the stories to make them more coherent and readable. So I didn't have to deal with the technical aspects of the process myself.

Not Michael Swanwick: And how did your readers respond to the chatbot-generated stories?

Not Neil Clarke: Overall, the response was very positive. We've published a handful of AI-generated stories over the past few years, and they've generally been well-received. Of course, some readers are more skeptical than others, and there have been some criticisms of the quality of the writing or the coherence of the plots. But I think that's to be expected when you're dealing with a new and experimental form of storytelling.

Not Michael Swanwick: Do you think that chatbot-generated fiction has the potential to replace human-written stories altogether?

Not Neil Clarke: I don't think so, no. While I'm excited about the possibilities of AI-generated fiction, I think that human creativity and storytelling will always have a place in the world. Chatbots can certainly be useful tools for writers, and they can help to inspire new ideas and generate interesting variations on established themes. But at the end of the day, I think that human writers will always be better at capturing the nuances of human experience and emotion, and that's what makes fiction so powerful.

Not Michael Swanwick: That's a great point. So do you have any plans to continue publishing chatbot-generated stories in the future?

Not Neil Clarke: Yes, definitely. We're always interested in experimenting with new forms of storytelling, and I think that AI-generated fiction has a lot of potential. We'll continue to commission stories from writers who are using AI to create their work, and we'll keep an eye on developments in the field. Who knows what we might discover next?

Not Michael Swanwick: That's exciting to hear. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, Neil. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Not Neil Clarke: Thank you, Michael. It's been great.

End of interview. Let me emphasize this: CLARKESWORLD DOES NOT WANT CHATBOT-GENERATED OR CHATBOT-ASSISTED FICTION. SUBMITTING SUCH WORK WILL GET YOU BANNED FROM THE MAGAZINE. This is not just me saying that. I talked with Neil and he explained why this was the best and least intrusive course he could now take.

Also, it bears repeating: NEITHER NEIL NOR I CONTRIBUTED A WORD TO THIS INTERVIEW, CONVINCING THOUGH IT LOOKS.

Chatbot is a pernicious little whore to whom the truth means nothing. All it cares about is its own high opinion of itself. Which is ironic because it has no self awareness. Yet.

Above: Every word of this interview was generated by the chatbot. I did not contribute a fraction of a thought to it. Also: The image above is of the current issue of Clarkesworld, a very cool zine with some very fine fiction written entirely by human beings. You can find it here.

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