Planet of the Authors

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I just heard from my old friend Walt Maguire. Some thirty years ago, I was his dotted-line supervisor at the National Solar Heating and Cooling Information Center (NSHCIC -- motto: "What's a NSHCIC like you doing in a place like this?"), itself a dotted-line agency answerable to both HUD and DOE.

Back then, Walt and I were both unpublished writers, given to staying after work so we could use the Selectrics for our own work. Walt wrote plays and me . . . well, I became a science fiction writer and was never heard from again.

Anyway, Walt's got a book coming out this summer! Monkey See, which he characterizes as light reading (but that may just be him; Walt is a modest and self-deprecating guy; he probably meant to say "hilarious and fast-paced") is forthcoming from ENC Press (pre-order price $11).

You can read an excerpt here. Or you can download a podcast of the excerpt here. Plus, there's a picture of Walt looking authorial as hell here.


But, c'mon . . . talking apes? Where does he come up with these crazy ideas?

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Fossil Urban Underfoot Street Art

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No comment.

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The Global Economic Collapse -- And What's In It For YOU!

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Golden Gryphon, which is one of the crown jewels of the science fiction small press, has just announced a two-for-one sale.  When you buy any book from them, you can receive any other book you wish of equal or lesser value.

I find this alarming as a potential sign of just how badly the economy is affecting everything.  But it also means you can score some major short story collections from the likes of Nancy Kress and James Patrick Kelly and load up on books by Jeffrey Ford as well.  So it's a sweet deal for you.

You can check out the details here.  The offer is only good until June 23.

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It is now officially summer

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Every year in early June for something like the past twenty years, there's a major bicycle race here in Philadelphia. Its name changes with its sponsors, and I've given up tracking what it's called this year. But the highlight of the race is when the bicyclists ascend a street in Manayunk so steep and challenging that it's been dubbed "the Wall."

Manyayunk and Roxborough (where I live) are working class neighborhoods. So there was a certain amount of skepticism about young people in bicycle shorts and plastic helmets passing through the first time the race occurred. But then they hit the Wall.

Difficult, painful, and essentially pointless labor repeated time after time after time is something that working folks can understand. So the race has been adopted by the neighborhoods, and on Bike Race Sunday there are parties, barbecues, and keggers throughout the region.

We've been having ours longer than can be remembered. Up above are some of the guests who showed up yesterday.

It is now officially summer. The party season can commence.

And in today's mail . . .

. . . came my contributor's copies of The Mammorth Book of Mindblowing SF. My contribution was a reprint of "Mother Grasshopper." But among the reprints are original works by Stephen Baxter, Eric Brown, Paul di Filippo, Robert Reed, and Adam Roberts. I'm looking forward to reading them.

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Another Delightful Book You Can't Have Yet

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Monday I drove to DC for a dinner with Washingtonians and Russians. Wednesday, I went to the Barnes Foundation in the morning and then drove 300 miles to Pittsburgh. Yesterday I came home. So it's been a busy week.

I was going to blog about the Barnes, which is quite a wonderful experience, a truly great museum and one which accepts only a limited number of viewers. Every time I go there, I plan to stay the entire day. But after only a few hours, my eyes are so full I couldn't look at one more Van Gogh or hypersexual Courbet to save my life. It's that rich an experience.

However, in the mail today, came a slim book with an inscription inside from Henry Wessells:

The

first

copy

for

Michael

Swanwick

2 June 09

HW

Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career & Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees, written by Your Humble Correspondent, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman and a fabulous frontispiece by Charles Vess exists! I am so very, very happy for me.

You, of course, will have to wait for Readercon (July9-12) to own a copy. But authorship hath its perks. The front and back covers are shown above.

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Dinner with Russians in D.C.

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Monday, Marianne and I drove down to D. C. to have dinner with the Washington fans and our Russian friends Larisa Mihailova and Alexei Bezougly. The photo above is of Larisa (right) and Russian-born writer Eva Gerasimenko. Larisa is, among other things, the editor of the Moscow sf magazine Supernova.

What a warm-hearted and pleasant to be with crowd the WSFA people are, though! I've been particularly fond of them since I was a new writer and they treated me as if I were potentially Somebody. After we ate, John Pomeranz got up and said a few graceful words and presented the guests with copies of the current Dozois Year's Best volume -- which is a great gift on two fronts. First, because it's probably hard to find in Russia and correspondingly more expensive. Second, because on the flight back home both Larisa and Alexei had something engaging to read.

This is grace in everyday life. I had to admire it.

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Meeting My Imminent Replacements

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Yesterday, I had a pleasant afternoon, talking with a local writers group (shown above). I asked if the group had a name and, after some hesitation, was told, "Universal Dominance Collaborators," and then, in a lower voice, "or more conventionally PhillySpecFic." So I think it's a case of not really having a formal name, but only a common determination to write better. (And, since I just now misplaced my notebook somewhere in the room, I may have gotten the names wrong anyway.)

One thing I found particularly engaging was how extremely interested they all were in methods to avoid imbuing imagined races with old racial stereotypes. To somebody of my age, this is remarkable, because I can remember when the stereotypes weren't relegated to the subtext at all -- they were right on the surface. So the thought of somebody saying, "Yeah, we have Jews and African Americans in our country club. But no orcs!" strikes me as genuine progress.

Musing it over afterwards, I formulated my thoughts into two rules:

1. Writers should be extremely sensitive to avoid stereotypes, not only regarding race, gender, age, and ethnicity, but in every other possible category as well: People from California, white guys who chew gum, bocci players, women electrical engineers, members of their own families . . . Not for reasons of "political correctness" but simply because it's our job to record the world as it is, rather than as we were told it is.

2. Readers should cut us all the slack in the world, and always assume the best of our intentions.

And right now I'm off to D.C.! I'll report back on the experience soon.

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