How Cool is THIS?

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My friend Kyle Cassidy has been taking photos of Tenzin Gyatso, who defines himself as "a simple Buddhist monk" and is also the current Dalai Lama. You can read his take on the experience and his appropriately color-saturated photos here.

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The President's New Nobel

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Like everybody else, including the recipient, I was astonished when Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize for Peace. Clearly, the Nobel Committee were (a) trying to encourage the man to bring about peace more than actually reward him for having done so, and (b) afraid that if they waited for the end of his term, they wouldn't be able to give him the prize. So in one deft move, they managed to offend both the American Right and the American Left by giving our president the single most prestigious award in the world.

Deftly done, Nobel Committee!

But the REAL scandal is, of course, the news that against all reason I have once again been passed over for the award. And so, for what is surely the last year, I must again post . . .

My Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech(Presented Here Against the Unlikely Chance I Never Get to Deliver It)

It's about time!

You lousy bastards should have given this to me decades ago, and you fucking well know it. Look at the morons and retards you have given it to. Okay, so Albert Einstein, personal hygiene aside, wasn't a total loser. But Niels Bohr, Desmond Tutu, Ilya Prigogine, the Dalai Lama? You'd think this award was being given for having a funny name! And whoever decided it would be a cute joke to give the prize in literature to the likes of Thomas Mann, Anatole France, and Selma Lagerlof obviously never bothered trying to read those boring old windbags. To say nothing of that self-promoting fraud, Mother Theresa!

I could go on, but I think my point is made.

The Nobel Prize was created by Alfred Nobel, who was—I trust I'm not hurting anybody's feelings here—a neurotic recluse and a mass-murdering Swede. So, when one considers the source, I really shouldn't be surprised that you only gave me the one. There are five, you know. (I don't count the Economics thingie as a real Nobel, and neither should you.) It's not as if the single greatest Writer/Peacemaker [note to self: scratch out whichever category these idiots neglect to honor me in] the world has ever known couldn't be adept in chemistry and physics and medicine as well. I assure you I could. Not that I have, granted. I've been busy. But surely intentions should count for something.

Oh, and a word about the venue. Stockholm?? InDecember??? No wonder your bikini team never showed up.

So here's what I propose: Vegas, obviously, for the climate. Ditch the king—nice guy, but no Robin Williams. For the MC, rather than doing the safe thing with Madonna or J-Lo, go visionary with the Osborne Family. Can you picture them wandering aimlessly about the stage? Hilarious. Maybe we can even convince Ozzie to bite the head off a (fake) bat.

To get television coverage in the major markets, you're going to need music—Guns N' Roses, Aerosmith, maybe even get the Stones out of retirement and back in spandex again. Back 'em up with a few flash-pots and some fly-girl dancers. Filmed testimonials from Michael Jackson and the Simpsons. Choreography from The Producers. A line of Elvis impersonators. Dignified and elegant, that's the key. Keep the wire-work to a minimum.

I get shivers just thinking about it.

Now I realize that these suggestions might seem startling to some. But that's why I'm up here and you're down there—because I'm a genius and you're not. So shut up and think it over.

Meanwhile, I accept this award with a modesty so profound that pissants like you cannot even begin to comprehend it.

Thank you.

The above was taken from Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of the Elements. You can view it here, or the entire 118-story run of elements here.

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Childhoods of Great Artists, Part 43

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I'm traveling today, tapping this out on a palmtop while I finish my coffee in preparation for a hard day's work. So today's post will be short, even for me. But I made a cartoon, or I guess a fumetta, the other day, and I thought I'd share it with you.

And the caption is:

EARLIEST KNOWN WORK BY LITTLE ANDY GOLDSWORTHY, AGE FIVE

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The Explicated Gene Wolfe

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I get free books in the mail now and then, and my reaction to them varies from an elated "Hey, look what I got!" to a sullen, "Life is too short to read stuff like this."

Today, I opened a package from Sirius Fiction and said, "Oh my God!' I'd just gotten a copy of the second (expanded) edition of Lexicon Urthus, Michael Andre-Driussi's dictionary of the strange and wonderful words in Gene Wolfe's Urth cycle (the Book of the New Sun quartet and related texts), and a reviewer's copy of the spanking-new The Wizard Knight Companion, subtitled A Lexicon for Gene Wolfe's The Knight and The Wizard.

Then I showed Marianne the new book and she took it out of my hands and did not give it back.

There's a lot of scholarship, both true and faux, attached to science fiction and fantasy books nowadays, but such efforts are particularly rewarding when applied to Wolfe's oeuvre, because he puts so much more into his works than almost any other writer.

As an example, here's a Lexicon Urthus word which, because I once worked for the National Solar Heating and Cooling Information Center, I was able to shed some light upon. In the Book of the New Sun, Severian has a fuligin cloak, blacker than black, whose warmth he several times praises. The word is derived from fuliginous, meaning sooty or soot-colored:

fuligin a sooty color, powdered black (1, chap. 4, 39).
Commentary: the descriptions of this color as being "blacker than black" (aside from the powerful sin aspect) indicate to Michael Swanwick that it is actually "selective black," a black that absorbs light beyond the visible spectrum and into the ultraviolet. Selective coatings are used on solar collectors to maximize absorption of radiation. It is a notion that engineer Wolfe would definitely be familiar with, and the seeming paradox of having a practical explanation would fit his sense of humor. Presumably a fuligin cloak would be unusually warm.

What I want to point out about this is that it's the literary equivalent of what programmers call "Easter eggs," hidden messages or treats placed into games or programs for the lucky (or canny) person to find, which are not necessary for your enjoyment of the experience.

People who seek these things out tend to make Wolfe's books sound like a riddle inside in an enigma wrapped in something that's too much work to be much fun. Not true. Okay, there are a couple of his books which are not for the weak-minded. But you can do a fast and superficial reading of The Knight and The Wizard (originally submitted to Wolfe's editor as a single book, The Wizard Knight, but broken in two for reasons of publishing economics) and not only have a good time but get everything that's most important about it: The examination of what qualities make a man a knight and the ending, which could hardly be clearer in its meaning. Nobody literally needs The Wizard Knight Companion.

But some of us -- and we know who we are, we happy few, you and I -- want it anyway. Simply because when we love a book, we want to understand it better. Also because we have a weakness for Easter eggs.

For us, there is Michael Andre-Driussi's book. For which I am duly grateful.

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Slidewalks, Zeppelins, and Naked Brains in Bottles!

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Zeppelin City, the brilliant collaborative story between Eileen Gunn and, well, (cough) me, has just been published on Tor.com as part of their special October theme of Steampunk Month.

Eileen surely exaggerates when she claims the story was fourteen years in the making. But I do seem to recall that all the tech was cutting edge when we started it.

Will you love it? Considering that it has a girl inventor named Radio Jones, an ornithopter pilot named Amelia Spindizzy, and giant naked brains afloat in bottles, the real question is not whether you'll love it, but how could you not?

Plus, the story has the ingredient that all the Web has been screaming for: It's free.

Click here to see and read.

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My Periodic Table of Science Fiction REBORN!

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When the lamentably titled but greatly-missed webzine SciFiction went under, it took with it Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction. Recently, even the unauthorized mirror site went down, apparently because some other working writer pointed out to the proprietor that publishing people's work without their permission is simply not nice. Which meant that if you wanted to read those stories, you either had find a copy of the out-of-print PS Publishing book or else know Serbian.

MSPToSF, if you came in late, was a series of 118 short-short stories, one for each element in the periodic table, which were written and posted in order, one per week, over the course of roughly two years. During much of that time, I was also writing and posting a weekly series of 80 short-shorts for Eileen Gunn's webzine The Infinite Matrix, one for each of the etchings in Goya's Los Caprichos, which I titled The Sleep of Reason. Writers used to turn pale and cross themselves when I walked into a room.

Well, I've posted the MSPToSF stories again, here on Blogspot. I don't have the nifty clickable periodic table interface that the SciFiction website had. But all the stories are there for you to read, and a pretty nifty batch they are too, if I do say so myself.

You can find them at www.periodictableofsciencefiction.blogspot.com. Or just click here.

You can still find The Sleep of Reason online by clicking here. I have to warn you, though, that in deference to Goya's dark vision, some of it is pretty bleak stuff.

At top: The cover for the book version of The Periodic Table of Science Fiction. I always loved that woodcut.

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Rich and Strange

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Yesterday morning, I was watching elk fighting on the side of a mountain of mine tailings, and last night I was at a production of Beckett's Happy Days (with a brilliant performance by Mary Elizabeth Scallen). This is either the strangest of all rich worlds or the richest of all strange worlds.

Above: One of a gazillion snapshots I took. Really, I should've brought a sound recorder to capture the bull elks bugling. It's a sound like no other.


Oh, and an open question . . .

I'm thinking of maybe sometime next year writing an essay on flash fiction. In preparation for which I really ought to assemble a list of the masters of the form. I'm talking about people who have actual books, or at least locatable web collections.

Offhand, I'd have to include Julio Cortazar for Chronopios and Famas, Franz Kafka for Parables and Paradoxes, Carol Lay for her Story Minute compilations, and Lynda Barry for various Ernie Pook's Comeek collections.

Who am I leaving out?

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