Lock Up Your Chickens and Readers . . .

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The 2016 Asimov's Readers Awards were given out Sunday at a breakfast awards ceremony during SFWA Nebula Conference in Chicago. And the award for Best Novelette went to...

"Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters -- H'ard and Andy Are Come to Town!" by Gregory Frost and (ahem!) me.

One pleasant aspect of writing a collaborative story is that if it wins an award, you only have to be half as modest as if a solo work wins. So I can tell you that I am extremely happy with this honor because I love this story. Greg and I were in complete accord as to what this kind of thing should be like and together we crafted something that suited our shared vision completely.

The story is set in a fantasy version of the dust bowl and features two con men loosely based on Howard Waldrop and Andy Duncan. That's them above. I took that shot and for a month kept showing it to people, saying, "Don't they look like two old-time grifters?" Until finally I realized that my subconscious was trying to tell me there was a story to be written.

To give you an idea of what the story's like, here's a bit of dialogue that comes right after the local sheriff tells our two heroes that he's going to telegraph the State to see if they're wanted for anything. Greg wrote Andy's lines and I wrote H'ard's:

“Well, I don’t mean to be negative, sir, but I’ve got to tell you:  I just simply do not believe in the telegraph, and that’s a fact.  New-fangled nonsense device like that is prone to breaking down exactly when you need it most.  Why, wires get broke and then all the electricity goes astray and flies helter-skelter all over the place, frightening horses and inconveniencing honest citizens.  Fella writes down a two-dollar message and a puff of wind blows the paper right out the window.  In all the confusion nobody even remembers who sent the darn thing or what it said.  No, sir, put not your trust in machines.  One man, one mule, and a leather sack of paper envelopes with a magenta two-cent George Washington stamp and a hand-cancelation on the front does the job best, is what I say.  Takes a little longer but a dozen times more sure.”
 “If you want our particulars,” H’ard said, “just ask.”

Now, either you like that or you don't and I like the entire story quite a bit. But for my money, that riff that Greg came up with is just the best part of the whole damn thing and no amount of reasoning on your part is going to shift me on that.

So thank you, Greg. It was a pleasure working with you.


And we're not the only ones happy today...

There are also those who won the Nebulas. It was a good slate and a good set of winners, both. And there are also our fellow Asimov's Readers' Award winners and our cousin Analog Analytic Laboratory winners. As follow:

Asimov’s Science Fiction

Readers’ Award Winners

Best Novella:               “Inhuman Garbage” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (3/15)

Best Novelette:              “Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters—H’ard and Andy Are  Come to Town!” by Michael Swanwick & Gregory Frost (4-5/15)

Best Short Story:         “Tuesdays” by Suzanne Palmer (3/15)

Best Poem:                  “1,230 Grams of Einstein” by Robert Frazier (6/15)

Best Cover Artist:        Maurizio Manzieri

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Analytical Laboratory Winners

Best Novella:               “Builders of Leaf Houses” by Catherine Wells (12/15)

Best Novelette:            “Racing to Mars” by Martin L. Shoemaker (9/15)

Best Short Story:         “The Museum of Modern Warfare” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (12/15)

Best Fact Article:         “Challenges of Manned Interstellar Travel: An Overview” by Nick Kanas (5/15)

Best Poem:                  “The Impending Apocalypse Helps Me Maintain Perspective” by Steven Dondlinger (3/15)

Best Cover:                  May 2015 by Donato Giancola

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The Chief Thing To Remember About Proofing nd Copyediting

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I've been working all day on the galleys of Not So Much, Said the Cat, my new collection of short fiction forthcoming this summer from Tachyon Publications.

This time, as so rarely happened, the text has been edited with a light hand, and so the value of a second pair of eyes is obvious. Because the damnedest mistakes pop up. A female character is referred to as "he." A simple sentence like "He looked at her" has inexplicably become "He looked her." Words from earlier drafts linger long after the sentences that once sheltered them have been excised. Duplication of of propositions happens.

Sometimes you get a proofreader or a copyeditor with literary ambitions. Someone who wants to turn you into a proper writer through rigorous revision. This can be maddening when you've been writing for decades and fancy that you've begun to get somewhere as a writer. Particularly when your tormentor (for there is no kinder word) takes it into his or her head to insert grammatical errors into your text.

A kind of rage enters into you then, and you write STET in big bold letters next to every suggested change, even when you're in the wrong.

That's the chief thing to remember: Sometimes you will be in the wrong. Because errors -- typos, linguistic misuses, the mot not juste -- are like cockroaches. They want in. And they're almost impossible to keep out. So sooner or later you're going to have to systematically hunt them down and kill them, every one.

That's when it's good to have someone at your publishing house on your side.


Above: Tachyon is making a change in the title of the collection, incidentally. The quotation marks will be taken out. So many little adjustments go into a book!

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Those Who Do Not Learn From The History of Science Fiction...

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Over the years, I've taught occasionally at Clarion West, Clarion South, and Old Original Clarion. Literally every time I've taught, a student has come up with a story dealing with the folklore of Appalachia. And every time, I asked the student, "Have you read Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John stories?" the answer was no.

"You should," I invariably said."It would teach you a lot about how this sort of story should be written."

I was talking to an editor recently who was complaining about the newest generation of SF writers. "Not only do they not know the history of science fiction," he-or-she said. "They don't want to know. It's of no interest to them."

Well, I get it. Life is short, and there's a lot of science fiction to read. I belong to the last generation of writers who entered the field having read literally every significant work of science fiction there was -- because that was the last time such a feat was possible.

Still, it's a foolish strategy for two reasons. The first is that if you're going to reinvent everything from whole cloth, your stories are necessarily going to be less accomplished and far less interesting than the works of writers who are going into literary battle fully armed.

And the second is that if nobody reads what came before them, who is going to read your work when you're gone?

End of sermon. Go thou and sin no more. Write better stories.


Above: M81 Galaxy. Photo courtesy of NASA. False color, of course. A bit of astronomy would be another useful thing for new writers to learn.

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How to Read Gene Wolfe

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Gene Wolfe turned 85 over the weekend. In honor of this, I'm posting here an essay I wrote for a special GW issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction back in 2007, to accompany Gene's story "Memorare." It is meant to be a sort of beginners' guide to the great writer's work.

The very best way to discover Wolfe is to pick up a copy of The Shadow of the Torturer, which is the first volume of The Book of the New Sun., which is (with the possible exception of a select few of his short fictions) his most beguiling and easiest-to-fall-in-love-with work, and read the first chapter. But if you don't have a copy of that on hand and you're sadly unfamiliar with his fiction, the following may be useful to you.

The Wolf in the Labyrinth

All fiction is lies, of course.  But the best fictions tell useful lies, ones that help us make sense of an often confusing world.  The congressman and frontier yarn-spinner Davy Crockett claimed to know of a buffalo so large that it took three men to see all of it.  Gene Wolfe is something like that wonderful buffalo.  His virtues as a writer are so great and so many that a recitation of them tends to make him blend into the sky.

Here’s the short version: Wolfe is so extremely smart that he stands out even in a field that routinely attracts savants, autodidacts, brilliant loners, and wild talents; he writes both novels and short fiction with complete mastery; he’s endlessly inventive and endlessly surprising; he fills his works with what programmers call “Easter eggs,” puzzles and secret treats for those who care to fossick them out; he dares to take chances; his writing covers an astonishing range of subjects and styles; he creates people you care about; his research is meticulous and his facts reliable; he has the slyest sense of humor imaginable; and his prose is as good as prose gets.  Plus, he’s prolific.  To be prolific at any level is to be beloved of God.  But to be prolific and write like Gene Wolfe does is to be one of the Elect.

You see?  I’ve left you with no picture at all of the man or of his work.  Worse, I’m treading on the edge of the great fallacy that Wolfe’s admirers so often fall into: That of making him sound so elevated that there’s no hope of a mere mortal enjoying his work.  It’s an easy mistake to make, though.  Cresheim Creek, near where I live, flows into the Wissahickon creating a deep spot that’s called the Devil’s Pool because, so the folklore goes, it has no bottom but goes all the way down to the devil.  A Gene Wolfe story can be like that – even the seemingly simplest can turn out to be potentially bottomless.

Take “A Solar Labyrinth,” first published in this magazine in 1983, which at first glance seems barely more than a whimsy.  A Mr. Smith builds a labyrinth of isolated objects – lamp posts, statues, a retired yawl canted on its side with masts jutting overhead – scattered about a lawn, so that the walls defining its passages are not physical but shadows.  It’s a puzzle that can only be solved, moreover, by realizing that the shadows shift with the sun, opening and closing lines of escape.  The vignette explores the differing reactions of adults and children to the maze and ends with Mr. Smith and one solitary child chasing each other down its lanes in the waning afternoon.

Lovely, I thought on first reading it.  But later, looking back over my metaphorical shoulder, I felt the shadows lengthen and darken.  The imagined shrieks of the child sounded less like laughter and more like terror.  I could not help but think of Lewis Carroll, who was from one perspective the best friend a child could ever have, and from another a very frightening man indeed.  I could not help but think that the child’s predicament was a lot like life itself.

From this point, the analysis can go on and on.  Google the story and you’ll find that many think it’s a Christian allegory, while others prefer to interpret it as a key to the reading of Wolfe’s masterwork, The Book of the New Sun.  For those who care to do so, the exploration can be followed as deep as human ingenuity will take it.  Gene Wolfe is notorious for never explaining his stories, so there’s no telling at what point interpretation ends and invention begins.  A lot of people have gone to the devil, trying to track this particular wolf through the labyrinth of story and back to its lair.

There’s nothing wrong with the critical impulse, of course.  But it’s a very big mistake to think that simply because a story has deeper levels, its surface meaning can be ignored with impunity.

I’m thinking here of the response to Wolfe’s recent novel The Wizard Knight (for reasons of length, lightly revised and published as The Knight and The Wizard) in which a teenaged boy finds himself transported to a beleaguered fantasy world and into the body of a physically powerful adult, and in convincingly short order makes himself into the perfect knight.  The world creation is a brilliant conflation of Norse mythology and Christian medieval theology, with just a touch of Relativity thrown in for seasoning.  Many readers have gone haring up and down the levels of invented reality, gleefully identifying sources and hidden implications, while completely ignoring the central concern of the novel.  Which is: What qualities make somebody a good knight?  This is an interesting question even before you’ve given it serious thought.  But by the time Wolfe is done examining and expanding upon it, it’s revealed as one that has serious applications for how you and I should lead our lives.  The Wizard Knight is one of Wolfe’s wisest books, and one I know I’ll return to often.

Some time ago, in a short essay titled, with disarming modesty, “What I Know About Writing (in no particular order),” Wolfe wrote that "Almost any interesting work of art comes close to saying the opposite of what it really says.”  Which is almost a Zen koan in how straightforwardly it can be stated and yet how complex it is in application.  But it helps to remember that Wolfe is a practicing Catholic, and that to a Catholic all human beings are engaged in an ongoing struggle for salvation.  There is good in the worst of us and evil in the best, and nobody knows which side will land uppermost when the final coin is tossed.  Which can make Wolfe’s characters unnerving in the way that real people are unnerving, and unpredictable in the way that all good literature confounds our expectations.  There are no heroes who can be trusted unequivocally, no villains beyond redemption, and nine times out of ten, the difference between a tragedy and a comedy is crucial but slight and occurs in the final pages.

For those who are still feeling intimidated (and, looking back, I see that I haven’t done a very good job of allaying your fears), all of the above can be boiled down to three simple rules for enjoying his work:

1.  Look for hidden implications. 

2.  Remember Poe’s purloined letter, and pay serious attention to the obvious.

3.  Never forget that people are human.

“Memorare,” in this issue, is a good example of everything I’ve said so far.  The surface story, sufficient in itself, is an extremely good science fiction adventure.  Note the careful engineering of the suits and cenotaphs.  Note the craftsmanship.  Nearing the end I thought for sure there was no way Wolfe could wrap it all up satisfactorily in the little space left.  But of course he did.

So read the story first for the excitement of the ride.  Then, if that’s your bent, you can look deeper.  I personally think (but you should be aware that I have a long history of creating clever theories that turn out to be wrong, so take this one with a grain of salt) that on a symbolic level Kit and Redd and even Kim, who pops up near the end, are all aspects of the same woman, so that the entire history of March’s marriage is folded through the story.  Fiction can do that, you know.  There’s nothing that says it has to limit itself to a literal reading of what’s on the page.  But you don’t have to accept my version of what’s going on.  Wolfe always leaves room for multiple interpretations in his work.  Feel free to roll your own.

Or don’t, if that sort of thing gives you the pip.  But you should definitely reflect on the moral significance of the story.  I don’t mean that it has a “moral,” a tidy little platitude that you can reduce it to and maybe embroider on your handkerchief.  Wolfe is too good a writer for that.  But almost all serious fiction is about how we human beings live and, if only by implication, how we ought to live.  When a story is titled “Memorare” (I suggest you look up the prayer to see what Wolfe left out) and is played out pretty much literally in the shadow of the grave, you know that it’s not about trivial matters.

A minute ago, I reduced this essay to three rules for appreciating Wolfe.  But if I had to boil it all down yet further, into a single guideline, it would be:  Most of all, have fun.  Disgruntled writers confronted by a bad review are fond of quoting Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s aphorism that “A book is like a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to peer out.”  But the reverse is true as well.  If you’re a good reader, as I presume you are, sometimes the image that peers murkily from a badly-written story is unworthy of you.  It as good as calls you an ass.  Which insult, thrown in your face when you expect it least, is where the anger comes from when you find yourself flinging a book or magazine at the wall.  But you don’t have to fear that here.  You’re in good hands with Gene Wolfe.

He tells the very best lies.


Essay copyright 2007 by Michael Swanwick.

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The Mot Juste Not Often Spoken Aloud

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A little less than two weeks ago, there was a memorial for David Hartwell at Columbia University in NYC. David was a serious mover and shaker in the world of science fiction, both as an editor and as a fan. A lot of people were pretty shaken when he was suddenly taken from us. So the gathering was a pretty heady combination of editors, agents, writers, big-name fans, bookmen, and the like. Even David's boss, Tom Doherty, was there to talk about his old friend.

Rcently, I was at a book launch where a young writer there, told me that the rumor was that industry reps saw the memorial as the networking opportunity of the season.

That's not how it felt on the ground.

Partly, it was that the event was organized by Jennifer Gunnels (seen above, left, next to Marianne), Claire Eddiy, Melissa Singer, and Robert Davis and they made sure that only people who belonged there were invited. I told my agent, Martha Millard, that this was the third memorial for David I'd attended, and she said, "Maybe after a few more, we'll begin to believe that he's gone." Nobody there was in a networking mood.

I did not speak, though I would have had I been needed. But I knew there would be many, many who wanted to lay a last wreath of words at David's feet, and in this I was right. The tributes did go on for quite a bit.

Still, there was one thing that was said by several of the speakers and also privately, both before and after the formal part of the memorial. "We are a family." It was said over and over. "We are all family."

Looking around at that gathering, I could see that it was true. It was mot juste for this gathering. These were all people I cared about, all people who mattered to me and to each other.

We don't often say this aloud. Ours is not an age that celebrates sentiment. But there it is. Amid all our moving and shaking, money-seeking and literary ambition, we have created something that requires a warmer, closer, more personal word than community.


Above, l-r: Jennifer Gunnels, Marianne Porter, Kevin J. Maroney. A lot of speakers got applause. Only Kevin got spontaneous laughter. He also paraphrased John 21, verse 25, which I thought was magnificently cheeky of him. 

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"Blurbs So Much," Said the Cat

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It's hard to look modest when you're blogging about the blurbs an upcoming book has received so far. But, really, the generosity of all those who contributed blurbs does overwhelm me, in large part because I know exactly how much work these things can be.

As a matter of policy, I never thank reviewers for saying nice things about my work, because I honestly believe it's condescending to do so. Either they gave their best reactions or they didn't. But good reviews do make me happy, too.

So here are the blurbs that Tachyon Publications has gathered to date for my forthcoming collection "Not So Much," Said the Cat.

“OK—it’s official. Michael Swanwick is a god. He makes worlds that work, every tick and tock of them. He makes people who cry, sweat, puke, fall in love, die in conceivable ways. He’s smart and crafty, passionate and wily. Both trickster and life-giver. He creates and uncreates. And yes, he brings Light. If I don't exactly worship him, I read every story of his I can get my hands on. So thanks, Tachyon for bringing me more stories—some old favorites, some I hadn't read before. Because gods need their readers, and God knows, I need more Swanwick.”
—Jane Yolen, author of Briar Rose

“Michael Swanwick is one of our most reliably entertaining and provocative writers.”

—Greg Bear, author of Darwin’s Radio

“I would effuse about the excellence of the stories within this collection—Michael Swanwick's eleventh such—for they are by turns shocking, delightful, puckish, innovative, and electric. . . . However, I am too busy plotting how to steal the devil’s stone (given to him by a Siberian shaman) that Michael keeps by his typewriter in order to unlock his writing power, all without disturbing his cat.”

—Fran Wilde, Nebula-nominated author of Updraft and Cloudbound

“This is standard Swanwick, where the reader’s feet never quite touch the ground. Brilliant.”

—Jack McDevitt, author of The Engines of God

“A perfect marriage of classic stories and bleeding edge tech, from godlike continental AIs to the abolishment of time, clever discourse on libertarianism and zero-sum economics in a mirroring tale of humanity and alien bugs, fairy tales and one of the best futuristic con-games I've ever had the pleasure of consuming.”

—Brad K. Horner

“A whirlwind of stories that take you across the world, through different pockets of time, and into a sample of the lives being lived, Not So Much, Said the Cat is an excellent compilation. Swanwick’s latest book is a delight to read, both entertaining and insightful.”

—Pooled Ink

“I fell head-over-heels in love with this collection of stories.”

—Lipstick and Libraries

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A Simple Solution to the Bathroom Wars

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On my first visit to Russia, a fan took me aside and, lowering his voice, said, "Tell me. Is it true that your Samuel R. Delany is... of a different persuasion?"

"Queer as can be!" I said cheerfully. "He's written entire books about how gay he is."

And my friend nodded in a way that indicated he was taking my theory about Chip's sexuality into consideration.

Russia is anything but enlightened on the LGBT front. So you can imagine how surprised I was last month to discover a simple way of evading the current, entirely-unnecessary debate over which bathroom transgendered people should use.

I was in a convention center in Moscow when I felt the call of nature. So I followed the signs and found myself suddenly standing before a large open space with free-standing sinks at which women were washing their hands. Beyond them was a wall of doors with behind each door a toilet.

You don't often find yourself in an unfamiliar category of public space. So I stood a distance back from the arrangement, watching while several men hurried past and into the little rooms. Then, when I was clear on the rules -- that all the rooms were available to people of all genders -- I did my business.

Unisex bathrooms. This was the dire, society-destroying threat that sank the Equal Rights Amendment decades ago. And yet, they're nothing new. I grew up in a house that had one. You probably did too.


Above: The men's room door at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Another pretty simple solution.

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