A Story: Part 2

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As an experiment, I'm writing a story online, starting with a paragraph I came up with and then incorporating suggestions for what might come next from whoever cares to make them. No idea whether the story will ever be finished.

Here's the original paragraph:

The city had been frozen in time. The moon hung, a thin disk of ice, in the afternoon sun. Birds were motionless specks in the sky. You could climb the smoke billowing from its chimneys halfway up to heaven and there discover an unimaginable nation just an hour's effort above the mundane world.

And here's the continuation, based on yesterday's ideas and suggestions:

Gehenna Immaculata stared at the city from the vantage of the topmost branches of the tallest oak in the adjacent forrest. She had no history or philosophy or even peasant morality to help her put what she saw in context. She was illiterate.

She only knew what she wanted.

So now we have a situation and a protagonist. Next up: motivation and action. What does young Gehenna want? Where has she come from? And what does she do next?

I await your input.


And next week...

I'll be switching this over to a weekly post because I have so many other things to celebrate in my life. But it's beginning to look like an interesting exercise, I think. Let's see how far we can take it.

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A Story: Part 1

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So. This "crowdsourcing" thing. Is it any good? I have my doubts. But let's not be hasty.

As an experiment, I'm going to post here the opening paragraph to a story that I came up with just now. I solicit your suggestions for what comes next.

So long as what you guys come up with helps move the thing along, I'll post new segments. When it fails to do so, I'll stop.

I have no more idea than you do what the outcome will be.

Here's the first paragraph:

The city had been frozen in time. The moon hung, a thin disk of ice, in the afternoon sun. Birds were motionless specks in the sky. You could climb the smoke billowing from its chimneys halfway up to heaven and there discover an unimaginable nation just an hour's effort above the mundane world.

Got it? Go!

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A Traditional, Old-Fashioned Boxing Day

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Ah, Boxing Day! Decades ago, Marianne and I were in Toronto for Boxing Day immediately before a change in the tax laws that was going to make everything more expensive, starting on January 1. Knowing the world-class shopping event that was about to begin, we slipped out of the city in the early hours of the morning and spent the day in an almost-deserted national park. In the evening, we came back and wandered through empty streets, staring into the windows of shoe stores with exactly three shoes remaining (none mated), clothing stores that were nothing but empty shelves and wire hangars flung to the floor, and similar scenes of commercial desolation. I saw a splash of color on the sidewalk and discovered that somebody had lost a new-bought scarf -- quite a nice one. So I wrapped it around my neck and walked on. I still have that scarf.

There are times -- usually involving shopping or watching television with relatives -- when I suspect that Marianne and I are not Americans at all.

So today we're off to celebrate Boxing Day not the traditional way but our traditional way. By going birding.


And because you deserve something of substance...

I've posted above a photograph of the shadow of a little girl demon, left behind on the sidewalks of Roxborough.


Above: Photograph copyright 2016 by Michael Swanwick

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Christmas in Old Winooski

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The snow fell soft and heavy that Christmas Eve of my long ago youth. The world was so silent you could hear an angel sigh. My father’s Chevrolet drove slowly and cautiously down Lafountain Street, the snow before us untouched and the snow behind bearing a single set of tire tracks, our own.

Every year I remember a little less. So I shall share this memory with you now, before it fades into oblivion, and me after it.

Christmas is a holy day of obligation. My mother, my father, and I were on our way to midnight Mass at Saint Stephen’s Church. My older sister Patty was in nursing school. Mary and Jack were home asleep. Sitting in the back seat of the car, I was acutely aware of the honor of being allowed up so late. I could tell my mother was concerned about the state of the roads, but she said nothing.

The sky was low. The houses we passed were dark. We three might have been the only people on earth. Yet as we drew closer to the church, other cars appeared in surprising number and when we arrived, the gravel lot was filling in fast. Solemnly, we entered the church.

The king of Northumbria was converted to Christianity when a missionary compared life to a sparrow which has flown out of the night through a banquet hall window to find itself briefly surrounded by light and warmth and color and music before flying out the window opposite into darkness and mystery again. Such is my memory of that Mass, all candles and incense and choir music, diminished only slightly by my worry that our car might get stuck on the way home.

Then we were outside again, our breaths white puffs of steam in the winter air. It was still snowing but during the service somebody had shoveled out the lot and the entrance to the street. The road, however, was choked with snow and looked more dangerous than ever. We got into the car and made our way, sliding slightly, to the street.

Just as we were about to turn, a car came fishtailing down the hill and lurched to a sudden stop before us. The driver leaned out his open window, face red and puffy, to drunkenly shout, “Merry Christmas!”

My father rolled down his window and, smiling, called back, “Merry Christmas to you too, sir!”

That was my father.

That was my childhood as well, in all its ordinary glory. That was Christmas in Old Winooski in a time that is fading slowly, inexorably, into the relentless snows of the past, growing dimmer and harder to see with each passing year. I hope that your every holiday, whatever you celebrate will, now and always, be every bit as happy, every bit as rich, and every bit as blessed too.


Above: I couldn't find a picture of the interior of St. Stephen's so the interior of St. Francis Xavier, the other Catholic church in Winooski, will have to do. "Christmas in Old Winooski" is copyright 2015 by Michael Swanwick.

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Pirate Utopia

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Novellas seem to be pretty popular nowadays. Tor has a strong line of them and so does Tachyon Publications. That's one of the latter's up above.

Bruce Sterling has always had a complicated relationship with science fiction. He has a particular brilliance for writing the stuff and a noted loathing for its conventions. This explains much about Pirate Utopia, which is almost not SF and yet should prove eminently satisfactory to genre readers.

The Free State of Fiume was a real thing. Fiume was a port city which was seized by troops led by the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio. Very briefly, it became an attempted Futurist utopia.

The novella explores this strange phenomenon through the lens of the single worst member of the new government, exposing along the way the seductively poisonous appeal of fascism. At the end, after the inevitable has played out, Harry Houdini appears with two alt-historical pulp writers to implicate science fiction and fantasy literature in the in the whole mess.

It really is quite brilliant.

Tachyon has packaged this story with an introduction by Warren Ellis, a Cast of Characters explaining the historical figures behind the story, an afterword by Christopher Brown, an interview with Sterling himself (by Rick Klaw), and notes on the book's design by John Coulthart. Taken all together, they raise the book to the status of Event.

Coulthart's cover and illustrations must be singled out for particular praise. Based on Fortunato Depero's graphics, they capture the energy and zest of Futurist art and the dangerous appeal that the movement had. I can't think of a better marriage of image and text than here.

Oh, and the postage stamp showing a line of daggers in clenched fists? That was a real thing too.


And...

Happy holidays, everyone! Happy Hanukah, Merry Christmas, Blissful Solstice. Whatever your holidays, may they be bright with joy.

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Forgotten SF: Clifford D. Simak's Highway of Eternity

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Important writer though he was, Clifford Simak's novels grew looser and more shambolic as he aged. Highway of Eternity, a book I read recently because it was at hand and I was too sick for anything more serious, is a good example of this. A family of fugitives is hiding in a bubble of time in the Thirteenth Century. They are refugees from One Million Years in the Future. And their names...?

They are David, Emma, Horace, Timothy and Enid. The Evans family. Surprisingly little changes in the next million years, apparently

The plot is a rambling, arbitrary mess. Multiple suspensions of disbelief are required to keep it going. The implications of the enabling technologies are pretty much ignored. Stucturally, Highway of Eternity is a hot mess.

And yet... There are two good bits in it.  One comes after Boone, the protagonist, kills an assassin-bot in pre-human North America. As he is surveying the wreckage:

The monster spoke inside his mind.
Mercy, it said.
"The hell with you," said Boone, speaking before astonishment could dry up his speech.
Don't leave me here, the monster pleaded. Not in this wilderness. I did no more than my job. I am a simple robot. I have no basic evil in me.

And later another character, Corcoran, in the far future sees something unexpected:

There was a strangeness about the ridge top -- a faint haziness (...) He slowed his walking, came to a halt, and stood staring up at the haziness that was beginning to assume the form of a gigantic, circular, free-standing staircase winding up the sky.
Then he saw that he was wrong. The staircase was not free-standing; it wound around a massive tree trunk. And the tree -- good God, the tree! The haziness was going away and he could see it more clearly now. The tree thrust upward from the ridge top, soaring far into the sky, not topping out, but continuing upward as far as he could see, the staircase winding round it, going up and up until the tree trunk and the staircase became one thin pencil line, then vanished in the blue.

Both those moments evoke that most hoary of science fiction virtues -- the sense of wonder. A little of which can make up for a great deal of what otherwise was a terrible waste of time.

Beginning writers should take note.


And since I was wrong...

I learned sometime after writing the above that Highway of Eternity is available as n e-book from Open Road Media, who also make available a great many other Simak books in e-form.

So I was wrong, and glad to be proved so.

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The Parable of the Creche

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This year's Christmas chores have been tumbling one on top of another, so I'm running a little late today. Nevertheless, it's time to present my annual re-telling of something that really did happen, exactly as I tell it here. This traditional Christmas tale I call...

The Parable of the Creche

When first I came to Roxborough, a third of a century ago, the creche was already a tradition of long standing.  Every year it appeared in Gorgas Park during the Christmas season. It wasn't all that big -- maybe seven feet high at its tip -- and it wasn't very fancy. The figures of Joseph and Mary, the Christ child, and the animals were a couple of feet high at best, and there were sheets of Plexiglas over the front of the wooden construction to keep people from walking off with them. But there was a painted backdrop of the hills of Bethlehem at night, the floor was strewn was real straw, and it was genuinely loved.

It was a common sight to see people standing before the creche, especially at night, admiring it.  Sometimes parents brought their small children to see it for the first time and that was genuinely touching.  It provided a welcome touch of seasonality and community to the park.

Alas, Gorgas Park was publicly owned, and it was only a matter of time before somebody complained that the creche violated the principle of the separation of church and state.  When the complaint finally came, the creche was taken out of the park and put into storage.

People were upset of course. Nobody liked seeing a beloved tradition disappear.  There was a certain amount of grumbling and disgruntlement.

So the kindly people of Leverington Presbyterian Church, located just across the street from the park, stepped in. They adopted the creche and put it up on the yard in front of their church, where it could be seen and enjoyed by all.

But did this make us happy?  It did not. The creche was just not the same, located in front of a church.  It seemed lessened, in some strange way, made into a prop for the Presbyterians. You didn’t see people standing before it anymore.

I was in a local tappie shortly after the adoption and heard one of the barflies holding forth on this very subject:

"The god-damned Christians," he said, "have hijacked Christmas."

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