A Transistor Radio in Faerie

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I've been reading Ursula K. Le Guin's new collection of talks and essays, The Wave in the Mind and admiring it immensely -- both for its erudition and for the patient way she explains matters that are perfectly obvious to any professional writer but need to be spelled out to readers who have not encountered them before. It may well be -- and probably is -- her best collection of non-fiction to date.

But it will never have the importance of her 1979 collection The Language of the Night, simply because at the time she was writing its essays, there had been very little masterful writing about modern fantasy. Yes, Tolkien and to a lesser degree Lewis. A few others. But there was a lot of uncharted wilderness at the time.

One of the most influential essays in that collection was "From Elfland to Pougkeepsie," which was chockfull of useful insights to at least one would-be fantasist. Among other things, it tried to establish that what distinguished good fantasy from bad was that it went all the way into the strangeness and otherness of the fantasy world, stating that "the point about Elfland is that you are not at home there. It's not Poughkeepsie. It's different."

She also stated in there somewhere (I can't locate my copy of the book -- if you could see my office, you'd understand -- so I'm working from memory here) that you couldn't have a transistor radio in Elfland without losing all the enchantment.

I was thinking of that statement when, in The Dragons of Babel, I wrote the following scene . Young Will le Fey, a refugee fallen into louche company, is on a train traveling through Babylon on his way to the Tower of Babel:

Esme had grown bored with the passing landscape and was rummaging through Nat’s luggage.  She hauled out a transistor radio and snapped it on.  Music more beautiful than anything Will had ever heard flooded the car.  It sounded like something that might have been sung by the stars just before dawn on the very first morning of the world.  “What is that?” he asked wonderingly.
 Nat Whilk smiled.  “It’s called ‘Take the A Train.’  By Duke Ellington.”

Which technically defies Le Guin's proscription.

I was particularly pleased that with that little tidbit because it epitomized the strangeness of the world I had created. But it was nothing compared to what Rachel Pollack did with Unquenchable Fire and Temporary Agency, the first a novel and the second two novellas that together make up a novel, both of which are set in Poughkeepsie sometime after a mystic revelation in which the shamanic world has made itself manifest.

Pollack's Poughkeepsie is a terrifying place, where parades include high school cheerleaders marching with human blood smeared on their naked breasts, and the man from the power company comes by once a month to read the meter and sacrifice a wren for the continued operation of your wiring. I highly recommend both books to anyone who loves great fantasy.

So right there are three works that violate the letter of Le Guin's essay. But they in no way invalidate it. They are mere contradictions of specific words within the essay. The spirit of "From Elfland to Pougkeepsie"remains inviolate and its insights as wise as ever.

Both "From Elfland to Pougkeepsie" and The Wave in the Mind are highly recommended to anyone interested in learning from one of the great writers of our time.

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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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