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Open Road Media is putting the e-book of what may be my most popular novel, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, on sale tomorrow, June 11th, That's one day only. The price will be $1.99. And, with apologies to the rest of the world, this offer is good in the US only.
And here's the entirety of my sales pitch: If you like e-books and are curious about my novel and live in the United States, you might consider buying it.
I don't believe in haranguing readers.
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The other day, on an impulse, Marianne and I went to Bombay Hook Wildlife Refuge in search of the otherwise nonexistent in the America wild black swan. I'm not going to mislead you: The swan did not get caught up in a windstorm in China and miraculously survive a journey across the Pacific Ocean and then over thousands of miles of the body of the United States to end up in Delaware. No. It was almost certainly an escapee or a dump from a private aviary.
Nevertheless, an adventure is an adventure. And, as adventures do, this one involved a lot of voracious insects. But also two separate bald eagles, sitting on two separate mud flats. And two foxes, one of which was obviously working the cars in the hope that someone would throw him a hot dog, a blue grosbeak (seen in the sun, where its plumage dazzled, and in the shade where it didn't), a wild turkey trotting down the road toward us, a green egret, which is a lovely little bird perfectly camouflaged for waterfront foliage, save for its bright yellow feet. We saw them all.
Oh, and the black swan.
We saw it.
It was kind of frustrating to be looking at such a rarity and have cars rush be without even pausing to ask what Marianne and I were looking at. I waved one car to a stop and, pointing, said, "There's a black swan out there." To which the woman replied, "We've seen a white one and a fox." and drove on. But on the return loop, we looked to see if it was still where we'd last seen it and it was. More pertinently, there was a stopped car and spilling over it five people with cameras and binoculars and spotting scopes all pointed in the same direction.
"You saw the black swan?" either Marianne or I said.
"Oh, yes. Right there. Wonderful."
"That's good." And, feeling much better, we drove on.
And because there's always more than one ending to any true story . . .
On the way home, shortly after Marianne said that the only thing she regretted was not seeing a snapping turtle, I spotted a snapping turtle on the verge of the highway.
Above: Yes, that tiny black silhouette is it. It looks better through binoculars. Someday I should consider getting a real camera with a zoom lens.
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Marianne Porter's latest Dragonstairs Press chapbook, Singular Interviews, will be offered for sale at noon Eastern time this coming Saturday, and sell out shortly thereafter. A quarter-century in the making, each of my interviews with a science fiction or fantasy notable is exactly one question long. Meanwhile, here's my favorite of the lot--the single most concise and enlightening summation of Michael Moorcock's oeuvre I've ever encountered. By the man who knows more about it than anyone else.
SINGULAR INTERVIEWS: MICHAEL MOORCOCK
QUESTION: When and why did you decide to interconnect all your stories and novels to make of them a single metafiction?
MICHAEL MOORCOCK: I frequently read that my aspiration was to ‘improve’ science fiction in some way by shifting emphasis away from its traditional subject matter and calling for higher standards of writing. Actually I wanted to introduce the techniques and subject matter of sf and fantasy into ‘literary’ or non-generic work, to broaden the concerns of general fiction which I believed to be moribund. For all I know this was going to happen anyway so I was perhaps just one of many people trying to do the same but at the time I knew very few people who agreed with me. The likes of Kingsley Amis, in fact, vehemently disagreed with me. My ambition inspired my criticism and my editorship of NEW WORLDS. None of this, of course, happened overnight. It took a few years to develop a coherent sense of exactly how this could be achieved and demonstrated.
I read Zweig’s biography of Balzac when I was 15 and as a journalist learned, like him, to write at high speeds without giving myself time to revise, developing ideas from one story to another rather than refining a single piece, but I was never consciously inspired by him. My first version of The Eternal Champion was written in 1957 when I was 17 and was pretty crudely written but contained the idea, perhaps inspired by Arnold’s Phra the Phoenician, of a protagonist constantly reborn to fight a cause over and over again through different historical periods and locales. My description of what I called a ‘multiverse’, The Sundered Worlds, a story which looked at a many worlds theory, first explored in fiction by Wells, from as it were the outside as an observable phenomenon, was published in 1963, but I didn’t start to consider my work as one large novel until 1968 when I began A Cure For Cancer, the second Jerry Cornelius book, and realized I could refine ideas over many books by linking them to the same characters in different situations and circumstances.
I’m not for a moment comparing my work to Balzac’s Human Comedy, but I might have come to it for similar reasons, practical as well as artistic, continuing themes and ideas via the same characters in often very disparate places, historical periods and invented worlds, enabling me to write stories which moved from generic fiction to literary fiction and so break down the barriers between them as editorially I tried to encourage authors to do in New Worlds. This quickly enabled me to write books which were part realistic and part fantastic and thus carry ideas organically from one sequence of stories, absurdist, fantastic and realistic, to another. A relatively minor character, such as Colonel Pyat of the Cornelius stories, could become the self-deceiving, unreliable narrator of a realistic examination of the 20th century roots of the Nazi holocaust, while a character like Elric can appear in a fantasy or a comedy without any apparent incongruity. They can, like players in a Commedia dell’ Arte sketch, keep their essential personalities and moral character from piece to piece and carry a theme which can be looked at from many different aspects and narratives. They offer the reader echoes, as it were, which bring a feeling of familiarity without the kind of distracting (and disappointing) rationale which, in my view, frequently ruins a good story. In this sense they should produce a feeling of resolution more like music than most fiction. Whether I’ve been successful in this, of course, is for the reader to decide.
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Look what I found while going through some old papers!
Here, before your eyes, is where my career as a fantasist began. With a drawing by a junior high school student who had just read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and would never be the same again.
I was in high school in Winooski, Vermont when... But I've already told this story, in an essay titled "A Changeling Returns, written for and published in Meditations on Middle-Earth. Here's the pertinent excerpt:
… in my high school days, my sister Patricia sent home from nursing school a box of paperbacks (I can see that box now, freshly opened and full of promise) which she had read and no longer wanted. Among them was The Fellowship of the Ring. I picked it up late one evening, after finishing my homework, meaning to read a chapter or two before sleep. I stayed up all night. It wasn’t easy, but by skipping breakfast in the morning and reading every step of the way to school, I managed to finish the last page just as the bell rang for my first class to begin.
Oh, how that book shook and rattled me! It rang me like a bell. Even today, when I am three times as old as I was then, I can still hold my breath and hear the faint reverberations from that long, eternal night. That reading made me a writer, though it took me forever to then learn my craft. It showed me what literature could do and what it could be.
As an adult, I am painfully aware of the deficiencies of that drawing. But it's a good indication of how enthusiastic I was about Tolkien's great work. And, to be fair to the kid who drew it, I haven't gotten any better as a visual artist in the decades since then.
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Marianne Porter's latest Dragonstairs Press chapbook, Singular Interviews, will be offered for sale at noon Eastern time this coming Saturday, and sell out shortly thereafter. A quarter-century in the making, each of my interviews with a science fiction or fantasy notable is exactly one question long. This week, I'm posting three of the interviews on this blog. Here's the second of them:
SINGULAR INTERVIEWS: GREER GILMAN
QUESTION: In Farah Mendlesohn’s and Edward James’ A Short History of Fantasy, they say that Cloud & Ash is written entirely in iambic pentameter. Can this possibly be true?
GREER GILMAN: Well, not pentameter, as it’s not in lines, but yes: iambic Xameter, endlessly enjambed.
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Marianne Porter's latest Dragonstairs Press chapbook, Singular Interviews, will be offered for sale at noon Eastern time this coming Saturday, and sell out shortly thereafter. A quarter-century in the making, each of my interviews with a science fiction or fantasy notable is exactly one question long. In the coming week, I'll be posting three of the interviews on this blog. Here's the first of them:
SINGULAR INTERVIEWS: JOHN CROWLEY
QUESTION: You have been working on Aegypt for rather a long time, and you're currently years from completion of this enormous four-book project. Why are you engaged in such a large and time-consuming single work?
JOHN CROWLEY: God knows. God help me. For having ever started this. When we are young we think that life will go on forever. When we grow older, we realize that life has shapes. It's time, it seems to me, to find out that the largest stretch of my creative years is going to be taken up with a project that will probably be the major thing that I do in life. That's scary. That's a terrifying thought. You try to preserve possibilities. You try to have a life that continues to open out, even though you know it doesn't. And the idea that it doesn't, and that life has shapes, is borne in on me as I work on this book. It's not like I will go on and write dozens of books. I don't know what they are. No, I know what they are, and I am already in the middle of writing one of them. I don't know why. I wish I knew.
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A quarter of a century ago, I was sitting in the bar at a Worldcon, chatting with John Crowley, and realized that it was an excellent opportunity to ask him a question I'd been wondering about. And, as it happened, I had a cassette tape recorder with me. So I got his permission, turned the recorder on, and asked.
Thus began a project that has just now culminated in Singular Interviews, the latest chapbook from Dragonstairs Press. Off and on, over the years, I would take the recorder with me to conventions and periodically ask people a single question. Later, I conducted more interviews via e-mail. Most of which were published one at a time in the New York Review of Science Fiction, though the last two or three are new to print.
Marianne Porter has collected these brief interviews in a beautifully crafted chapbook. The one-question interviewees are: John Crowley, Tom Purdom (a witty joke), Eileen Gunn, Gregory Frost, Paul Park, Mike Resnick, Samuel R. Delany, Karl Schoeder, David Hartwell, Henry Wessells, Greer Gilman, Spider Robinson, Fran Wilde, Tom Purdom (a serious answer this time), and Michael Moorcock.
What I like most about this project is how differently all the writers (and one editor) answered their question. But you don't have to take my word for it. I'll be posting three of the Singular Interviews this week, in the lead-up to the sale.
And for those interested in buying a copy . . .
The Dragonstairs Press notification letter has just been sent out. It contains all the ordering information and is reprinted below verbatim:
Singular Interviews is a collection of one question interviews conducted by Michael Swanwick, with a variety of science fiction and fantasy's best and brightest. The interviews were carried out over many years, and have previously been published in the New York Review of Science Fiction. They are collected here for the first time.
The eleven subjects include Greer Gilman, John Crowley, Mike Resnick, David Hartwell, and Samuel R. Delany, among others. The questions range from insightful probes into professional intentions to bits of whimsy about Jules Verne's appearance as Guest of Honor at Philcon.
Offered in an edition of 60, Singular Interviews are hand stitched, bound in Indian 100% cotton paper in various colors, numbered and signed by Swanwick. They will be available at noon, Philadelphia time (eastern daylight savings) on June 7, 2025 at www.dragonstairs.com.
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