S is For Story ("The Sorcerer's Daughter")

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 This seems to be a season for me to post flash fiction! I'm almost at a loss as to how to explain how this story came about. It involved Eileen Gunn, of course. Anything involving Eileen and fiction leaves me feeling addle-brained and confused.

So anyway. Over on Facebook, I somehow got involved in a conversation with the esteemed Ms. Gunn, and it somehow ended in a fiction duel. She was to write a short-short beginning with slapstick and ending with tragedy and I was to write one beginning in tragedy and ending in slapstick. In one day.

Simple, yes? Only Eileen somehow got the assignment turned around and wrote a story beginning darkly and ending in slapstick. So, after posting the first story, which began dark and ended light, I posted a second, which began light and ended dark. All in the prescribed day.

 Oh, and for some reason the phrase "Gnomes begone!" was supposed to appear in each story. I can't explain this. Just thinking about it leaves me feeling addle-brained and confused.

The only problem was that Eileen wrote a good story and I wrote two terrible ones. So I picked the one with the opposite overall shape of hers and rewrote it. The first version, I regret to say, involved a lot of goose droppings. Those were the first thing to go away. Also, as long as I was revising the story, I figured I might as well create a history for the fantasy world it occurred within. So I did.

And now I have a story that starts out light and silly and ends up dark and despairing. I cannot explain why it was thought this would be a good idea. Just trying to do so makes me feel confused and... and the other thing.

Anyway, here it is, the distinguished thing:

 

The Sorcerer’s Daughter

 

by

 

Michael Swanwick

 

 

Why was her life such a mess? Why did her spells always go wrong? Tisane’s father said she was as naturally powerful as anyone he had ever known—more so even than her late mother, who had been the wonder of the world—but impulsive. “You will be allowed to spell-cast without adult supervision when you’ve mastered calculus and not a minute before.” But she had barely begun learning algebra and already she was fourteen. At this rate, she’d be an old hag before she got to do anything neat.

 

Thinking dark thoughts, Tisane lugged a bucket of milk fresh-squeezed from their milch cow toward the cheese cave her father had excavated with one magisterial wave of his hand.

 

Harrawnk! Startled by who knew what, one of the geese hysterically half-flew half-ran past Tisane and into the barn, whose door she had accidentally left open. With a sigh, she put down the bucket and went after the silly thing.

 

Inside, the goose had somehow flapped and struggled its way up onto a high shelf, far beyond Tisane’s reach. In its panic, it had gotten lodged among the assortment of ancient machines from the Age of Science, which her father always meant to get around to examining someday. Honking bitterly, it endlessly bemoaned its plight.

 

Well, Tisane thought. Here was a good opportunity to try out her theory that magic was chiefly a matter of confidence. Her father was taking his mid-afternoon nap and wouldn’t enjoy being awakened for so small a matter. So she’d save him the inconvenience. Cocking her wrists and wriggling her fingers witchily, she shouted, “Down from the shelf, you goose!”

 

Poof! Small, soft feathers exploded into the air. (Tisane inhaled one and almost choked before she managed to cough it free.) Out from the center of that white cloud flew the bedraggled-looking goose. Riding atop it, thin legs closed about its neck was a laughing, red-capped elf.

 

“Fool!” the elf gloated. “I am your doom! I will unstitch your sacks of flour and topple your buckets of milk!” He flew the goose straight at Tisane. If she hadn’t ducked, it would have slammed into her face.

 

Gathering up her skirts, she ran after the airborne prankster out of the barn.

 

“What’s all this foofaraw?” Tisane’s father came lumbering out of their cottage, face red with annoyance.  

 

“Don’t worry, honored sire, I’ve got everything under control.” Once again, Tisane assumed the stance of a sorceress. Confidence! she reminded herself. Grabbing words at random from her reading, she intoned in the most self-assured and commanding voice imaginable, “Double, double, toil and trouble! Gnomes begone!”

 

Then, turning to her father with a bright confident smile, “See? Now they’re someone else’s problem.”

 

“But the great sorcerer’s expression, his horror-struck eyes in particular, made her wonder if maybe she’d gotten the spell wrong. Just a smidgeon, anyway. “By the demons of Old Detroit!” he cried. “You’ve created a von Neumann recursion!”

 

Tisane turned back. There were two elf-and-goose combinations in the sky.

 

Then four.

 

Then eight.

 

The elves were laughing maniacally. Waving their little red caps in the air, they dive-bombed the milk bucket, the geese, the chickens, the watchdog… even the milch-cow, which they sent scampering through the gooseberry bushes and bucking and kicking across the herb garden.

 

“Bring me my staff of power!” Tisane’s father commanded and she ran to fetch it. The staff had once been a nuclear control rod before it was transformed in the forges of the First Mages, back when the old world fell and science was transformed into magic.

 

By the time Tisane got back, the sky was dark with geese and the world echoed with the malicious laughter of the elves. Holding his staff before him, the mighty sorcerer strode forward—

 

And stepped on the toppled bucket of milk. He fell backward and struck his head on the hardened dirt barnyard. Tisane ran to him and raised his head, but he was out cold.

 

Meanwhile, the geese and elves continued to multiply. The sky darkened and the sun dimmed. Tisane’s father had always said that elves were nothing but conceptual machines, no more alive than the legendary computers of yore. She had always wondered what he meant by that. Now she thought she could understand just a glimmer. But not enough to do anything with it.

 

She had power enough within her to accomplish anything. But she didn’t know how to use it. Her algebra was weak and her calculus nonexistent.

 

The last sliver of sun disappeared behind overlapping layers of wings. Darkness swallowed up the world. The laughter of the elves merged and became universal, the roaring surf of an ocean of madness.

 

Tisane managed to drag her father inside the cottage and lay him on his feather bed. Then she lit a candle. Outside, the air was filling with the bodies of elves and geese, as tightly packed as the birds in the print made by the Wizard Escher that hung on the wall in her father’s study. They were so tightly thronged that they could no longer move. Still, they kept multiplying. Tisane could feel it. She had the power in her and it responded to the presence of anything magical.

 

Her last thought before the windows exploded inward was: It’s not fair.

 

Not long after, the total mass of elves and geese became greater than the Chandrasekhar limit, and the entire world collapsed into a black hole. But by then, there was nobody around to marvel at how tidily it had all come about.

 

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Moby Dick in 12 Words--With Plushie Toy Illustrations!

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Look what I found in the dollar store! It's the Cozy Classics Moby Dick.  As the back copy explains:

Teach your child simple words, concepts and stories--and an appreciation of the classics! In each book, twelve adorable needle-felted scenes and twelve child-friendly words capture hte essence of a beloved masterpiece.

Here's the passage explaining the conflict at the heart of this classic work:

 

 

And here's the moving ending:

 

Which I believe nobly sums up the novel's Epilogue:

"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE" Job.

The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?- Because one did survive the wreck.

It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. 

 There are also adaptations of Great Expectations, Pride & Prejudice, War & Peace, and the first three Star Wars movies. All of them exactly twelve words long. You can learn more about Cozy Classics by clicking here.

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Manger Animals

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Merry Christmas, everybody! My present for you is a story I wrote a decade ago, titled...

 

Manger Animals

 

There is a legend that on Christmas Eve the animals can talk.  Yet of all the many animals you’ve known or owned, be they pets or next-door dogs or half-tame squirrels that you almost got to accept a peanut out of your hand once, none have ever done remotely anything like that.

 

Still, the legend is true.  It just doesn’t apply to all animals. It applies only to those who were in one specific manger on the outskirts of Bethlehem two thousand something years ago. These were all made immortal by the Infant Jesus who, like any other child, had an inordinate fondness for dumb beasts. And for 364 days of the year (365 on leap years) they’re dumb in both senses of the word.

 

Ahhh, but on Christmas Eve...

           

On Christmas Eve, the cow and the donkey and the little goat that gnawed on Baby Jesus’s blanket are given the gift of speech. As are the two lambs who wandered in looking for fodder, the camels who carried the magi to the event and then stuck their noses in the window to see what was going on, and the pigeons who fluttered in the rafters while Joseph muttered angrily about their droppings.

           

“It was a night much like this one . . .” the cow begins.

 

“No, quieter,” says a camel.  “There weren’t so many cars back then.”

 

“It was cold outside,” says a lamb.  “But I found a warm spot to sleep right over there.”

 

“I gnawed on a blanket,” says the goat proudly.  “But somebody yanked it away.”

 

“I wonder who?” murmurs a dove. For animals have very little sense of what is and is not important, once you move away from the compelling subjects of food and sleep. The fact that there were people present two thousand years ago is almost forgotten.  Who those people might have been is entirely beyond their ken.

 

Still, like any other old-timers, they do enjoy reminiscing.

 

“They don’t make oats the way they used to,” says the donkey. “And that’s a fact.”

 

 

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The Parable of the Creche

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Once a year I present this story here on my blog. Sometimes the details differ by a word or three. But the message, I think, is timeless. Come gather around me, children, and I will tell you...

The Parable of the Creche

When first I came to Roxborough, forty-some 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, the three magi, the shepherds, 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 in the evening, admiring it.  Sometimes parents brought their small children to see it for the first time and the wonder they displayed was genuinely moving.  It provided a welcome touch of seasonality and community to the park.

Alas, Gorgas Park is public property, 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. One might even say disgrumblement.

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 don'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."

Above: The creche as it stands now. Personally, I'm grateful to the Presbyterians for rescuing it.

 

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Samuel R. Delany on Thomas M. Disch

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My interview with Samuel R. Delany on Thomas M. Disch, who was for many years this friend and then, abruptly, not, appears in the current issue of Foundation.  

Here's how it came about. Chip was at a party at Marianne's and my house after Philcon, and started telling stories about Tom Disch, his brilliance, and his difficult personality. He had his listeners rapt. Gee, I thought. Somebody should get this stuff down on the record.

In my family, we have a saying, swiped from an R. A. Lafferty story--"You see your duty quickly, citizen." Whoever observes that "somebody" should do something is that somebody.

So Marianne and I invited Chip back for lunch and an interview. It covered a lot of interesting ground and a lightly edited version appears in Foundation under the title, 'Bitter, Fun and Bright': Samuel R. Delany on Thomas M. Disch. Here's one small taste:

The last time I went to Europe, I had gotten all the way to Istanbul. I found Istanbul a really great city. I told Tom what a wonderful, rich city it was. Of course it has a literary history. Things like in Hemingway's “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” all the city sections take place in Istanbul—not to mention the opening of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934). Although that was not the social level of Istanbul I saw, I still always felt that that was something going on around me. (And, yes, the food was much, much better: Greek food, yes, but served in tiny amounts, like dim sum, so that it made culinary sense.) I had met people and I'd had fun while I was there. I'd had a great time.

 

Tom had a miserable time, I later found out.

The result was one of his best stories, called “The Asian Shore.” It's all about a totally isolated guy. Tom ended up spending like six weeks there during which he was not able to meet anyone. It produced things like “The Roaches.” Which is one of his best stories, about what happens when the bomb falls and you're thousands of miles away from anything you know. Also “The Asian Shore,” which is very basically a study of racism. Although that's not what you think when you first read it. John Benedict Harris, this architect, is being absorbed by the city and finally becomes indistinguishable from one of the Asians. This woman keeps calling him by the name Yavuz and his name is not Yavuz, but John Benedict Harris. You couldn’t have a more American name than that.

 

Tom thought his stay in Asia in Istanbul was the loneliest and most isolated time he ever had. On the one hand I feel good because it produced a great story. But Tom himself said he hated the experience. 

 

You can find more information about Foundation here.  If you want to subscribe or buy a single issue, you can do so here.

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A Chatbot Reviews My Iron Dragon Trilogy

 

 

So out of idle curiosity I asked a Chatbot to write an essay on my Iron Dragon trilogy. The results below are hilarious if you know my work. (If you don't, reading The Iron Dragon's Daughter and either "The Dog Said Bow-Wow" or one of my Darger & Surplus novels will bring you up to speed.)

Oh, and I should mention that the final paragraph seems to be boilerplate whenever the chatbot is summing up a fantasy/sf novel.

 Here it is, straight from the mouth of the machine:

The Iron Dragon novels by Michael Swanwick are a series of fantasy books that follow the adventures of a young boy named Darger and his loyal sidekick, Surplus, as they journey through a world filled with incredible technology and ancient magic.

The first book in the series, The Dragons of Babel, introduces us to Darger and Surplus as they are forced to flee their home in search of a better life. Along the way, they encounter a wide range of fascinating characters, including a powerful dragon named Babd Catha, who becomes their unlikely ally.

As they journey through this strange new world, Darger and Surplus must rely on their wits and cunning to survive. They are constantly confronted with danger and adversity, but they never give up hope and always find a way to overcome the odds.

Throughout the series, we see Darger and Surplus grow and mature, as they learn to harness their unique abilities and work together to overcome the challenges they face. In the end, they emerge as true heroes, ready to take on any challenge that comes their way.

The Iron Dragon novels are a thrilling and exciting read, full of adventure, magic, and a cast of memorable characters. Michael Swanwick's writing is sharp and engaging, and he has created a truly unique and captivating world for readers to explore. If you enjoy fantasy novels with a touch of technology and a lot of heart, then the Iron Dragon series is definitely worth checking out.

 

And the lesson we should learn from this is . . .

 Laughing  at the Chatbot is almost as much fun as marveling at all the AI programs that are industriously at work putting illustrators out of business. But they're just at the dawn of their powers and there are programmers working feverishly to improve them. Writers--including unpublished writers who are working hard to make the leap--should give some serious thought to how to respond to artificial fiction.

There isn't much time, though. So think fast.

 

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Grant Wahl, Dead in Qatar

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Another journalist had died. Grant Wahl probably thought himself safer than most because he specialized in soccer. But he was confronted by the Qatar government (and then received death threats and was followed) for wearing a rainbow shirt in solidarity with the LGBQT+ community. Not long after, he suddenly fell ill while covering a soccer match and taken by paramedics to a hospital where he died. He was 48.

Wahl's brother Erik believes he was murdered.

You can read about it on the Lawyers, Guns &Money blog here. Or read the NBC News account, which does not report anything suspicious about the death here.

Above: Image copied from Lawyers, Guns &Money.

 

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Feeling Sorry for the Illustrators? We're Next

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So how about those AI art programs--Dall-E and the like? Personally, I don't think anybody's said it better than the guys at Penny Arcade, above. (You can find the entire cartoon here.) There's been a lot of argument over whether the astonishingly convincing images created by something that isn't even self-aware are art or not. But nobody doubts that these programs are going to put a lot of illustrators out of work and seriously reduce the incomes of many or most of those who remain.

This prospect horrifies me, particularly since I know and like a like of those artists personally. But it's going to strike a lot closer to home a lot sooner than I thought.

I was talking with an editor at a science fiction convention recently and observed that sooner or later there were going to be programs that wrote fiction. 

"Oh, they're already here," he said. In fact, he knew a writer who routinely uses one to create his first drafts. He types in a few prompts and it spits out an entire story which he then revises into something that can be published. 

The writer in question produces formulaic fiction, of course. But the programs are only going to get better. A lot of marginal writers are likely to be forced out of the marketplace soon. And after that, better ones. And after that...

In the meantime, editors are consulting with each other on how to develop tools to detect artificially-created fiction. Because the means such programs employ--studying massive amounts of published fiction and writing imitations of it--leaves everyone involved open to charges of plagiarism.

So what can writers do?

Step one is to ditch Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. Every time you write a story or book that recapitulates the twelve or seventeen or ninety-eight stages of heroism, you're doing your bit to program the reader to expect exactly that structure. And that structure is extremely easy to imitate. Hell, a machine could do that. If not today, then soon. 

Step two is to stop relying on all the other crutches that writers use to come up with an easy story: Retelling a classic story but making the villain the hero, rewriting fairy tales but giving the protagonist contemporary values, etc., etc., etc.

Step three is to dig deep and come up with stories that satisfy the readers without giving them what they're expecting. Human stories that no non-sentient machine could possibly write because they're not retellings of stories that came before.

I know that sounds difficult. It is difficult. But if you decided to become a writer because you thought it would be easy... boy, are you in the wrong place!

End of sermon. Go thou and sin no more.

Above: I'm not a gamer but I follow Penny Arcade (www.penny-arcade.com) to keep up on that portion of the culture that involves gaming--most of it, to be precise. Also, it can be pretty funny. I recommend it.

 

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A Footnote to The Once and Future Rye

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 Not all that long ago, I wrote a history of rye whiskey as a metaphor for the history of America. (The Once and Future Rye: The Whiskey That Was America is still available for purchase at www.dragonstairs.com.) Just now, I found a passage in Bernard De Voto's essay/slim book The Hour, a jolly crank rant claiming that there are only two cocktails worth drinking: whiskey straight (by which he means rye or bourbon but not Scotch and how this is a cocktail is beyond me) and the Martini, which I wish I'd run across while writing my own chapbook. Here it is:

I don't know why but there are more brands of good rye than there are of bourbon. And I don't know why the God-damned Navy is permitted to monopolize so many of them--but here's a tip for you. Keep green your friendships in the service.

Now isn't that strange? De Voto's essay confirms one of my own central findings, which is that Prohibition turned America's palate away from rye to whiskey. But who would have suspected that for the longest time (The Hour was first published in 1948), bourbon was an also-ran? To say nothing about that weird observation about USN commissaries.e

It's clear that the history of American tippling has been sadly neglected. There's plenty of room our there for an amateur chronicler to make their mark. (To those reading this: That's a hint.)

Slainte!

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