a random thought

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"East of the Sun and West of the Moon is what the mysterious wanderer in fairy tales identifies as his place of origin. That place is, of course, the Earth. But if you think about it just a little, east of the Sun and West of the Moon places us in a halfway place between Day and Night.

Which is to say, in twilight.

In English folklore and literature, that space is claimed only by the Irish--in the so-called "Celtic Twilight."

Celtic twilight very rapidly became a derogatory term meaning twee, overly sentimental, and mystical in a middle-class drawing room manner. This is much the same scorn with which--I was there, I remember it--fantasy was exiled to the nursery.

But stop and reflect. Where are we humans in a cosmological sense? Somewhere in the universe. On the outermost arm of the Milky Way. Within shouting distance of a few local stars.

East of the Sun. West of the Moon.

Making our half-lit way through the dreams of the Emerald Isle.

But, of course, I being Irish would say that. Now, wouldn't I?

My Collection is a Locus Award Finalist!

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The Best of Michael Swanwick Volume Two is a finalist for the Locus Awards in the Best Collection category! This is an honor worth celebrating and I'm doing so now because there's not much chance my book will win. I say that without any self-pity whatsoever. Or modesty, come to think of it. But in the forty-nine years the category has been in existence, "Best Of" collections have only won three times--for The Best of Connie Willis, The Best of Gene Wolfe, and The Best of Fritz Leiber.

But there I am, on the slate! As are nine others:

    The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volumes 1 & 2, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon)

    Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance and Other Stories, Tobias S. Buckell (Apex)

    The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, Tananarive Due (Akashic)

    White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link (Random House; Ad Astra)

    No One Will Come Back For Us, Premee Mohamed (Undertow)

    Jackal, Jackal, Tobi Ogundiran (Undertow)

    Skin Thief, Suzan Palumbo (Neon Hemlock)

    Lost Places, Sarah Pinsker (Small Beer)

    The Best of Catherynne M. Valente, Volume One, Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean)

 

I think you'll agree that's pretty good company to be in.

And elsewhere on the list:

 

In related news, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro's remarkable book length interview Being Michael Swanwick is a finalist in the Best Non-Fiction category. In case you missed it, this is a series of interviews covering pretty much every work of short fiction I've ever published--where they came from, what I was trying to do with them, seasoned with a dollop of gossip. Alvaro was an extremely insightful interviewer and a most impressive researcher. He definitely deserves an award for this book, although--as one favorable reviewer noted--people who read my short fiction are a niche market. 

 

And up in the same category is The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History by Jack Dann.  This is relevant to me because in addition to the more analytical chapters about the nature of alternate history fiction, Jack assembled a round table of writers who have practiced the form, one of whom was me. He then posed questions, stood back, and let us disagree loudly with each other.

I will admit that, reading this book, there were a couple of times when I wished I had been more profound. But the other authors included were Kim: Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, Pamela Sargent, Harry Turtledove, John Crowley, Michael Bishop, Lisa Goldstein, John Kessel, John Birmingham, Barry N. Malzberg, Janeen Webb, Bruce Sterling, Mark Shirrefs, Christopher Priest, Terry Bisson, Mary Rosenblum, Paul Di Filippo, Richard Harland, Howard Waldrop, Lewis Shiner, and George Zebrowski, so there a lot of things there worth hearing.

There are also eight other books nominated in this category, most of which I have not (alas) read. They are:

 

    42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, Kevin Jon Davies, ed. (Unbound UK)

    Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir, M. John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail; Saga 2024)

    All These Worlds, Niall Harrison (Briardene)

    101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered, Sadie Hartmann (Page Street Publishing)

    Space Crone, Ursula K. Le Guin (Silver)

    Ex Marginalia: Essays on Writing Speculative Fiction by Persons of Color, Chinelo Onwualu, ed. (Hydra House)

    A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, Maureen Kincaid Speller (Luna Press Publishing)

    Owning the Unknown: A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God, Robert Charles Wilson (Pitchstone)

And who do I think will win . . . ?

I honestly have no idea. Perhaps because in my first decade as a published writer, my work was nominated for major awards over and over and never once won, I've always taken pleasure in the horse-race aspects of these awards. I'd read all the fiction and make my predictions, sometimes based on what deserved to win and other times based on the literary politics going on at that moment. And I was always wrong. Always.

I concluded then that there are so many factors at play in a popularly-voted award that when it comes down to the voting it goes chaotic. Which is why the process is still so much fun to watch.

 

Meanwhile, if you'd like to buy one of the books discussed here, you may:

The Best of Michael Swanwick Volume 2 may be purchased from Subterranean Press here.

Being Michael Swanwick is currently on sale (three dollars off!) at Fairwood Press here.

And The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History is available from Bloomsbury Publishing here. Although non-UK readers might try a local bookseller to save on postage.

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Random Readings: William Morris' "The Hollow Land"

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I was reading William Morris' short romance, "The Hollow Land," yesterday. It was an early work and not one he thought worth reprinting, though it happened posthumously. A fantasy, but not a great one.

However, it had the following passage, after the hero has by cunning infiltrated a walled town at night and is leading his soldiers toward their enemy:

 

We had not gone far, before we heard some knights coming, and soon, in a turn of the long street, we saw them riding towards us; when they caught sight of us they seemed astonished, drew rein, and stood in some confusion.

We did not slacken our pace for an instant, but rode right at them with a yell, to which I lent myself with all my heart.

After all they did not run away, but waited for us with their spears held out; I missed the man I had marked, or hit him rather just on the top of the helm; he bent back and the spear slipped over his head, but my horse still kept on, and I felt presently such a crash that I reeled in my saddle, and felt mad. He had lashed out at me with his sword as I came on, hitting me in the ribs (for my arm was raised), but only flatlings.

I was quite wild with rage, I turned, almost fell upon him, caught him by the neck with both hands, and threw him under the horse-hoofs, sighing with fury [...] I fought with my heart, till the big axe I swung felt like nothing but a little hammer in my hand, except for its bitterness: and as for the enemy, they went down like grass, so that we destroyed them utterly, for those knights would neither yield nor fly, but died as they stood, so that some fifteen of our men also died there.

 

Wow.  That is one vivid recreation of an event unlike any that Morris could possibly have taken part in. Gonnabe writers should reflect on this whenever somebody says, "Write what you know."

 There's more than one way writers can "know."

 

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The Annotated STATIONS OF THE TIDE (Part 4)

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Part 4! I begin to think it's possible I may bring the notations all the way to the end.  Again, I have to apologize for the fact that these notations are scattershot and incomplete. Some sources don't spring to mind immediately, while others are skipped lightly over for a variety of personal reasons. The technique allowing a man to achieve orgasms without ejaculation does, yes, work, but I'd have to do digging into the far reaches of my books to find the references and life is short. 

Meanwhile, a soupcon more insight into my novel:

Page 44:

“I killed a dog today”: When I was at William & Mary, struggling to pass German (I never did get good at it), I tried writing a story in German and only got as far as the opening line: Ich tötete heute einen Hund. This fact is of absolutely no importance. I mention it only to demonstrate how much more goes into any substantive piece of writing than the reader suspects.

 

Page 46:

Campaspe: The name is taken from E. R. Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison. In it, Campaspe is a sylph, whose human form alternates with that of a water-rat.

 

Page 50:

St. Jones's: There is no such saint. But the St. Jones is a river in Delaware. No one knows the origin of its name but it is speculated to derive from St. Joan or else St. Jone, a variant Welsh spelling of St. Ione or John.

 

Page 60:

Clay Bank: A neighborhood in Gloucester County, Virginia. Will Jenkins who, writing as Murray Leinster, was the original Dean of Science Fiction, lived there.

Cobbs Creek: A neighborhood in West Philadelphia, and a creek defining part of Philadelphia's border.

 

Page 61:

remscela: A little joke here. The remscela are the prequel-tales to the Táin Bó Cúailnge in the Ulster Cycle and Remscela is the title of a Celtic fantasy novel by my friend Gregory Frost. On Miranda it is apparently also a form of alcohol.

 

Page 62:

fantasias: I have usurped an existing word here as the name for elaborately fantastic costumes specific to  carnival on Miranda.

 

Page 63:

jubilee: In Biblical times, after seven weeks of years--half a century--came the jubilee, a time of transformation, when all debts were forgiven and slaves freed. The time of the jubilee tide is, similarly, a time of physical transformation and, for some, spiritual transcendence.

Page 65:

Undine: In Miranda, a witch; in our world, the name of a water-nymph. The word was coined by Paracelsus in his alchemical writings and popularized by Undine, an 1811 novella by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. A knight falls in love with the wild and capricious young nereid. Marriage, however, gives her a human soul and makes her virtuous in the drearily long-suffering Christian manner of the times. The knight proves unworthy and they both die—but romantically.

 

Page 68:

iridobacteria: A nonce-word, but in context self-evident.

 

Page 71:

nerve-inductor: An obvious swipe from Frank Herbert’s Dune. I am astonished I neglected to include it in the Acknowledgements page. Somehow, I forgot all about it.

 

Page 82:

“A new age of magical interpretation…”: This is a quote from Adolph Hitler.

 

Page 83:

Veilleur: French for “watchman.” There was a strong French (and French Carribean) component to the original human settlers of Miranda, as well as a lesser Armenian component.

 

Page 87:

the golden woman: The poncho-clad puppet who dissolves in a shower of golden rings is taken from C. L. Moore’s classic story, “No Woman Born.”

 

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THE SLEEP OF REASON in book form at last!!!!

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GREAT NEWS! and... less great news. The Sleep of Reason, my posthumous collaboration with Francisco Jose de Goya, is now available in paperback form from PS Publishing for thirteen U. K. pounds less one pence. I haven't seen it yet but I know that it's a beautiful book because John Berry did the book design. 

That was the great news. The less great news is that the signed-and-numbered hardcover edition of 100, priced at an eminently affordable twenty-five pounds, sold out pretty much instantaneously on pre-order.

Those copies will be mailed out later this week, but the paperback is available for purchase now.

And what exactly, you may ask, is this thing . . . ?

Way back when, I contracted with Eileen Gunn's then e-mag The Infinite Matrix, to write a flash fiction a week based on the illustrations of Goya's Los Caprichos. The images were by turns angry and sardonic and they called up the Irish darkness in me.

 

The stories can still be read online. But they read best with Goya's images large and lucid before you, and for that, you'll want the book.

You can read a typical story about the joys of motherhood by clicking here.

 

 

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