Vacuum Flowers Ebook One-Boxing-Day-Only Sale!!!

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Christmas Eve is a terrible time to be injecting a commercial into the flood of messages of goodwill. But Open Road Media, which publishes several of my ebooks, operates on its own schedule. And I feel a moral obligation to support them. So here's what they have to say:

We are pleased to let you know that the following ebook(s) will be featured in price promotions soon.

ISBN13	Title	Author	Promo Type	Country	Start Date	End Date	Promo Price
9781504036504	Vacuum Flowers	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - 1K Sale Weekly	US	2025-12-26	2025-12-26	$1.99

That's this Friday--Boxing Day!

And in the meantime, allow me to wish a very merry Christmas to all that celebrate it. And Happy Holidays to those who don't. 

And may the coming year be good to us all.

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Manger Animals: A Christmas Eve Story

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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.

           

Ah, 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.”

 

 

 

Above: This story was  was reprinted here once, in 2015. But of all the stories I've written for Dragonstairs Press's solstice chapbooks, it may be my favorite, so I'm posting it again. I don't think once every ten years is overdoing things.

 

 

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The Iron Dragon's Daughter in Ukraine

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Look at that beautiful cover! It seems that The Iron Dragon's Daughter is back in print again--this time, in Ukraine. I can hardly tell you how moved I am that in the midst of war, Ukrainians can find time for the civilized pleasure of reading a fantasy novel.

I don't feel that way just because it's my novel in question--though I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel flattered by the choice. I believe strongly in the virtues of fantasy literature. As solace in times of loss, as haven in times of suffering and, yes, as escape whenever escape is needed. It was there for me when I needed it most. It will be there for others long after I am gone.

This did put me in a difficult moral position, though. I was paid for the right to translate and publish my book. This is right and proper. Creators of art, music, literature, and the like should all and always be paid. But I couldn't feel good about taking money out of a country where it is needed.

So I donated the lot to GlobalGiving's Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund, which provides shelter, food, and clean water to refugees, treatment for children with cancer, access to education and economic assistance to civilians in need, among many other admirable services. They even have a program to provide transport for rescued pets.

One thing that was important to me was that none of the money will go to support the Ukrainian Army. This may be hypocritical of me--I'm still struggling with that one--but I have friends in Russia and would not want to contribute to the death of a son or nephew there.

Anyway, the new edition of The Iron Dragon's Daughter from Zhupansky is beautiful and I'm delighted to see it. Meanwhile, alas, the war continues.

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The Parable of the Creche

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Every December, shortly before Christmas I post the following parable. It says a lot, I think, about my neighborhood, and possibly about human nature as well.

The Parable of the Creche

by Michael Swanwick

When first I came to Rosborough, long years 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 the top of the roof--nor was it very fancy. The figures of Joseph and Mary, the Christ Child, and the animals were a couple of feet tall at most and there were sheets of Plexiglass over the front of the wooden stable to keep vandals from stealing them. But there was a painted backdrop of the hills of Bethlehem at night, the floor was strewn with real hay and the neighborhood folk loved it.

It was a common thing to see people standing before the creche, especially at night. Sometimes parents brought their small children to see it for the first time and the wonder they then displayed was genuinely moving. The creche 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 pointed out that the creche violated the principle of separation of church and state. When the complaint finally came, the creche was taken out of the park and put in storage.

People were upset, of course. Nobody likes seeing a beloved tradition die. There was a certain amount of quiet grumbling.

So the kindly folks of Leverington Presbyterian Church, located just across the street from Gorgas Park, stepped in. They adopted the creche and put it up in 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. Formerly, it had been in an empty area, surrounded by trees, separated from our normal daily lives.  It just was not the same located in front of a church. The creche felt lessened in some strange way, made into a prop for the Presbyterians. You didn't see people standing in front of 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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John Varley, 1947-2025

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John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025.  A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment. 

In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His "Eight Worlds" stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat to its whales and porpoises and humanity survives everywhere else in the Solar System. Despite this bleak background, the stories were bright and inventive. People change gender on a whim. Wealthy and glorious cities turn to shacks and hovels when their holographic fronts are turned off at night. People bank their memories so that, upon death, they can be restarted with new memories. He wrote so many major stories per year that, in a resurrection of an old pulp-days practice, some had to be published under a pseudonym.

We were all dazzled. His work was full of impressive new ideas. And, outside of the Eight Worlds sequence, he wrote things like "In the Hall of the Martian Kings," which resurrected the possibility of intelligent life on Mars after the Mariner probes had apparently disproved that. Or "Air Raid," which made air travel terrifying again. 

His novel Titan looked to be the opening of a classic trilogy.

Briefly--for almost a decade--John Varley seemed to be the new Robert Heinlein.

And then, alas, he went to Hollywood. 

Hollywood paid him to write, rewrite, and rererewrite a script for Millennium (based on "Air Raid") while four directors came and went. Unsurprisingly, the result pleased nobody--most particularly Varley himself. His novelization of the movie made that abundantly clear. Then, by the man's own testimony, he was paid more and more and more money to write scripts that were never made.

After too long an absence, Varley returned to print. He was every bit as good a writer as he'd ever been. But his ideas were no longer new. In his absence, writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson had moved the cutting edge along.

Thereafter, Varley was only a very good science fiction writer. It is this person that most of his readers will mourn.

But I will mourn the man who, for a time, seemed to be the resurrection of science fiction, the New Heinlein, the kwisatz haderach of genre. Back then, he set the standard. His were the stories we all wanted to equal and perhaps surpass. He was the reason we read science fiction in the first place.

Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans. Asimov gazed sadly after him and said, "Look at him. A decade ago, everybody was asking, 'Who is John Varley?' A decade from now, everybody will be asking, 'Who is Isaac Asimov?'"

And that was John Varley's moment.

Above: Photo taken from Worlds Without End. Go here to explore it.

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Books I'll Never Write: SCIENCE FICTION IN THE EIGHTIES

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This begins an occasional-at-best series of brief introductions to books I could but almost certainly won't ever write. Enjoy!

Introduction: The Simple Act of Going to Dinner

Friends!

I was at a Capclave one year (this was before the alt-sex group hung an NYC policeman from a water sprinkler, triggering a massive flood and evacuation of the hotel in the middle of the night; see chapter 14) and a group of writers, editors, friends, and such assembled to go out to dinner. There were ten of us in all--two cars' worth. Jack Dann found a restaurant in D. C. and made reservations. Chatting, we ambled to the parking lot. Along the way, somebody started to tell a mesmerizing story that obviously wasn't going to finish anytime soon. As a result, Jack, Ellen Datlow, and everybody else wanted to be in the car being driven by the storyteller, even though that meant that several of them would have to sit on each others' laps. I was driving the second car. Only Tim Sullivan was willing to ride with me, and he only because he took pity on me.

I turned out of the parking lot, followed by the overloaded second car. Feeling dreadfully sorry for myself, I made my way to the ring road around Washington. Then a thought occurred to me.

Turning to Tim, I said, “You and I are the only two who know where the restaurant is, aren't we?”

In a puzzled tone, Tim said, “Yes?”

“Good,” I said. And I floored it.

How fast was I going? Eighty? Ninety? More? It didn't matter. My faithless friends had no choice but to match speeds with me.

When, finally, I pulled off at the exit ramp and came to a stop at the traffic signal, the other car pulled up alongside me and everyone within it, laughing, gave me the finger.

That was what it was like in the science fiction community of the early 1980s. We were all young and full of beans. Science fiction fandom gave us a matrix within which we could meet, mate, love, quarrel, feud, and be geniuses-in-utero. And, by God, we took advantage of it. The world we created was a small and private one, admittedly, the sort of personal Eden that never gets documented.

Except, this once, here and now, in this book.

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Tom Stoppard (1937-2025)

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Tom Stoppard is dead. Let the satyrs and rainclouds weep. Let all who value wit for wit's sake drape their brows with black crepe.

Stoppard's big (and early) break was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a play reimagining Hamlet from the perspective of the two least-developed and worst-treated (Hamet has them murdered) characters in the play, As it plays out, they might have stepped out of Waiting for Godot if only they'd been baggy-pants black and white movie comedians. 

His other great triumph was Shakespeare in Love. He did not write the script for that movie. Marc Norman did, and God bless him for that. But the suits, in an uncharacteristic burst of wisdom, looked at Norman's script and said, "This needs a sprinkling of wit. Let's bring in Stoppard."

The result? Imagine me blowing a big wet French chef kiss. Mwah! 

Parfait!

His other plays were a varied lot. All were witty. Some were better than others. Many or all may well survive our age. But Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Shakespeare in love are timeless.

I know his work and am heartbroken. You should be too.

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Introducing Dragons

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Look what came in the mail! Loong's Tales: The True Form of the Dragon, edited by my friend Lynn Sun. As you probably know, there are several different forms of dragons in China. The one we are most familiar with is the Loong, which is the emperor of dragons. Not coincidentally, this is the type that the anthology focuses on.

The publisher is Eastern Wood, in Singapore, and the text is entirely in Chinese. The book contains five stories:

"Regarding Why Humans Have to Seek Dragons" by Baoshu

"Becoming a Dragon" by Wang Xiaohai

"Are You Aware of the Dragon's Transformations?" by Zhan Baitang

"The Last Speech" by He Jianhong

and "Report on the Origin and Usage of Loong Memes" by Xinfeng Xike

 with an afterword by Lynn Sun and a foreword by (cough) me.

In the U.S., this would be a fantasy anthology, but things are different in Singapore. These are all science fiction stories--and a varied lot at that. It was a pleasure to write the introduction and I feel honored to be associated with these writers.

 

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A Month of Universe Box Mondays

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October has come and gone and with it,  the first month's (plus one week's) Universe Box Mondays. These short essays on File 770 are, obviously, meant to promote my forthcoming Tachyon Publications short story collection The Universe Box. But they were written to be as entertaining as I could make them, each one meant to serve as an amuse-bouche to start out your week.

 Structurally, these writings are meant to serve as a short nonfiction anthology. And the rule for constructing an anthology is to "start and end long and strong." None of these essays is long. But the series starts out with one of the strangest objects I own: 

September 29: a devil stone 

Then burns gracefully toward one of the homier pleasures of summer:

October 6: home grown tomatoes

 And from there segues into how, for the proverbial fifteen minutes, I became a cocktail mahoff:

October 13: a martini  

 And how I spent my summer vacation:

October 20: mermaid's toenails 

 And, finally, how J. G. Ballard shamed me into writing a story on a life-mask of my wife:

October 27: a mask 

 It occurred to me a little late that I ought to be bundling these essays in monthly installments. So the next bundle ought to come out in only two weeks.

In the meantime, enjoy!

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AUTUMN DREAMS In One Continuous File.

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October has come and gone, and with it my serialized written-on-leaves Halloween story, Autumn Dreams.

My son Sean has crafted an Imgur post containing the whole story. If you want to re-read it in ease, of if you'd like to share the story with a friend... well, there it is.

You can read the story here. 

Enjoy!

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AUTUMN DREAMS (Conclusion)

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The End

Above: Every autumn, I create a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then abandon them where I found them. The story is then serialized here, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.

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AUTUMN DREAMS (Part 30 of 31)

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Above: Every autumn, I create a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then abandon them where I found them. The story is then serialized here, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.

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AUTUMN DREAMS (Part 29 of 31)

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Above: Every autumn, I create a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then abandon them where I found them. The story is then serialized here, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.

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AUTUMN DREAMS (Part 28 of 31)

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Above: Every autumn, I create a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then abandon them where I found them. The story is then serialized here, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.

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AUTUMN DREAMS (Part 27 of 31)

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Above: Every autumn, I create a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then abandon them where I found them. The story is then serialized here, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.

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AUTUMN DREAMS (Part 26 of 31)

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Above: Every autumn, I create a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then abandon them where I found them. The story is then serialized here, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.

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AUTUMN DREAMS (Part 25 of 31)

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Above: Every autumn, I create a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then abandon them where I found them. The story is then serialized here, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.

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AUTUMN DREAMS (Part 24 of 31)

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Above: Every autumn, I create a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then abandon them where I found them. The story is then serialized here, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.

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On Love and Marriage

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Nicholas Sparks was on NPR yesterday, explaining why his novels were always about love.

I couldn't help remembering an incident, years ago, in a Jiffy Lube waiting room. I was in limbo while my car's oil was refilled with no available diversion save for a few tattered copies of People, some car magazines, and a coffee machine with a carafe of stale caffeine.

There was one other occupant of the room. He was an ordinary little fellow, rather older than me. We introduced ourselves. He started talking about his late wife. How they met, how soon they married, what they meant to each other. What her virtues were. He didn't elevate her to the status of Saint Wife. But it was clear how much they loved one another. And, listening to him, I could tell that it was the love they'd had which made her death bearable to him.

You could pass this man on the street and think nothing of him. If you knew he was a widower, you might well pity him. But, hearing his story, I realized he was one of the blessed of God. He had married the exact right woman for him, and as a result his life was rich and good. Even in her absence, he had her memory.

When he was done, he apologized for boring me. Then he left.

I think of this man from time to time and what an enviable life he had.

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AUTUMN DREAMS (Part 23 of 31)

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Above: Every autumn, I create a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then abandon them where I found them. The story is then serialized here, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.

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AUTUMN DREAMS (Part 22 of 31)

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Above: Every autumn, I create a Halloween story, write it out on leaves (one word per leaf), photograph the leaves, and then abandon them where I found them. The story is then serialized here, starting on October 1 and concluding on the 31st--All Souls Day.

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