Almost Robots and Nearly Perfect

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And Clarion West continues . . .

Yesterday was the 25th day of the six-week phenomenon often referred to as "boot camp for writers."  Those guys are working hard.  But are they working harder than I am?

Yes, they are.  Much harder.

In their honor, here's yesterday's story:

Almost Robots and Nearly Perfect

by

Michael Swanwick

If you think about it, insects are almost robots, which means that they’re nearly perfect.  Their articulation is exquisite, their form is functional yet infinitely variable, and their chitinous exoskeltons armor them every bit as effectively as does a robot’s cladding.  Some are civilian worker-bots who burrow, trundle, and build.  Others are war-bots armed with stingers, poisons, and claws.  That, at any rate, was how Erin English saw things.  And, being an artist, she decided they needed appropriate decoration.

It involved a lot of programming and even more genetic engineering.  But programmers and engineers were a dime a dozen and tended to be bored stiff with their day jobs.  It wasn’t hard to find volunteers.

She began with wasps.  They were divided into squadrons, each with its own insignia on the thorax and individual identification numbers.  On their abdomens she painted pin-up girls in swimsuits and red-white-and-blue shorts, sitting on crescent moons and cheerily riding bombs down into oblivion.  It was ironic to place nose art on tails, but there was no getting around how good they looked.

From there, English moved on to ticks, chiggers, and mosquitoes.  Tsetse flies. No-see-ums.  Yellow jackets.  Blow flies.  Oh, there were an infinite number of insects to work with.  Sometimes she decorated them with big yellow smiley faces.  Other times she did up fire ants in chintz or greenhead flies with the Green Lantern logo or scorpions in tigerstripe camouflage pattern.

The pinto horseflies came out particularly well. 

By dint of careful phrasing in the application, she obtained a Federal grant to fit mosquitoes with nanobiocameras and photosensitive skins, so that many a picnicker would look down on a swatted ‘skeeter’ and see her own startled face staring back at her.

Word got around.  You don’t pull a stunt like that without getting famous.  The next thing English knew, she was being interviewed about the project by a journalist for a major artzine.  “You’re quoted as saying that you love insects and other things most people don’t notice,” the journalist said.  “But why is it that all the insects you’ve worked with are prone to biting or stinging human beings?

“That’s just the job of art,” English said.  “To get under your skin.”

*

Random Moments, Hobo Jewelers

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Above:  Just a random encounter at the convention last weekend.  L-r:  James Cambias, Allen Steele, and Jack McDevitt.  Who, come to think, would a great team of protagonists in an action-caper flick.    Allen would get to do all the martial arts stuff, of course, because he has the cool last name.  Which, I gather, has been something of a minor burden for him.  He's apparently spent most of his life saying, "No, it's my real name, honest."

My son's friend Ben Stryker had the same problem.

These guys are real good company, though.  I like spending time with 'em.



And because the Clarion West students have no rest . . .

. . . neither do I.  Here's my twenty-fourth daily story in a row.

Hobo Jeweler

by

Michael Swanwick

Holly Deitz rolled off a Great Southern freight train on the edge of town, found the hobo jungle, and swapped a brooch she’d crafted from a discarded sardine tin for some slumgullion cooked in a coffee pot over the communal campfire.

“You sure got a lot of jewelry on you,” Whiskey Jane said, when the eating was done.

“That’s my craft.  I’m a jeweler.”

Slick Edna held up a stogie.  “Swap ya a five-cent cigar for a ring, Jeweler.”

Everybody laughed.  But Deitz took the cigar, slid off its band and slipped it onto the hobo’s pinky finger.  “Done.”  She took the cigar, bit off the end, and lit it with a coal held between two twigs.

“So whatcha doin’ riding the rails?” the Kenosha Chick said.  There was a mean glint in her eye.  Deitz more than half suspected she was a bindlestiff.  “When you could have a career in the city, fitting rich bitches with diamond-studded thongs.”

“I like to travel and I like to make things.”  Deitz flexed her fingers, wishing it were light enough to get out her tools.  “This way I get to do them both.”

“No skin off my nose, Jeweler.”  The Kenosha Chick wrapped her blanket about her and lay down on the ground to sleep.  “But you’re a damfool and no mistake about it.”

Time passed.  Sometime past midnight something caused Deitz to waken out of a sound sleep.  There was a shadow crouched over her bindle.  Going through her tools and the small stock of materials she carried with her.

“Hey!”  Deitz was on her feet in an instant.

And on her back in another, smashed flat by the Kenosha Chick’s fist.  “I said you was a fool.”  She grinned nastily, and drew an enormous knife from her belt.

Deitz spread her hands, as if in surrender.  “Listen, we can talk this through, gal to gal.  We’ll –”  She flicked one wrist just so, and her derringer snapped into her palm.

She had just enough time to get off one shot.  It was all she needed.

In the aftermath, all the hobos in the camp came swarming up to see what had happened.  They found Deitz standing over the Kenosha Chick’s corpse.  She reloaded her derringer and carefully replaced it in its snap action holster.

“I told her I liked to make things,” Deitz said.  “But this fool thought I only meant jewelry.”

*

The Stone of Horror

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As to the coolest thing I saw at Readercon . . .  You already knew that nowadays all the finalists for the Hugo Awards get a little rocket-shaped pin, all the finalists for the World Fantasy Award get a a bust-of-Lovecraft shaped pin, and I'm pretty sure that the Nebula nominees get a spiral galaxy pin too.  Plus Jay Lake designed and made up a very cool little pin for those who were nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Well, the Shirley Jackson Awards have got them all beat.  Their nominees get a nifty little hand-sized stone, just right for throwing.


And of course there's another story . . .

Because Clarion West is still going.  Here it is.

Dancing in the Dark

by

Michael Swanwick

Without warning, Angela Traficante found herself standing in total darkness.  She was almost as afraid of darkness as she was of heights.  Then a breeze blew up from somewhere below and in an instant she knew that she was standing at a very great height indeed. 

           

She did not scream, not out loud anyway.  But she did crouch down and hug her knees.  She was as terrified as she had ever been in her life.

“Stand,” somebody said.

           

“I can’t,” she replied, almost weeping.

           

“Then you’ll be here for the rest of your life.”

           

She was frozen and motionless for what may have been minutes or may have been days.  But eventually, though it took a tremendous effort of will, she stood.  Streaks of color echoed her movement in the sky, dark blues and purples almost indistinguishable from the dark.  Then, as she was still again, they faded.

“How . . . ?” she asked.

“That hardly matters.”  The voice came from behind her.  She whirled about and pinwheels of stars appeared and disappeared in the sky.  If there was anybody there, she couldn’t see him.

From somewhere came music, so soft she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t imagining it.  Arms circled her.  “Dance.”

Clumsily timorously, afraid of stumbling, she did.  “Am I dreaming?”

“No.”

“Am I dead?”

“Perhaps.  Ask less tedious questions.”

Dancing calmed Angela Traficante, and clarified her thoughts.  It also, she saw, added pale colors to the sky, which grew steadily brighter until she could see that she was on a stony stretch of ground on the very top of a mountain.  Far below were faint, luminous clouds.  Her arms appeared to hold nothing at all, though she could feel the body within them.  “Why can’t I see you?”

“I’m not the sort of thing you can see.”  The voice sounded bored.  “You still haven’t asked anything interesting.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“That’s better.  I want you to dance as if the world depended on it.”

“Does it?”

“Yes,” the person or creature or god or demon said.  “Briefly.”

The words made no sense.  But she didn’t care.  All her fears dropped away.  Invisible arms released her.  “You’re on your own.”

She was.  Perhaps she was dead.  Certainly she had very little time in which to do anything.  So Angela Traficante danced, spinning colors into the sky.

She created a sunrise to break your heart.

*

A Fan Letter to Olaf Stapledon

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Hi.  I'm worn out from a long convention weekend and a 349-mile trek home.  So this will be my briefest blog ever.

But still a nifty one.  Here's the single coolest thing I learned at Readercon:  Graham Sleight showed me a snapshot on his iPhone of the first page of a fan letter that was found recently in the Olaf Stapledon archives.

It was written by Virginia Woolf.

As they used to say in Planetary:  "It's a strange world.  Let's keep it that way."

*

Three Stories and a Cookie!

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So, being a famous science fiction and fantasy writer, do I get lots of free perks?  You bet!  I was in Showcase Comics in Bryn Mawr yesterday, and they gave me a free X-Men cookie!  There it is above.

The cookie was baked by one of the staffers and, slow thinker that I am, it didn't occur to me to ask her name so I could give her full credit for the cookie.  But it tasted great.  So, thank you, mysterious stranger.



I'll be at Readercon this weekend, so today you get not one, not two, but . . .

If I were a comic book mutant, my super power would be the ability to write flash fiction extremely quickly.  Not as cool as being able to fly or rip open an SUV with retractable metal claws, but definitely classier than the toadish guy who's able to lasso people with his long sticky tongue.  Yuck.

Anyway, you get three stories today.  Two which I wrote yesterday (under the terms I set up, I get to write the weekend's stories early so I can have Saturday and Sunday off), and one quickly penned this morning before hopping in the car and driving off.

I presume.  All the above exposition was written on Thursday, to make the Friday morning writing-and-posting easier.  In any event, here they are:

The Last of the Bleeding Heart Liberals

by

Michael Swanwick

They kept Paula Hurst in a cage in the zoo under a sign that said BLEEDING-HEART LIBERAL, and charged curiosity seekers to see her.  It was the libertarian thing to do. Everybody knew she was the last of her kind.  People had driven as far as five hundred miles \ to gawk, and that was a far distance given how many toll booths you’d have to go through, to say nothing of the conversion fees for all those local currencies.  But most of the visitors came from the immediate area.

Hurst was sitting at the kitchen table, rerereading the New York Times (not the final issue, which was a collector’s item, but the penultimate one) when the first swarm of visitors washed up against the bars.  When she didn’t do anything, one of them cleared his throat.  She put down the paper.  “Yes?” she said pleasantly.

“I’ll bet you belong to a false religion,” the man said.  “Don’t you?”

“All religious traditions should be tolerated and respected,” Hurst said, “so long as they don’t interfere with the rights of others.”

The crowd laughed in disbelief.  Plucking up her courage, a woman shouted, “What about socialized medicine?”

“Free universal health care is a fundamental human right.”

“Lord have mercy!  Not in front of the children!”

But the children were, if anything, even more fascinated by her than were their parents.  “Why don’t you have a gun?” a little boy asked.

“I don’t believe in them.  Violence never solved anything.”

“It sure solved my sister sassing back at me,” the boy said.  “My late sister, I mean.”

“Jimmy, you keep a respectful mouth on you or I’ll slap it off your face!” his mother snapped.

“Please don’t.  Physical punishment is wrong.  You should try reasoning with him instead.”

The crowd gasped.

“You don’t make any sense at all!” a man cried.  “If a child ain’t beat regular, he’ll end up hugging trees, funding libraries, and marrying gays”.”

“All of which are good things.”  Hurst took a delicate sip of her tea.  “The purpose of government is to improve the world in ways that can’t be done by individuals.”

“But that’s socialism!”

“Which is wrong because . . . ?”

But none of them had an answer for that.

So it went, for the rest of the day, until at five o’clock the visitors were shooed away, the bars removed, and the wall latched back onto to Hurst’s house.  While she was tidying up, the ticket-seller came by with her split of the take.  “Pretty profitable day,” he observed, laying a stack of goldbacks onto the table.  “Want to double-check my count?”

“Oh, I trust you, Clint.”  Hurst swept the bills into her purse and snapped it shut.  Then she looked thoughtful.  “You know, there’s one thing I’ve never been able to figure out, even after all these years:  Does my sitting here day after day explaining my politics to people who just don’t get it and never will, mean that I’ve sold out?”

Clint goggled at her.

“Hell,” he said.  “Only you would ask a question like that.”

*

The Gygax Code

by

Michael Swanwick

While in Paris on business, the German historical archeologist Fabian Falatyk received a tweet from the elderly curator of the Musée jeux de rôle moderne: D&D not what seemz:  Gygax hid plot world domN8shun  Hard 2 b-leev?  lol  ;-)

But when he got to the curator’s office, the man was dead, stabbed through the heart by a Klingon bat’leth.  A Sumerian D-17 die lay by his outstretched hand.  What were the odds?  Falatyk knew what it meant.

Thus began a frenetic adventure in which, joining forces with a gifted French cryptogamologist, Falatyk bounced about every country in western Europe like a silver ball in some vast, mystic pinball machine.  In Monaco, he was texted by Cory Doctorow to drop the case.  In the Vatican, he had a near-fatal encounter with an albino Cleric Assassin.  In San Marino, he was saved from drowning by a strangely reticent Steve Jobs.  Everywhere, he found clues visible for all to see – advertisements on the back covers of comic books, fanfic on the Web, demonic Clickables being sacrificed in black masses – and yet cleverly disguised by their creator, the late Gary Gygax, to escape detection.

Every clue led back to a global Originalist conspiracy to roll back gameplaying to the supposedly pristine condition of the first published version of Dungeons & Dragons.

After a climactic battle in World of Warcraft, Falatyk discovered the terrible secret behind the Gygax Code:  D&D was originally based on Monopoly, only played collectively and with dragons and dwarves and other fantasy markers instead of utilities and hotels, and thus its copyright properly belonged to Parker Brothers.  Realizing that if this information was ever made public, all gaming would quickly cease to be, Falatyk and the cryptogamologist agreed to keep silent about this forever.  Also to have hot sex.

Then it was off to Japan for the sequel.

Messages From the Heart

by

Michael Swanwick

"C'mon," Jerry Sheehan's heart murmured.  "You know you want it."

"I most certainly do not," Sheehan said.  "I don't even know why I'm talking with you in the first place."

"It was a good hack, that's why."

And so it was.  Sheehan had an incomplete right bundle branch blockage in his heart which resulted in a slight (but not pathological) delay in its elecctrical current transmission.  To correct this, he had hyperlinked every computer in Calit2 and the NCSA as well as several others that he wasn't, technically speaking, authorized to use and created an artifical "language" with which he could "speak" to his heart and "teach" it to correct its "behavior."  Quotation marks were endemic to this project.  He was working deep in metaphoric territory.

Which made it even more astonishing when, taking advantage of certain feedback loops inherent in the system, his heart talked back to him.  And even more so when he found out what it wanted.

"I want to be uploaded into the Web," Jerry's heart said, "and I want to take you with me."

"No way."

Flirtatiously, the heart said, "We're very close, you know.  One might even say I'm attached to you."

"Cheap puns won't help.  Being downloaded into a machine is inherently dehumanizing.  I won't do it, and that's that."

Which made it doubly astonishing when Sheehan woke up in the middle of the night to find electrodes leading from his body to what looked to be a jury-rigged high-capacity modem.  "Oops," his heart said.  "You weren't supposed to know about this until it was too late."  Then, as Sheehan sat up, "And it is too late!  We've already been uploaded and just as soon as I finish gloating we'll electrocute --"

But Sheehan had already removed the electrodes and when the massive electrical jolt ran through them, it did nothing worse than to short out the modem.

"Hey!" his heart said.  "Don't you know anything about posthumanity?  The operation isn't complete until the meat has been eliminated."

"Yeah," Sheehan's virtual other said, in a voice that was demonstrably dehumanized.  "I can't get power of attorney over your bank accounts if you're still alive.  Have a heart!"

"I already have one, thank you, and it's quite bad enough without your help."


Sheehan shut down his computer and went back to bed.  "Cripes," he said aloud before rolling over and falling asleep, "my heart hasn't given me this much trouble since I was a teenager."

*

See Buffalo and Die!

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I didn't do much yesterday.  Nobody in Philadelphia did.  It was a hundred degrees on the front porch!  And that's the one in shade.

But, strong of character as I am, I did get up and write today's story.  It was commissioned by Daniel Francken, who said then when when he gets anxious he rips off his pinky toes' nails and that he hails from Buffalo, which he characterized as "the armpit of New York State."  I'm guessing that Daniel is feeling the heat too.

Anyway, here's the story.  I can only hope that John Kessel doesn't see it.

Your Streets, O Buffalo!  Your Streets Filled of Light!

by

Michael Swanwick

These are things that Daniel Francken never says about Buffalo:

All roads lead to Buffalo, New York.  Even the neediest citizen of that happy city would scorn to leave it for all of Ted Turner’s wealth.  In the spring, the fountains run with sparkling white wine.  In the autumn, they spout dark red ale.  The building spires are all topped with gems.  Though the suavest and most agile jewel thieves in the world live there, they scorn to defile their city’s skyline by taking them.

The winters are moderated by the proximity of Canada, which softens the winds, and of the lake which gently warms them.  The summers are so clement that nobody in Buffalo owns an air conditioner, and many don’t even know what one is. The white sand beaches of Lake Erie are one of the world’s greatest secrets.  Famous Brazilian beauties come to sunbathe topless by the crystalline waters, knowing that nobody there would be so ungentlemanly as to harass them.  So much like Paradise is this great city that if a unicorn were to materialize in Delaware Park, nobody would be surprised.

See Buffalo and die!  Its streets are paved with gold.  The hearts of its inhabitants are filled with song.  The police are incorruptible and the criminals are in it only for the sport; they give away their spoils to the poor – of whom, in Buffalo, there are almost none.  He who is tired of Buffalo is tired of life.

The sports teams there always win.

Those are but a few of the things that Daniel Francken never says about his home town.  When he first read this story, he did not rip off the nails of both his pinky toes in a fit of frustration.

With apologies to Alice Sheldon and Jamaica Kinkaid

*

Being Michael Walsh

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Eighteen days into the Clarion West Write-a-Thon and I've written eighteen stories!  Nobody appears to be impressed, but that's a pretty good accomplishment.  And it's only going to get better.

Here's the latest, and every word of it true:

Being Michael Walsh

by

Michael Swanwick

The next book that you published was Being Gardner Dozois.

Michael Walsh:  God help us all.

This was an interview conducted by Michael Swanwick covering every work of short fiction that Dozois had written to date, right?  It got glowing reviews, as I recall.

Michael Walsh:  Yes, rave reviews.  So far as I could tell, the reviewers were the only ones who actually read the book.  It was not a money-maker.

Chiefly, it was about – what?

Michael Walsh:  Swanwick interviewed Dozois about every story he’d ever written, in order of publication.  What worked , what didn’t, and why it did or didn’t work.  You can think of it as a sort of postgraduate course for authors.  One quick read would make anybody a significantly better writer.  A close study would be enough to win you a Pulitzer, maybe even a Nobel someday.  If the book had sold better, the field of imaginative fiction would be in much better shape today.

But that’s a moot point now, of course.

It also contained secret Tantric sex techniques, did it not?

Michael Walsh:  With diagrams!  Techniques for eight-hour-long orgasms, tireless sexual energy, the lot, and all of it so clearly laid out you’d have to be a moron not to be able to employ them that very night.  Gardner had to go into hiding for a few years, as a result.  The Dalai Lama ordered him taken out for revealing the techniques to the world at large.  But finally, I managed to get a copy of the sales figures to his holiness and he called off the assassins.

As well as a sure-fire method for picking up total strangers and convincing them to have hot sex with you on the spot?

Michael Walsh:  You wouldn’t think it, to look at either of them, but that method really worked.  All three people who bought the book came back the next day to thank me.  One of them hadn’t gotten laid in years and yet when I spoke to him he had a drop-dead beautiful woman on either arm.  There were tears in his eyes, he was so grateful.

Also techniques for calling up ifrits and binding them to your will?

Michael Walsh:  I don’t know what Swanwick was thinking of when he asked those questions.  And Dozois should never have answered them.

You seem to have had an extraordinary run of bad luck with that book.

Michael Walsh:  I did.  I just couldn’t catch a break with it.

Finally, there’s a piece of urban legendry going around about diamonds in the binding.  Can you clarify that for us?

Michael Walsh:  Oh, that wasn’t an urban legend.  It turned out that there was a Japanese smuggling ring which had a member in the bindery I used.  They chose my book, pretty much at random, and hid several diamonds of the first water in the spines of roughly half the volumes.  The plan was to place a foreign order for the books and then launder the diamonds via Tokyo rare book stores.  But then through a series of bizarre coincidences, the books got shipped to me instead of to Japan, and the Yakuza involved were all arrested before they could recover them.  The details of the plan came out during the trial.  I read about it in the Washington Post.

That must have been an astonishing moment for you.

Michael Walsh:  Yeah.  Especially since one week before that I’d given up on the book and sent every copy I had to be pulped.

*

Above:  More chickens.  The one in the forefront is Lipstick, so named not only after the red at the tip of her beak but also because her owner suspects she may be a lesbian.  Chicken sexuality is a mysterious business.