Another Book You Need to Buy

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I'm in reprint again! Jonathan Strahan's latest, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Vol 9 is fresh on the stands. And it contains... wait a second, I really do have to look it up... my own "Tawny Petticoats."  This is the Darger & Surplus adventure originally published in George R. R. Martin's and Gardner Dozois' rather splendid anthology Rogues.  It chronicles the two scoundrels' brief but eventful stay in New Orleans, a period during which they took on a third partner.

Here, in alphabetical order, are the contents:

1. “Tough Times All Over”, Joe Abercrombie
2. “The Scrivener”, Eleanor Arnason
3. “Moriabe’s Children”, Paolo Bacigalupi
4. “Covenant”, Elizabeth Bear
5. “Slipping”, Lauren Beukes
6. “Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (The Successful Kind)”, Holly Black
7. “Shadow Flock”, Greg Egan
8. “The Truth About Owls”, Amal El-Mohtar
9. “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology”, Theodora Goss
10. “Cold Wind”, Nicola Griffith
11. “Someday”, James Patrick Kelly
12. “Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No.8)”, Caitlin R Kiernan
13. “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They are Terrifying”, Alice Sola Kim
14. “Amicae Aeternum”, Ellen Klages
15. “Calligo Lane”, Ellen Klages
16. “The Lady and the Fox”, Kelly Link
17. “The Long Haul From the ANNALS OF TRANSPORTATION”, The Pacific Monthly, May 2009”, Ken Liu
18. “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family”, Usman T Mailk
19. “Four Days of Christmas”, Tim Maughan
20. “The Fifth Dragon”, Ian McDonald
21. “Shay Corsham Worsted”, Garth Nix
22. “I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There”, K. J. Parker
23. “Kheldyu”, Karl Schroeder
24. “Tawny Petticoats”, Michael Swanwick
25. “Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)”, Rachel Swirsky
26. “The Insects of Love”, Genevieve Valentine
27. “Collateral”, Peter Watts
28. “The Devil in America”, Kai Ashante Wilson 

Which I feel is sufficient reason for you to buy the book.


Remember:  If at all possible, you should do so at an independent bookstore.  The big chains do not hold readers or authors in high esteem.  And don't get me started on Amazon.

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A Brief Note to Young Writers of Science Fiction

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Children, this is what science fiction used to look like.  This is what it used to sound like.  This was all a long, long time ago.

Your task is twofold:

1. You must write something as powerful as this.

2.  You must write something much better than this.

With love,
Unca Mike

P. S. Keep it new, y'all!

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Let Me Write A Story About YOU...

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As the Indiegogo funding campaign for Stories For Chip moves into its last days, editors Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell have unveiled more rewards for the well-heeled, including three bespoke short-short stories (or flash fictions, as they're called nowadays) written by me.

I'll explain what a bespoke story is in just a second.  First, a little background:

Stories For Chip is a festschrift (a book of writings honoring a worthy individual while that person is still alive) celebrating the life and works of Samuel R. Delany, who commonly goes by the nickname "Chip."  Chip is one of the best and most influential writers in the history of science fiction.  He's also cut quite a swath in the circles of criticism and gay pornography.  Anyone reading this blog probably knows quite a bit about the man.

Despite the title, the book contains a mixture of fiction and non-fiction.  My own contribution is an essay titled, "On My First Reading of The Einstein Intersection."  I also appear as a character in a reprint of Eileen Gunn's semitrue metafictional "Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005." Here, in near-alphabetical order are all the other pieces:

Introduction by Kim Stanley RobinsonChristopher Brown – Festival
Chesya Burke – For Sale: Fantasy Coffin
Roz Clarke – Haunt-type Experience
Kathryn Cramer – Characters in the Margins of a Lost Notebook
Vincent Czyz – Hamlet’s Ghost Sighted in Frontenac, KS
Junot Díaz – Nilda
Geetanjali Dighe – The Last Dying Man
Timmel Duchamp – Real Mothers, a Faggot Uncle, and the Name of the Father: Samuel R. Delany’s Feminist Revisions of the Story of SF
Hal Duncan – An Idyll in Erewhyna
Fabio Fernandes – Eleven Stations
Jewelle Gomez – Be Three
Eileen Gunn – Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany at the Joyce Kilmer Service Area, March 2005
Nick Harkaway – Billy Tumult
Ernest Hogan – Guerilla Mural of a Siren’s Song
Nalo Hopkinson & Nisi Shawl – Jamaica Ginger
Walidah Imarisha – Walking Science Fiction: Samuel Delany and Visionary Fiction
Alex Jennings – Heart of Brass
Tenea D. Johnson – Each Star a Sun to Invisible Planets
Ellen Kushner – Delany Story
Claude Lalumiere – Empathy Evolving as a Quantum of Eight-Dimensional Perception
Isiah Lavender – Delany Encounters
devorah major – Voice Prints
Haralambi Markov – Holding Hands with Monsters
Anil Menon – Clarity
Carmelo Rafala – Song for the Asking
Kit Reed – Kickenders
Benjamin Rosenbaum – The First Gate of Logic
Geoff Ryman – Capitalism in the 22nd Century
Alex Smith – Clones
Sheree Renee Thomas – River Clap Your Hands
Kai Ashante Wilson – Legendaire

So... bespoke fiction.  Like bespoke shirts, bespoke fiction is custom-made to fit you. I've contributed up to three stories of roughly 500 words length, certainly no more than a thousand, based on information that the buyer provides about himself, herself, or a loved one.  The buyer gets the original typescript, signed and dated by me.  And I'll throw in the right to post it on your Web page, copy it into your Christmas letter, write it on the side of your barn -- and/or any other non-commercial use that may occur to you.

It's kind of like a Tuckerization, except without all the parts of the story that have nothing to do with You.

These are, I should mention, pricey little things.  They're going for two hundred dollars a pop.  But the money is going toward the creation of a book I devoutly wish to read, so I think it's all in a good cause.

You can find the site, order a copy of the book, maybe go for one of the many special donor perks here.

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A Greenhouse on Mars

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So early yesterday, I took the train to D. C. for a SIGMA panel at the 2015 Humans to Mars Summit.  The subject of the panel was what science fiction can do to promote the colonization of our sister planet. My fellow pundits were Catherine Asaro (moderator), Tom Ligon, Geoff Landis, and Mary Turzillo. You can judge how good a job we did, if you wish, by viewing the video above.

What I remember about my own words is how fundamentally optimistic I was.  Asked for a justification for the colonization of Mars, I said that we didn't need one.  I'd just returned from China which is still undergoing explosive growth, in the wake of which they created an ambitious space program. So far as I can tell, they never bothered to come up with a reason why.  Great nations do great things.  So of course they want to take the lead in space.

Two thoughts I had on the subject which the panel had no room for, however, were:

Any reimagining of the colonization of Mars will have to start with the people. So it's a pity that it seems unlikely that anybody thought to run a study of the volunteers for the Mars One project.  Some of them never expected to go and merely signed up to get a closer look at something they found interesting. But there were a lot who really did hope to live the rest of their lives on another planet. Who were they? What did they want? What expectations did they have?

One thing I know is that they're going to live lives of very expensive poverty. For a very long time they will be unable to manufacture things like surgical instruments, birth control devices, guitar strings... the list goes on forever. All of which will be extraordinarily expensive to ship from one planet to another. I expect they'll make a lot of their own entertainment: Sing-alongs, amateur theatrics, and the like.

I expect the first Martian export will be poetry.

I want to see a greenhouse on Mars.  If a colony is going to succeed, they'll have to grow their own food. It'll be heavy on vegetables at first. And it would help if there were extensive greenhouses in production by the time the colonists arrive.

Sooner or later NASA is going to have to run an experiment on Mars to see if a robot-assembled, remotely-tended greenhouse can raise viable crops on Martian regolith. When they do, it will be as good a means of promoting the exploration and colonization of the Red Planet as the rovers have been.  I hope that in addition to the crops, they think to plant a small rosebush.

I want to be watching the camera footage when the first rose blossoms on another planet.


And afterward...

Catherine suggested we all go out to lunch together. Which made it ironic that somehow we managed to lose her before we did so.  But we picked up Rosemary Smith, who very sensibly was at the summit to learn all she could on the subject, so we had a full quorum for some very lively conversation.

Geoff Landis, ever the engineer, pointed out that it would be every bit as informative and a lot cheaper to put a greenhouse on the Moon.  Point taken.

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Hunting the Phoenix

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Here's something I would have sworn would not and would not occur in this universe.  Dragonstairs Press, which is my wife Marianne Porter's self-styled "nanopress," has just published an art book. By, of all people, me.

A little background first.  Dragonstairs is not, as many people have reasonably assumed, my own vanity press.  It was created and is run entirely by Marianne.  Nor is it a hobby.  In large part because Marianne creates small-run, limited edition chapbooks, it's been a profit-making concern from the beginning. Her creations sell out quickly.

Marianne does have an advantage over most small-press publishers of having an author living in the same house whom she can direct to write something for her.  As she did with Tumbling, a Lizzie O'Brien story written specifically because she had learned how to fold and cut a single sheet of paper into a small booklet and wanted something appropriate for it.  Or as she did with the upcoming Universe Box, which... well, I'll let that be a surprise.  But it's an extremely cool project.

The important thing to know here is that these projects arise in Marianne's brain. Hunting the Phoenix is an idea that I doubt would ever have occurred to me.

So what is Hunting the Phoenix?

You may recall that I have a novel coming out on August 1 from Tor Books.  It's called Chasing the Phoenix and it's the second novel chronicling the adventures of Darger & Surplus, Postutopian con men extraordinaire.  As I was writing the book, I used an iPad drawing app to make sketches of some of the characters and situations that were coming up. It was one of many means I used to coax my subconscious into giving up its treasures.

Marianne has taken those pictures and made of them a booklet.  It's called Hunting the Phoenix because that was originally the working title for the novel, back before I discovered who or what the Phoenix would turn out to be. (There were a lot of candidates.) When I did make that discovery, it seemed obviously wrong to hunt such a creature, so I changed the present participle.

All the work was done by Marianne, save for an introduction which I wrote so my artist friends would not think I had completely lost my mind.

Here's the official website description:

Hunting the Phoenix by Michael Swanwick. 6 1/2" by 4". Bound in archival board wrappers covered with hand-dyed rice paper, with a stab binding ornamented with a single aventurine bead. The contents include a text introduction by Michael Swanwick, and seventeen color illustrations, also by Swanwick, created originally on the iPad, as part of early planning for the novel, "Chasing the Phoenix". Illustrations include many of the major characters, and several incidents from the book.
Limited to 30 numbered copies, signed by the author, with 27 available for sale. $30 each, including shipping.

You can find the Dragonstairs Press site here.

One third of the stab books, incidentally, sold out in the first day.

Above top: One of several covers. Above bottom: Demons.

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Visiting Science Fiction World

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The highlight of my stay in Chengdu was revisiting the Science Fiction World offices on April 7.  SFWorld is the largest-circulation science fiction magazine in existence -- and also a publishing house of Chinese and translated science fiction novels including works by (ahem) me. My long association with Science Fiction World is one of the great satisfactions of my life.

After a tour of the offices -- ever the editor, Ellen Datlow was most impressed by the fact that, it being shipping day, there were cartons of books piled high everywhere, ready to go out to bookstores -- we were taken by editors Emily Wan and Fay Jing on a tour of the ancient town of Anren, including Liu’s Manor Museum and the Anren Jianchuan Museum Cluster.

The most heartwarming moment in all our time spent in China came when we were walking from the Flying Tigers Museum to the Modern Ceramics Museum and our paths crossed with a class of very young students -- kindergarteners, I think.  Seeing Westerners in an area of China where we are a rarity, they all burst into huge smiles and waved excitedly and cried, "Hello! Hello! Hello!"  Then, when they had passed us, they joyfully cried, "Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!"  Their teachers were smiling too, happy at this proof that the English they taught was being put to good use.

In the evening, several of the editors took us to the Laomatou Hot Pot Restaurant for the kind of delicious feast that Sichuan Province is world-famous for.  There were, in the course of the evening, short impromptu speeches and toasts.  But mostly we enjoyed good company, good conversation, and good feeling.

As I said, that day was the highlight of my stay.  Better than the pandas?  Better than Du Fu's cottage?  I can't speak for the others, but for me -- yes.

The photograph above was taken that evening.  From left to right:   Deputy Editor-in-Chief Yang Feng, me, Jing Yanfei (Fay), John Berry, Eileen Gunn, Wan Jie (Emily), and Editor-in-Chief Yao Haijun.

Above: Photo by Ellen Datlow and used by her kind permission.

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Goodbye, Mr. Chip

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The other day Marianne and I went to Samuel R. Delany's retirement party at Temple University.  Chip, as he is pretty much universally known, drew a large crowd of faculty, students, friends, and other well-wishers.  Those from the local science fiction community who could make it included Gregory Frost, Fran Wilde, and Diane and Lee Weinstein.  I'm probably leaving somebody out, for which I apologize.

Pictured above are Chip and Fran, whom I had just introduced.  I have other, duller pictures of Chip at the event but I figured what the heck, I'd let Fran bask in the reflected glory.  Now, of course, she has to spend the rest of her literary career living up to this association.

No pressure, Ms Wilde.

There were the usual short speeches, the joke presentation (of a tie), the serious presentation (of a pen), and then, after some preliminary remarks about his career, Delany read a chapter from his book Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.  Chip is one of the finest readers in genre, whether that genre be science fiction or gay literature, so it was well worth the hearing.

Two things particularly moved me about the event.  First was that before the reading, during the mix-and-mingle part of the event, Chip very carefully connected with everyone he knew personally, not just chatting them up but talking about them and their lives, in a way that let all of us know that he valued us as people.  That was extraordinary for an event whose purpose was specifically to honor him.

The other thing was the students.  I could not help seeing them -- the scowling young man working intensely upon his inscription in the guest book, the trio of young ladies looking as if they were about to break into nervous giggles -- as bundles of potential, early adults launching themselves upon the ocean of their lives.  They were all so serious and hopeful. They knew that their lives had been touched by an extraordinary man and if they didn't quite know what they were going to do with this, they knew that eventually they would figure it out.

Or so I could not help speculate.  Teachers live on through their students, much as writers live on through their books.  It looked to me like Chip was leaving behind some good ones.


And now . . . ?

I have no idea what Chip is going to do next.  But when I observed that now his time was his own, he involuntarily exclaimed, "What!?"  So I'm guessing he's still going to be busy as busy.

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