Michael Swanwick

Micheal Swanwick's Dancing With Bears is just so damn good. It's a pure sci-fi romp, carving out some sort of indefinable territory between cyber and steampunk. Confidence tricksters Dargle and Surplus help wreak havoc in postutopian Moscow! Packed with ideas, told with the wit and expertise of a born writer, it's one of the best books of the year so far. I hope Swanwick has a wheelbarrow for all the awards this'll win, and deserves to have another one full of money, too.

On rereading, damn show more this is still good stuff, wild, raunchy, violent, funny, horrific and epic, all tied upin a small perfect package. show less

This was some kind of amazing. The main character, who was never referred to as anything but Bureaucrat, was hardly my definition of a bureaucrat. He was part outcast, part superspy, part magician's apprentice, and part avenger. He wears so many hats during this superb little gem that I never slow down and even consider why. The plot is also so damn interesting and the pacing so fantastic that I almost miss exactly how wonderfully crafted the writing is.

Am I a fan of Swanwick? I have read a show more few of his short stories, years ago, and I loved them. I remembered them very fondly, but in passing, because I prefer novels over anything else. So why am I so damn late to the table, now? Hell if I know, and I'm ashamed because of it. I'm going to be going through his entire catalogue shortly.

So many wonderful sf ideas were crammed in here, and all of them were firmly in the service of the overarching story that happens to have an awful lot in common with The Tempest. The obvious bits were intended by the colonizers of Miranda, and the allegorical allusions were fully conscious and intended by the characters. It was delightful in that respect. The things that happen give the feel, but thankfully not the full substance of the play, so never worry, if you think you might be turned off by a shameless cribbing. This novel is truly a one-of-a-kind brilliant homage to all things SF and Fantasy. A lot of the time, it's impossible to separate the two, but what else can you do when you have awesome worldbuilding on colony worlds, cloning, terraforming, world-AIs, NSA game theory puzzle boxes the size of nations, AND indigenous aliens who shapeshift, who's biology is mostly incompatible with us except when triggered, turning us into wizards with grand powers, morphing into angels and demons, mind-control, as well as the summoning of immensely powerful archetypes? Is it SF or Fantasy? Clarke's razor applies.

But lo! This is no simple tale to mix elements and say, "Hey, look what I did!" No. The story here is king, from old world to new, disillusionment to renewing perception, retribution to revelation to understanding.

Of course, it also borrows concepts to sweep a wide circumference, even stooping to crib from some classics (Dune fans rejoice, pain by nerve induction). For this, I don't care too much. It serves a serious and pretty much identical purpose, but in the service of magic apprenticeship. There's other examples, too, but it slides by so fast and delicious and moves on to the next wonderful surrealism and solid chink of plot, that I'm left gasping with joy.

THIS IS A GRAND GEM, people. Fantastic writing, wonderful ideas, and nothing short of intensely memorable characters. It won the Nebula award in '91 and was nominated for Hugo, alas that it hadn't won.

I will probably read this one again, just to bathe in it. The tide is coming. Can YOU read between the lines of the tv station? show less

Michael Swanwick offers an explanation for Cabell's current low standing in critical opinion: The author over-produced, and constructed a silly "complete works" (Storisende) edition of his Biography of the Life of Manuel, a vast, jerry-rigged assemblage padded with books that didn't really belong and books insignificant compared to the best in the series. This forced his fans to read through second- and third-rate works for completism's sake, thus tarnishing the memory of Cabell's show more best.

Swanwick's list of Cabellian classics is slender compared to Cabell's output:

1. Figures of Earth
2. The Silver Stallion
3. Jurgen
4. The High Place
5. The Cream of the Jest
6. The Way of Ecben

with

7. Domnei
8. Something About Eve
9. a few stories, such as "The Wedding Jest"

thrown in for balance, though these latter are of second order.

I will podcast a review of this book. At risk of jumping the gun for that review, I will state, here, for the record, that Swanwick errs by not mentioning Cabell's best story, "The Music from Behind the Moon: An Epitome" (the subtitle by Cabell accurately indicating its value and its place in his canon), and by slighting "The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck," which, though surely not his best book, is the closest thing Cabell made to a standard novel, and is also a personal favorite (I have read it many times).

Further, Swanwick does not contemplate or give full regard for Cabell's self-professed auctorial philosophy: He wrote chiefly for his own pleasure. That any of the works concocted on this primary standard fit with a wide readership can only be described as fortuitous. Cabell didn't care.

I prefer to take the great ironist as not being ironic when it came to his frequent revelations of intent. By not considering this, Swanwick misses the nature of Cabellian irony and its place in his philosophy and literary method.

I also suspect that Swanwick grossly misinterprets and under-evaluates "Hamlet Had an Uncle", and unjustly relegates Cabell's last comedy, "The Devil's Own Dear Son," to Maya's field of contented but forgettable cattle. I remember reading "The Devil's Own Dear Son" with much pleasure.

Still, this was a fun book, and included much material I had not encountered before. The Barry Humphries introduction is precisely the delightful-if-pointless kind of prefatory remarks one has come to expect in any book by and about Cabell. (Now that I think of it, Dame Edna is a very Cabellian kind of woman — though not, of course, a witch woman, and not a Norn.)

It is essential reading for those few of us who still read James Branch Cabell. Though I disagree with some of Swanwick's judgments, I nevertheless greatly appreciate his book. I recommend it to others.

https://wirkman.com/2019/08/13/swanwick-on-cabell/ show less

Swanwick, Michael. Vacuum Flowers. 1987. Open Road, 2016.
Michael Swanwick is a writer who should be better known than he is, despite one Nebula award for his novel Stations of the Tide and three Hugo awards for his short fiction. He caught the cyberpunk bus early on, and in Vacuum Flowers he extends its reach into the kind of space opera I usually associate with John Varley’s Eight Worlds series. The story is set in a solar system that is inhabited all the way to the Oort Cloud with show more “cannister habs,” “Dyson trees,” and a partially terraformed Mars. Most of the solar system is dominated by large corporations, but not Earth. It has been taken over by an AI that has incorporated all its residents into a hive mind. Our heroine, Rebel Mudlark, is resurrected into a body not her own after her death by suicide. Her persona with all its memories and skills is owned by a corporation, but Rebel lives up to her name. She is “wetware” who does not accept her programming. Her story is fun to follow, and if I have one complaint about the novel it is that the world-building too often leaves Rebel in the background. Nevertheless, Swanwick is a writer I will revisit. show less