Excessive Candour
Walking the Dog

It does not take very long to work out that the greatest pleasure this book gives is pleasure. There is a camaraderie about the stories Michael Swanwick has assembled in The Dog Said Bow-Wow, a willingness to share their deepest ingenuities with the reader, that makes the book almost tingle in the mind: wagging its tale to tell more. What the stories in this collection are so good at doing, to put it another way, is being stories. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. This is not exactly to say that Michael Swanwick does the same. The other side of the exuberance of The Dog Said Bow-Wow is a severe chastity of reticence. Michael Swanwick is a teller, but he does not tell himself.

But we cannot fault a writer for selecting his remit. And the polished variousness of Swanwick's gift is in itself gift enough. A run-through can only hint at the workings inside.

"The Dog Said Bow-Wow" is the first of three tales set in a Land of Fable, mid-distant-future Earth some time after the desolate Apollonian tyranny of the descendants of our own deadly civilization—they are known here as the "Utopians"—has collapsed. The Land that has survived is a bit like the quasi-urban Heroic Fantasy venues of a writer like Fritz Leiber (just as the two main characters—a confidence artist named Darger and the eponymous dog, who is of human intelligence and has been bio-engineered by his American makers into a human semblance—are blood relatives of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser). London, where the first tale is set, and Paris, where "The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport" takes place, give off a Babylonian end-times feel. The plots are scampish and slightly scatological, rather similar in this to Fritz Leiber's late fiction, but the remote, chuntering, "philosophical" tone they take is more reminiscent of James Branch Cabell in the full susurrus of his flow (see below), and their ingenuity is Swanwick's alone.

There was a point in the third of these tales, "Girls and Boys Come Out to Play," set in an Arcadia inhabited by amiable satyrs, where this shining calliope of story-types almost comes apart, or maybe transubstantiates into something too grave to handle. A grotesque scientist from an older era is attempting to re-create simulacra of Dionysus (sex) and Thanatos (death) who broadcast their daimonic commands through irresistible pheromones. For a while, it looks as though both will be unleashed simultaneously—for the consequences of such a marriage, see Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), which does a good job of predicting World War II—but Swanwick swings the story into two safely separated parts, and we are all safe; Sex and Death do not consort to garrote us this time round.

The dog barks; the horse just lies there

Other stories. "'Hello,' Said the Stick" is as swift and surreally abrupt as one of the better tales of Hans Christian Andersen and tells a deep and savage parable about war and its promulgators without depending on a single metaphor: It is simply all there. "Slow Life" and "Legions in Time" and "Tin Marsh" could almost be thought of as serious SF stories, if someone else had told them rather less well. The first is a hard-SF problem-solving trudge down into a big moon somewhere, I seem to remember it's Titan; the female protagonist, in a damaged suit or unit or mini-ship of some sort, has only x hours to live as her oxygen fails and she nears the moon out of control unless y solves z in the nick of time, while a new alien species is discovered en passant and takes a role. The second is a Changewar tale that starts flatly but that—by the time the blah protagonist finds out who she really is in the long conflict—turns into a small jewel of kinetic storytelling. The third—believe it or not—is a Prospectors on Venus in Debt to the Company Store tale, and it works too.

None of these stories makes enough fun of its model to destroy the joy; each of them is a sophisticated, 21st-century, funny but reverent Thought Experiment in how to intensify the telling of a particular 20th-century SF story. Each burns through the cliche of the mold that gave it birth.

"Triceratops Summer" is another time-travel jeu whose poignance wells up slowly and calmly and called for: There is no Bradbury-like pumping for steam as we bid a suddenly moving farewell to the tame trusting Triceratops "sleeping in the moonlight" "in the late summer" of a time-loop soon to be canceled by bureaucrats. Several stories—including "An Episode of Stardust," "The Bordello in Faerie" and "A Small Room in Koboldtown"—quite successfully tune the runes of Fantasy, though I did find myself slowly worn out by tell-it-as-it-is make-it-gritty revisionist upgradings of begat by Tolkien on Terry Brooks long, long ago. It is a dead horse Swanwick pounds with real skill, but I think we may have reached funeral time for the sex elf and the haint shamus and their kin.

Telling the world of itself

Two more to mention, I think: "The Skysailor's Tale"—a previously unpublished story featuring sky ships and hierarchy-driven crews and seconded navigators and an America that did not win the Revolution, all of which hauntingly parallels significant stretches of Jay Lake's Mainspring, though neither author would have seen the other's work—is as close to a personally revealing tale as Swanwick seems willing to write: the first-person narrative of a young man who escapes Philadelphia into argosies of dream life, but who comes back in the end to live as a citizen in his world, generates a fairly complex glow of real life experienced. And "Dirty Little War" is purely masterful: It is a pure example of the literature of the fantastic—which I would prefer simply to call "fantastika"—a pure example of fantastika at work.

In an upper middle class house somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line, an upper-middle-class party is taking place, sometime in the middle years of the Vietnam War. The air fumes with upper-middle-class hypocrisies and dysfunctional marriages breaking down and bad sex not yet happening. "Unacknowledged" by these people, who voted for the war and who have battened on it, a squad of American soldiers, tinier than mice, tries to make its way alive across this deadly terrain, under the feet of the parents and bosses who have eaten them. We see in separate paragraphs that they are real soldiers, and watch as they are decimated in ambush after ambush. They die, one by one. At the very end of this very short story, a sole survivor looks up and seems suddenly to see something loathsome and gigantic and bloated. Almost instantly, he is snuffed out. The hostess of the upper-middle-class party of bloats instantly receives word of her son's death in combat and begins to scream. Nothing more. Not a single metaphor, just fantastika at work, telling the world as it is.

A short note on another book: Michael Swanwick has just published with the small press Temporary Culture (P.O. Box 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043) a movingly intense pamphlet which he calls What Can Be Saved From the Wreckage?: James Branch Cabell in the Twenty-First Century. Swanwick is good on Cabell's few successful books, and deeply illuminating on his many failures, most of which were composed in a tone of mephitic self-referential coyness, all making up an oeuvre whose airlessness is a savage body English of Cabell's total lack of self-knowledge. I wondered as I read if Swanwick may well have taken this terrible example very much to heart: A few Cabellian cadences may echo cunningly here and there in The Dog Said Bow-Wow, but no whiff of the prison air of an author who, knowing nothing about his subject, talks about himself interminably. In his own work, Michael Swanwick is very careful to say only that which may be said of others.