ince his first short story appeared over 20 years ago, Michael Swanwick has been one of American SF's most stylish and subversive writers, bringing to his intense, finely wrought stories and novels a sardonic intelligence that has few literary peers. His output is spare: He publishes relatively infrequently, averaging one novel every three or four years, and all of his works share an economy of length that only serves to emphasize how compressedly rich a volume of symbolic and speculative material each of them contains. To open a Swanwick text is to broach an aesthetic Pandora's box: fascination and disturbance inevitably and rewardingly follow.
As a novelist, Swanwick showed his gifts quickly. Although In the Drift (1985), a portrait of an America rendered strange and savage by nuclear meltdown, is somewhat loose structurally, it is highly atmospheric; Vacuum Flowers (1987) is a bravura exercise in cyberpunk-tinged space opera, delineating a colonized solar system of frenetic energy and great danger. After that, there was no looking back. Stations of the Tide (1991), winner of the Nebula Award, is a fast and feverish meditation on transformation in all its aspects, as its protagonist, known only as "the bureaucrat", wanders a soon-to-be flooded world in search of a technological wizard; The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993) impregnates Celtic high fantasy with the seeds of rampant industrial capitalism, presenting a scathing, and extremely entertaining, critique of its target genre; Jack Faust (1997), in which the legendary Magister makes the world over by science rather than by magic, is a dark, bizarrely mercurial exploration of hubris at its damning ultimate; and Bones of the Earth (2002) is a masterfully constructed time-travel extravaganza featuring dinosaurs, paradoxes and a dauntingly complex love affair.
At the same time, Swanwick has served as one of contemporary SF's few authentic masters of the short story. He restlessly reworks genre themes into cogent polished gems of narrative, as can be seen in his superb collections Gravity's Angels (1991), A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Moon Dogs (2000), Tales of Old Earth (2000), his long novella Griffin's Egg (1990) and recent stories such as "Slow Life" (2002) and "King Dragon" (2003). His command of the short-short-story form is amply attested by several ongoing series published online: The Periodic Table of Science Fiction, carried on Sci Fiction, The Sleep of Reason, featured on The Infinite Matrix and the "Stories of the Month" on his official Web site, Michael Swanwick Online.
I interviewed Michael Swanwick by e-mail in April 2003.
Anyone examining your fiction output of the last few years inevitably notices two things: dinosaurs and short-short stories. We'll come to the short-shorts later; how did your literary and scientific obsession with dinosaurs develop?
Swanwick: One of the advantages of working for yourself is that you can always take a few weeks off to do something unprofitable. So when Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger needed some volunteer help setting up the art show for Dinofest, "The World's Fair of Dinosaurs," I was available. Working backstage while dinosaur skeletons were assembled and fossil eggs and enormous chunks of amber were settled into display cases, I was exposed to a lot of fascinating detail about the enterprise. For example, what do paleontologists do when they accidentally break a fossil? They use Paleo-Bond, a line of adhesives specifically designed to be non-reactive with those materials. It saves them a lot of recordkeeping, because when they document the chemicals used in the restoration, they can simply put down the brand name.
Then, while I was thinking I might write a few stories around the topic of dinosaurs, I attended the attached symposium and was blown away by the dedication and enthusiasm the paleontologists brought to their subject. I heard Peter Dodson—Dr. Peter Dodson, I should say, but paleontologists don't use their titles very often—deliver a paper on a new model for fossilization which I later used in my novel. There were tears of joy in his eyes when he said, "And it's falsifiable—you can test it in the laboratory!" It didn't hurt that this happened to be a particularly interesting period when the first feathered non-avian dinosaur fossils were being found, and new species discovered every six weeks, and the cladists finally coming up with some interesting results. The excitement was contagious, and I caught it. I wanted to write about the passion these people felt for their science, why they might be right to feel that way and how they were rewarded.
Indeed. Your dinosaur novel, Bones of the Earth, is very much about science, scientists, the scientific method. How genuinely heroic is the practice, and outlook, of Science—the Scientific Worldview?
Swanwick: The scientists I know would be very uncomfortable at the thought of themselves or their beer-swilling buddies being heroic. I think admirable is a better word here. I used to read a lot of science fiction from the late Soviet Union, and there was a very common phenomenon in which a story would be stunningly written, even in translation, until the scientists appeared, at which point it would crash and burn. Because all their science popularizations had the Heroic Socialist Scientist nobly pushing back ignorance, which myth the fiction writers would either buy into or mock. Resulting in either a stuffed shirt or the sort of hideously unconvincing character you get when you're parodying something that doesn't exist.
With the exception of the lucky few, the Nobel Prize winners and such, so long as they're alive, it's very hard to tell whether scientists have made the right choice following their hearts rather than going into commerce. There's not a whole lot of money in the pure sciences. There's not much glory. (Quick! Who is universally acknowledged to be the greatest paleontologist alive today? Give up? It's John Ostrom.) The work can be incredibly tedious. But when you die and the contents of your house are sold off and everything you spent a lifetime accumulating is scattered to the winds and there's nothing left but your friends shaking their heads sadly, the picture becomes clearer. "He did what he wanted with his life," they say. "She made a real contribution."
As for the scientific worldview, people have the notion that science is a cold and dispassionate endeavor when, as it's practiced, it's anything but. Scientists often start from an intuition or an emotional preference and work outward from there. Logic is only a tool, like a chisel or a gas chromatograph, that they use in their work. Far more central to the enterprise is intellectual honesty, the ability to admit that they may possibly be wrong or, even better, that the guy with the opposing viewpoint may be making a valid contribution. I saw an auditorium full of people give John Ostrom a standing ovation after he made the introductory statement at a symposium on the early evolution of birds. It was a powerful, emotional thing to witness, and afterwards the guy next to me leaned over and said, "Did you notice who was the first one on his feet?" And he named a man whose theories were in direct conflict with Ostrom's. But he could still applaud the integrity of Ostrom's work. That was extraordinary.
Having caught the paleontological bug: Why, in your view, do dinosaurs constitute such a powerful cultural and intellectual icon, within SF and without?
Swanwick: That's an easy one. It's because dinosaurs are (a) monsters, (b) real and (c) safely extinct. It's an unbeatable combination! My paleontologist friends hate it when I use the M-word, but let's be honest here, that's the appeal. There's a story that Kenneth Carpenter saw a Godzilla movie when he was a boy and immediately decided that he was going to devote his life to studying such creatures. Then, when his parents gently broke it to him that Godzilla was imaginary, he switched his loyalties over to dinosaurs, as the next best thing. Decades later he discovered a new species of theropod and named it Gojirasaurus. Thus keeping a better faith with his younger self than most adults do.
This is one reason that I deplore the rush to represent all dinosaurs as being covered with feathers, even those for which we have perfectly featherless skin imprints. Where are we going to get the next generation of paleontologists if T. rex looks like a gigantic parakeet? The mind reels.
A striking component of Bones of the Earth is the theory your characters develop as to how the dinosaurs communicated and co-operated, and why they died out. Without giving the core concept away, how did you arrive at this remarkable hypothesis?
Swanwick: The problem with writing hard science fiction is that the more you know about a subject, the harder it is to introduce an innovation. Simply because you know better. That's why Asimov wrote so little fiction about biochemistry. Still, when you write science fiction of that sort there's an implicit contract with the reader that you'll deliver the grand ideas. So I focused on things that don't fossilize, such as behavior and skin color. The behavior of the juvenile tyrannosaurs, for example, was strongly influenced by Bernd Heinrich's Mind of the Raven. Similarly, Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants by Katharine Payne gave me the central conceit, which I thought eminently possible, if unprovable, and which I then proceeded to play around with and elaborate until it grew into a unified theory of everything.
I've been told informally that the part about the extinctions doesn't work, which is a pity. But even if it had turned out to be correct, that wouldn't have meant much because it's just a notion. Scientists are under the obligation to provide rigorous proof of their ideas. Science fiction writers can simply wave a hand and say, "and it was so." If needed, our hero will stumble upon exactly the right fossil at exactly the right time. We really have an unfair advantage there. God, how they must envy us!
Also very interesting in Bones is your projection of terrestrial evolutionary history far into the future. Did anything particularly prompt or influence your thinking here?
Swanwick: If you read a vast amount of the literature, you eventually move beyond imagining the distant past as a discrete series of locales When Things Were Weird, and begin to see it the way paleontologists do, as a fluid set of extremely interesting changes occurring over vast lengths of time. By moving into the far future, I was able to get beyond that perspective we all have of the past being entirely about us, an immensely long journey that has finally reached its ultimate destination—me! But more importantly, I could begin to touch upon why life changes as radically as it does from era to era. By one reading, it's grass that's responsible for the existence of human beings. After the K-T Event took out the non-avian dinosaurs, there were still lots of small birds around. Why was it the mammals that grew larger and radiated out into the empty environmental niches, rather than the birds growing larger and re-creating the saurischian dinosaurs as they were? Because the rise of grasses had significantly altered the playing board. The new biome was a lot more hospitable to mammals, and so here we are.
There's also a little joke there that should be obvious to people who've read the novel and think cladistically. Here's the key: In cladistics, a species is not only itself but a member of all its ancestral clades. A human being is a primate and a mammal and a vertebrate and a chordate and so on. So the intelligent beings ultimately encountered are. ...
Bones of the Earth is an ambitious, tricky time-travel story, a fabric of temporal paradoxes and illusory histories. What are the particular satisfactions and challenges of writing this sort of SF?
Swanwick: The particular satisfaction of writing a time-travel novel is that it's one of the great themes of science fiction, even one of the defining themes, and it's been put through the hoops by some of our best writers. You're playing the Great Game with the likes of H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Silverberg, Ray Bradbury ... all the big kids. And they've established a very high standard of achievement, which is exhilarating to measure yourself against.
The chief danger is that the accumulation of paradoxes, loops, predetermination and branching timelines tends to become more and more arbitrary and more and more artificial. You have to be constantly mindful of the pitfalls and of your obligation to the reader not to let the apparatus turn the whole thing into nothing more than a brain-teaser. Not far behind are the twin perils of reducing life to a clockwork futility and of defining the rules of the game so cheerily that you've negated the possibility of tragedy. I forget who it was—Silverberg?—who said that once you have time travel, there's no such thing as death. After your best friend's funeral you can always jump back a couple of years and there he'll be, alive and well. Infinitely branching timelines have the same effect. Sure, you're being investigated by the IRS and have a toothache locally—but elsewhere, you're in the Bahamas, having sex with the most desirable person on Earth! When everything is not only possible but mandatory, nothing matters.
Which is why, ultimately, Bones of the Earth had to end the way it did. It helps to remember that when the timelike loop closes, everybody goes back to their starting places, undamaged, even those who died. They've all been given several years' extra life, doing what they most want to do. They won't remember it ... But life isn't lived in order to amass memories. It's something we do for its own sake.
Now to your huge output of short-short stories: the two big series, The Periodic Table of SF on Sci Fiction and The Sleep of Reason on The Infinite Matrix, as well as various smaller clusters on your own Web site, in Interzone and The New York Review of Science Fiction, and elsewhere. What first got you interested in writing at this length, and how did the numbers mushroom so?
Swanwick: It was a series of accidents, really. I used to write in my sleep. I'd come up with an idea for something and write it out in words, repeating them over and over until they reached final form, and then on awakening I'd forget them. Eventually I became curious to learn whether what I was writing and losing was great works of art or complete gibberish. So I trained myself to wake up in the middle of the night, immediately after writing one, and memorize it so I could write it down in the morning.
They turned out to be odd little surreal near-parables: A train carrying God pulls into town. I reminisce about my old mentor, the Storyteller Rock. Eventually, just because I hate waste, I published them in The New York Review of Science Fiction. This led me to try writing similar pieces of non-fiction for such ideas or observations as how the mainstream could be corrupted into sharecropping (which has since happened, alas), the fact that the geography of Mordor is identical to that of Transylvania, and suchlike, under the title "Brief Essays." I wrote an abecedary for the Disclave program book because I wanted to give them something original, another for NYRSF, and a bestiary for the Trinoc*con program book. And there were a few collections of related short-shorts that I published as short stories here and there as well.
It became clear that I had a facility for the things. So when Eileen Gunn hit me up for a series of short-shorts for her elegant online 'zine, The Infinite Matrix, I decided the only way to keep up my interest was to raise the bar, to try something really difficult, and I fixed on one story a week for every element in the periodic table, in order. The chief interest here was the very real possibility that I wouldn't be able to do it. There'd be that tension you get watching a tightrope walker or a trapeze artist working without a net.
One story into the sequence, The Infinite Matrix's sponsor went down in the dotcom crash, so Ellen Datlow picked up the series for Sci Fiction. Which made two editors who were more sure I could complete the thing than I was. Later, Eileen was able to restart her 'zine and asked for a second series. So I had to raise the bar again. The Sleep of Reason was a lot more ambitious than The Periodic Table of Science Fiction. The elements are meant to be nothing more than good entertainment. But the Goyas aspire to the state of literature.
But it's none of it been premeditated. It all simply happened in a fit of absent-mindedness.
You've always been noted for the economy of your writing, your skill at short fiction; is the short-short story, then, simply a natural application of your talents?
Swanwick: I don't feel like my writing is all that economical. I've been re-reading William Carlos Williams' short fiction recently and, man, that guy could break your heart in three pages! But in science fiction you've got a readership that's willing to let you sprawl. So long as you're entertaining them, they don't mind if it takes you a few extra pages to reach the end. This is why so much literary mainstream short fiction feels so much tighter than SF does. The advantage here is to SF. You can take that slack the reader has given you, those extra pages, and use them to cut a few figures, try a few things out, maybe invent something new. That's a priceless gift for the writer.
The short-short is an interesting form, more limited than most, but with genuine potential. And because a short-short announces itself as a silly little nothing—the ones printed in The New York Review of Science Fiction had almost exactly the same proportions as a New Yorker cartoon—you're free to do anything you want, to write a story in the form of a recipe for unicorn, say, or an encyclopedia entry, or in the second person. You can be playful.
As I worked with the form, I saw more and more possibilities. Now I'm convinced that it works best collected in (and written as) sequences: in bestiaries and abecedaries, in The Periodic Table of Science Fiction and The Sleep of Reason. The stories chime and clash against each other. They each gain strength from proximity to the rest.
So your technique in crafting these short-short sequences has evolved considerably since the start. One of your first exercises of this sort was Puck Aleshire's Abecedary, 26 stories for the 26 letters of the alphabet. Was this alphabetical determination of content arbitrary, or do the stories, however independent when read singly, add up to some sort of thematic whole?
Swanwick: Only in the vaguest sense thematic. I wanted the stories to be varied and interesting and thus to suggest a rich little fantasy world from which they might originate, with the eponymous Puck, most likely beer in hand, as the not-terribly-reliable storyteller. So I was careful not to let proximate stories have too-similar tones. I saw it as being like one of those chocolate samplers you give or receive on Valentine's Day. You bite into a chocolate not knowing what you'll get. Harlan Ellison must have had a similar insight, because he named one of his abecedaries Harlan Ellison's Chocolate Alphabet.
The Periodic Table of Science Fiction had somewhat more structure, in part imposed upon it by the periodic table itself, and in part by a running series of stories about Summergarden Specialty Ores and its successor corporations. This worked so well that when I started The Sleep of Reason I organized over half the stories into sometimes-overlapping story arcs. These were "Elena the Man-Hearted," "Witches," "Tales of Prick the Donkey," "The Sorrows of Young Grace" and "A Sad Story." "The Nightmares," though central to the thing, never had a storyline of their own; they just darted in and out of other people's stories. It was a bear to organize. I made up multicolored charts and revised them every step of the process. But it was also great fun and full of discovery. I was amazed how likable Prick turned out to be, considering who he was based upon. And there was one evening, when I was only 20 stories from the end of the project, when I suddenly realized that Elena and Grace were two aspects of one woman. When I explained my great insight, however, my wife and son were vastly unimpressed. "You just figured this out now?" they said.
The Periodic Table of SF—one story for each element—is sometimes whimsical, sometimes very penetrating; this depends on the element, it would seem. How do you set about extracting the narrative essence of, say, uranium?
Swanwick: That's a good example, because uranium turned out to be unexpectedly difficult to write. I'd start by free association. Helium—the capital city of Barsoom! Arsenic—Lucrezia Borgia! (Who has been vilely slandered, by the way, but who am I to get in the way of a good story?) If that failed, I'd consider the element's most obvious uses and associations. But when it came down to uranium, I didn't want to write about Hiroshima (I've got a framed panorama photo of the aftermath in my office, so that subject is hard to find amusing) or nuclear reactor meltdowns (I did an unsuccessful novel on that very subject) or any of the things that came easily to mind. So I hit the reference books (John Emsley's Nature's Building Blocks has been very useful, Oliver Sacks' Uncle Tungsten far less so, but lots of fun anyway) to look for interesting properties I might exploit. That's where all the hard-science stories came from; they're the elements where nothing easy leaped to mind. But again I came up empty, in part because when you get into the heavier, radioactive elements, you're dealing with substances that don't have the myriad everyday uses of—say—copper or lead. Far less is known about them. So then I hit the Web. (Theodore Gray's site dedicated to his Wooden Table of Periodic Elements—for which he won the Ig Nobel Prize, making him one of a select few who are actually proud of the honor—is particularly useful because he's got that glint of madness that one associates with chemists.) Yet again, nothing.
Now, of course, all this activity is non-sequential. It's all done in scrips and scraps of spare time. In between, I'm working on longer stories, writing up elements that come before and after uranium, and so on. At any given time, I'll be working on a dozen or so elements. So finally, out of the ether, I came up with the idea of a bar made of depleted uranium on which thick uranium platters can be placed to create a sub-critical mass, making the platter hot enough to cook the food for jaded and monied Manhattanites. I ran the story past Pete Tillman, who is my chief advisor in matters geological and chemical, and he told me that the science probably didn't work but that he thought it was amusing enough to overlook that flaw. Nobody likes jaded and monied Manhattanites.
This method only failed me once. I got up to vanadium and hit a brick wall. I could discover nothing interesting about that element! So, finally, I made up a rant about vanadium being the couch potato of the periodic table. You never see it dining tete a tete with Sharon Stone in St. Croix. It never falls off the Matterhorn, to be saved by a single piton and the quick thinking of its friends. It doesn't burst into flames on contact with air. And so on. Did I get letters? Yes, I did. Impassioned letters from people prepared to defend the inherent interest of vanadium with their lives! It's a catalyst, for Chrissake, they'd write. How boring can a catalyst be? Or: Vanadium may not be one of your glamorous pretty-boy elements, but it's a good, solid blue-collar ...
At the time I was baffled. Later, researching a particularly difficult element, I discovered that the URL for the Sci Fiction site was being included in lists of tools that can be used to turn young people on to the joys of chemistry. So I'd just stabbed every high-school chem teacher in the world in the back.
The Sleep of Reason sequence on The Infinite Matrix is made up of 80 shorts, each matched to an etching by Francisco Goya. You're illustrating the work of a famous artist, or he's illustrating yours; how easy, and how spooky, is such posthumous collaboration?
Swanwick: Extremely easy, extremely spooky. The thing about Goya's Los Caprichos is that the etchings are obviously narrative—the viewer is dropped smack-dab in the middle of a plot with people being cheated, conned, betrayed—and yet the accompanying "explanations" don't tell you what you want to know. Most are trite and conventional at best. Some even seem to have been misplaced, because they don't describe what you see before your eyes. For the longest time, I wished somebody would tell the stories that went with the pictures. Eventually I realized that nobody else was going to do it, so ...
Mostly I made up the stories very freely, without any attempt to figure out what Goya was up to, simply because the information to determine that isn't there. Many refer to things like the Holocaust, tabloid newspapers, Susan Brownmiller and sanitary landfills, just to make this clear. But occasionally I think I managed to identify the story Goya was trying to tell. The monk carrying the enormous clyster, for example, has clearly just gotten a dose of his own medicine. For the rest, even when it's not clear what's going on, it's easy to tell who's the victim and who's the villain. The sleazy, self-satisfied smirk of a man wrongfully in power looks the same now as it did then.
It takes chutzpah to do a project like this. Goya has already been anointed Great by the passage of centuries, and to treat him as an artistic partner you have to aspire to greatness yourself. You have to aspire to greatness and then forget it. Because you can't write with one eye on Parnassus. Even Goethe must have hung his ego up on the door when he sat down to write. But the wonderful thing is that the very difficulty of the task paradoxically made it much easier than the other sequences. This blast of seriousness that comes up from the etchings, the moral indignation, the sense that Goya was passing judgment on humanity, that he was grappling with real things, was like a great wind behind the prose. It just drove the stories along.
All the hard work in this sequence was done long before I was born. I'll never have another collaborator like Goya again.
So the bawdy, cynical, even misanthropic air of the Sleep of Reason stories: exactly how much of that is you, and how much Goya?
Swanwick: About half and half. There's not much room for moral uplift or happy endings in the images Goya provides. The women are witches and whores, the men are rogues and scoundrels, and they're every one of them a fool. But Los Caprichos isn't unrelentingly dark, the way The Horrors of War is. There's humor and whimsy in the depictions of the demons, and for all Goya's moralistic disapproval of women's sexuality, you can see his appreciation of their physical bodies. I'm probably more tolerant of follies committed in the service of lust than Goya was, so I tried to bring up that aspect. Anything that two or three or seventeen adults care to do of their own free will in private is fine as far as I'm concerned. Just don't show me the Polaroids.
The bawdier the stories were, the more fun to write. I was aiming for the sort of scurrilous tales you find in Boccaccio or Chaucer or Balzac that leave you approving of human beings less and yet, paradoxically, liking them more. They're never going to make it to heaven, so you'd better appreciate them now.
The funny thing is that in order to keep the sequence from coming across as offensively misogynous, several of the stories had to take on a feminist tinge. Goya was an equal-opportunity moralist; he disapproved of the failings of both sexes. But in our culture the imbalance of power is so great a little counterbalancing was required. If I were to write an outraged short-short about priests molesting altar boys, everybody would understand the anger to indicate that there was a proper way for priests to behave, an expected minimum which these individuals were violating. But if I were to state that all women were doxies and trulls, there would be people of both genders who'd think I meant it literally. It's a depressing indication of exactly how far we have to go.
Once your short-short series have run their course online, what prospects are there of print publication? You have Cigar-Box Faust and other Miniatures coming up from Tachyon Press, and have sold The Periodic Table to PS Publishing. ...
Swanwick: Because of problems with various distributors, Cigar-Box Faust has had a long, hard slog toward publication—I think it was originally supposed to come out in the year 2000—but Jacob Weisman swears it'll appear this fall. I've seen the catalog copy, so I've got my fingers crossed. I've been told that the cover and interior illos by artist Freddie Baer are extremely good. It should be a lovely book.
The editor of The Periodic Table of Science Fiction, as you know, will be yourself. Which I imagine puts you in a difficult position here. But I look forward to the editing process. Some of the stories will be revised or rewritten because I've grown displeased with them for various reasons. My mother was upset at "Lithium for God," which she felt was blasphemous, and of course she was right. Not that I mind being blasphemous per se. But I'd like to rewrite it without Jesus making an appearance, because that comes across as an offense to Christians. God, on the other hand, belongs to everybody, so he's fair game. Even when we're making fun of him, it's affectionate fun. We all like the Big Guy. We all think the universe was a marvelous idea on his part.
As for The Sleep of Reason, it's in my agent's hands. It will find a home somewhere I'm sure, and I'm hoping for a mainstream press that can give it a larger print run than a small press could afford. Because it would appeal to the art market as well as to readers. Done right, it could be a beautiful, beautiful book.
I do think that once I wind up the Periodic Table, I'll stop writing short-shorts altogether. People have been very good about them, in part because it's an inherently modest form. It strives to entertain, it doesn't take up much of your time, and it's rarely going to be difficult for a reasonably intelligent reader to understand. All of which attributes, incidentally, make it ideal for the Web. But I have to fear the day when a reader reaches for a magazine and thinks, "Just once I'd like to read something that didn't have one of Swanwick's short-shorts in it." Also, I have the example of Flann O'Brien forever before me. He's probably the least-known great writer in the English language because instead of writing more books like At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, he frittered away his talent on short and clever columns for the newspapers. Those he wrote under the pen-name Myles na gCopaleen were collected in The Best of Myles, but much though I love and admire that book, it was a terrible waste of his genius.
I've got a few things out there still headed for print, a collection of fairy-tale short-shorts in Realms of Fantasy and some Coyote short-shorts for Asimov's, but I expect that'll be it. I've made it look like these things are effortless for me and I've complicated my bibliography no end, and I think that I've pretty much proved whatever it was I set out to prove with these things.
Talking now about your regular short fiction output: your tales about the far-future rogues Darger and Surplus, such as the award-winning "The Dog Said Bow-Wow," are becoming very popular. How many Darger stories are already written, and how long do you see the series running? Is a Darger and Surplus collection on the cards?
Swanwick: Two stories have appeared in Asimov's so far, and "Smoke and Mirrors: Four Scenes from the Postutopian Future" will be out any second now in Live Without a Net, an original paperback anthology edited by Lou Anders. This last is a connected series of (yes) four short-shorts telling one longer story that takes place after the lads leave London at the end of the first story and before they reach Paris in "The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport." Being prone to detours, they end up in Basle. At the end of "Cat," they're once again on the way to Russia. In the next story, "Girls and Boys, Come Out and Play," which is nine-tenths written on my hard drive, they're in Arcadia. At the end, they're headed for Byzantium, but I don't think they'll get there. Maybe they'll pop up in Prague; possibly they'll go to Africa.
Darger and Surplus are good company, and I hope I can keep their saga going for a long, long time. I don't know if they'll ever reach Moscow, their ultimate destination, but if they do, there's probably a novel-length adventure in it. I do know that they're on an inadvertent journey around the world, ever eastward, so that eventually they'll show up in China and then Japan and ultimately America. Someday Surplus has to return to the Demesne of Western Vermont (my old stomping grounds; like me, he's a Winooski boy) and confront his past. He has secrets, though I don't yet know what they are.
Not long ago, you published a major hard-SF story, "Slow Life," in Analog. Few would have pegged you as an Analog writer; how did this gig come about?
Swanwick: I like to write a hard-SF story every now and then because it gives you street cred. It's like going to the well for a bucketful of respectability. It proves you can play the same game as Nancy Kress and Hal Clement. So last year, just to keep my hand in, I started downloading NASA-sponsored papers on Titan and thinking about the possibilities. While I was playing with this info, my friend, cartoonist Matt Howarth, hit me up to write a script for a series of SF cartoons that Space.Com wanted him to do. I was on a productive binge at the time and feeling invulnerable, and the challenge of telling a long story in a series of one-page vignettes, each of which would be its own story, sounded interesting, so, being completely mad, I said, "Sure!"
Unfortunately, Space.Com decided to play hardball in the contract negotiations and wanted the final product to be work for hire. Poor Matt broke his heart trying to talk them around to something we could live with, but it was no go. However, the story had a hold on me by then, so I set to work. As I wrote it the background chemistry got more and more detailed, and when I got to the point where I was including lists of chemicals in the atmosphere, that Analog mystique kicked in. A little voice in the back of my head said, "I want to sell this to Analog. And I want to have the cover!"
In the event, Stan Schmidt not only bought it and gave it the cover, but he was kind enough to write me a note saying that the story contained more technical detail than was usual for an Analog story. I'm going to have to get that note framed.
My Analog-writer friends were all so happy for me. Mike Flynn patted me on the back and said, "We knew you could do it, Michael."
An impressive novelette of yours, "King Dragon", soon appears in the Marvin Kaye anthology The Dragon Quintet. Is this story set in the same world as was your big Industrial Faerie novel of a decade ago, The Iron Dragon's Daughter?
Swanwick: Most likely. The dragons are certainly identical. But where the novel was set in an analogue of America, "King Dragon" is located in an amalgam of England and France in a far more traditional sort of fantasy setting. I mean, it still has motorcycles and land mines and needle drugs and the like, but there's a village in a rural setting and standing stones and petty magic and all those things one goes to a fantasy to find comfort in. Which makes it a pity that there's also a Vietnam-style war going on.
Except for the Darger and Surplus stories, this is the first time I've returned to a prior setting, and I can't say for sure why I did it. Possibly it was because Jane Alderberry, the protagonist of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, didn't belong in that world. She was the ultimate outsider, somebody who could never find a place for herself there, no matter what she did. Young Will, the hero of "King Dragon," is thoroughly embedded in his own time and place, so the potentials for him are quite different. There's the possibility of subverting the reader's expectations in an entirely new and productive manner.
Though the story doesn't touch upon it, Will has a destiny far stranger than anything he could have imagined for himself. "King Dragon" is just his origin story, the event that sets him in motion. We'll see if I ever get around to telling the rest of his tale.
"Dirty Little War", published in Byron Tetrick's anthology In the Shadow of the Wall, seemed to me one of the very best short stories of 2002. Your anger against the conduct of the Vietnam War is searingly evident there; what's your opinion of the War on Iraq?
Swanwick: This is a subject I find very difficult to write about. I'm glad that so few American soldiers were killed, particularly since I know some of them personally. I'm appalled that we went in there in the first place. I hate how it's made us feared and despised around the world. And I'm shocked and horrified at how slickly it's being used to transform this country from a Republic to an Empire.
In America the Republic, the ultimate power resides in the people, only Congress has the power to declare war, and whatever our flaws may be in practice, we aspire to behave in a moral fashion. The American Empire is run by an oligarchy of powerful men whose identity, we are told, is none of our business. Who wrote our energy policy? That's a secret. Why this war, rather than focusing our energies on Osama bin Laden? They won't tell us. Now we're poised to embark on a series of overseas adventures that would make the recent war just the first in an endless series. Is this what Americans want? It doesn't matter. We're not being consulted.
The current administration's ambitions—free trade, universal democracy, a Pax Americana—can be read as noble. But only so long as you think that there is nothing inherently special about America, that we're just another world power like Rome or England or Germany. I believe that this country is a noble experiment and one that has been the light of the world for the past century. We're getting the short end of the stick when we trade that in for mere power.
But I'm not an activist. I've been speaking out against Gulf War II, but only because my conscience wouldn't let me do otherwise. That's another thing I hate about this war—that it's forced me into a role I'm not very good at.
What's next for you? Is a new novel on the way, perhaps another substantial story collection?
Swanwick: More books, more stories, more surprises. Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who can't talk about what they're working on without ruining it, taking it out of the To Do box and putting it into the Written Or Talked About box. The worst case of this phenomenon I ever witnessed was that of my fellow Philadelphian, Tom Purdom. Fifteen years ago, I asked him what he was working on. "Well, it occurred to me that space colonies aren't really colonies," he said, "but cities ..." Then he stopped, looked pained, and said, "Damn!" I'd just killed his story for him.
So all I can say is that I'm in the early stages of a novel, and I think it will be a good one. I'm also working on a great variety of short fiction—I probably have 40 or so stories partially written at any given time—and I constantly come up with ideas for more. This is a very productive period for me.
Just don't expect any more short-shorts after this current lot is done.
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