Customer Reviews

The Best of Michael Swanwick

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

It wasn't until I was about a third of the way through this book that I started to believe Michael Swanwick capable of writing a pretty awesome story, and it wasn't until reading "The Very Pulse of the Machine," and everything that comes after it, that Swanwick became a strong contender for my favorite writer ever.

For the first third of this collection I had to struggle to find a way in to these stories: "The feast of Saint Janis" and "Ginungagap" were snappy tales with interesting premises but which felt more like a surrealist writer's take on wacky science fiction. "A midwinter's tale" and "The edge of the world" were decent stories that had their moments but were otherwise unremarkable. And "Griffin's egg," "The changeling's tale," and "Trojan Horse" sailed clear over my head.

Maybe it took Swanwick a while to find his groove, or maybe it just took me a dozen or stories to get the feel of this wonderfully outlandish writer, but either way I'm glad I stuck with it. The flavor of these later stories is somewhat darker - refugees from a future holocaust whose horribly violent nature is only hinted at flee through a time portal in "Radiant Doors"; a woman stumbles into a far future slave earth in "Legions in Time"; scarcity-induced genocide is hard-wired into an alien society in "From Babel's fall'n glory we fled"; and in both "Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Slow Life" doomed women on distant planets in our solar system make incredible discoveries - but what makes these stories sing is the depth of the characters, typically a spunky woman, who, through their actions tell more of the strange worlds they inhabit than the spare and highly caffeinated prose (Swanwick's descriptions feel more like rough charcoal pencil sketches, all smudged and scribbly, than the clean Edward Hopper-esque scene painting I've come to love in the work of Lucius Shepard).

Despite the fact that the first third of the book left me somewhat cold, most of the stories in the final two thirds of this retrospective are so wildly good as to tax my capacity for hyperbole.

This is an author I hadn't encountered before; I would put him on a short list of people who I would actually recommend. His stories seem to follow a familiar arc: interesting event, trial, revelation, open-ended-universal truth. He says things like, "In any economy, resources and labor cost a certain amount, and then to make a profit, businesses have to charge over the cost of both labor and resources, which inflates prices, which then leads to periodic depressions."

And then you have to think about what he just said.

He's right. Lots of his stories are sort of amazingly right. They're also a bit painful in tone, perhaps, sad, even, which explains why this author isn't more popular. This is very worth reading, though: you'll have moments of sitting above yourself realizing you're reading really, really good writing.

The others rating the book ahead of me are correct. You aren't going to find a lot of uplifting gee-whiz kind of stuff. Most of the stories are kind of dark and carry some sort of gloomy undercurrent. They are also some of the better and more interesting character-driven SF you will read, and instead of the gee-whiz stuff you'll find a lot of good scientific extrapolations and settings that mesh well with what's happening to the characters. His writing is clear, and very pleasurable for the effortless way he conveys the at times complex environments in which his stories take place, and the reactions of his characters to them. Very pleasing and meaningful.

I picked this up for the "Griffin's Egg" story being quoted on a sci-fi page as one of the 100 Best of All Time. Having been a lifelong sci-fi reader I wasn't disappointed. Then again, I wasn't blown away either.

Of all the stories in this collection I can only recall about four as being interesting. The others that I read I digested at the time and cruised on to the next one without anything staying with me. Comparatively I can still quote passages from Dune years after having read them as they're still constantly floating around my brain.

The book is a bell curve. The middle passages are the best with the tail ends at the beginning and end being standard short story submissions to magazine contests. Plots that meander with uninteresting or unclear characters. They aren't necessarily bad but they're not really that good either. Personally I found this book to be pretty unremarkable.

Perhaps my entire review of this hefty volume has got summarised in the title. The author of this book is very-very respected in the arena of science fiction (broadly fantasy), but these stories use such pretexts (mostly in the form of a somewhat futuristic world which is really not a very nice place to stay) only to address a very basic human emotion: the will to live another day, against all odds, even when life gets tinged with poisonous blue, no matter how you try to look at it. This world is not very unlike ours in the sense that money calls all the shots there as well, but it is darker, even when the author liberally douses the stories with a wit that sparkles up the entire panorama.

The contents are:

1) The Feast of St. Janis
2) Ginungagap
3) Trojan Horse
4) A Midwinter's Tale
5) The Edge of the World
6) Griffin's Egg
7) The Changeling's Tale
8) North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy
9) Radio Waves
10) The Dead
11) Mother Grasshopper
12) Radiant Doors
13) The Very Pulse of the Machine
14) Wild Minds
15) Scherzo with Tyrannosaur
16) The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O
17) The Dog Said Bow-Wow
18) Slow Life
19) Legions in Time
20) Triceratops Summer
21) From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled...

Most of these stories have graced the "Years Best" collections of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, etc. A large no. of them have also received almost all the awards that can be given in these genres. Biut I would like to classify them only as fiction, of a very high order, which entertains less, but makes the reader more thoughtful than he had expected before commencing his journey across the Swanwick-sea. Recommended.

I've read (or begun to read) a lot of Michael Swanwick. Some SF authors, I like everything they've done, like Tim Powers. Some, I can't seem to get through anything they've done, like Michael Moorcock. Swanwick is right in the middle. Some of his novels are really, really good, some make no impression on me at all. But short stories, of course, are fundamentally different, and this fat volume brings together twenty-one of them published between 1980 and 2007 -- and five of these won Hugos within a period of six years, which is an impressive record. They're presented chronologically here, which allows the reader to observe his development as a writer. "The Feast of St. Janis," the earliest, is about America after the Collapse, Pearl singing the blues, and Dionysian social engineering. "Ginungagap" is a startlingly original and very well done First Contact story, which is also about the validity of unique identity. "Trojan Horse" didn't make a lot of sense, not to me. And reading it was like trying to wade though a field of large foam sofa pillows. "A Midwinter's Tale," on the other hand, while it started out puzzling, morphed into a quite fascinating folktale. "The Edge of the World" is an alternate world (sort of) story about air force brats and the power of wishing. Widely considered a classic, "The Griffin's Egg" is the longest piece in the book, crammed with every hard-science, techie-type SF trope you can think of, about the coming nuclear war between East and West -- and it left me totally unmoved and uninvolved. I can't begin to explain why. But it's followed by "The Changeling's Tale," which is a very nice little fantasy about what happens when a young boy runs off to join the elves. Traditionally, the damned reach their destination via Charon's ferry, but in "North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy," they travel through New Jersey by the helltrain, and the porter learns about choices. But I really like Swanwick's take on what angels are actually like. "Radio Waves" is a Stephen-King-ish sort of tale about death upside-down in the wires and final death in the depths of the sky, and it's poetically horrific. Essentially, "The Dead" is about the corporate prospects for zombies. The way Swanwick describes the necrophiliac possibilities, the political right wing will love it. "Mother Grasshopper" is about colonists living on a huge space-swimming grasshopper. (Like Great A'Tuin, maybe?) However, as with a number of the stories in this volume, I can't say it makes a lot of sense. I suspect Swanwick occasionally gets carried away with being original and forgets that he's supposed to be telling stories for the benefit of others. "Radiant Doors" is a much better story. What do we do when doors open from the future and terrified, horribly abused refugees -- our own descendants -- begin streaming through, by the tens of millions? How did it happen? And why? And what happened -- will happen -- to those who didn't make it back to our time? We get the kind of future we deserve -- unfortunately. "Wild Minds" is about what happens when anyone can be made into the perfect employee -- easily, cheaply, safely -- and about those who refuse to undergo "optimization." "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O" is about a semi-trailer full of monsters, a picnic basket full of dead puppies, and a couple of archetypes on the eternal highway to anywhere. A not-bad folktale. "Legions in Time" is meant to be a tribute to A. E. Van Vogt, but ol' Alfred Elton did it so-o-o-o much better. This one is more of a pastiche, which I don't think is what the author intended. Swanwick does a lot of dinosaur stories and I've always liked Clifford Simak's quiet pastoral yarns, which for some reason "Triceratops Summer" greatly reminds me of, so I quite enjoyed this one. And maybe it all really happened. "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled" is the newest story in the book, a consideration of two alien psychologies (one of which is human) and the nature of trust under pressure. A little abstract but not bad.

The first of Swanwick's Hugo-winners, "The Very Pulse of the Machine," is the best sort of hard-science problem story, about the only living human on Io and her decision to survive by becoming something very much else. The second winner, "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," is one of Swanwick's very best efforts -- rather better, in fact, than the novel of which it later became a part. On the other hand, the third winner, "The Dog Said Bow-Wow," has always seemed merely silly to me, never mind that it seems to be one of the author's most popular stories. His fourth Hugo was for "Slow Life," a combination First Contact and survival-on-alien-world story, is interesting but a bit confusing.

A parting comment: Subterranean Press has been around for some time and generally does a nice job in terms of physical product, but I found the lack of copyediting and proofreading in this book highly annoying. One doesn't like to have to pause in the middle of the narrative to figure out what a sentence is meant to say.