Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 118

by Neil Clarke

  A hundred years after William Morris and the Romantics began the revival of fantasy literature, the 1973 introduction to The Lord of the Rings, written by Peter S. Beagle, still evokes the same longing for a lost golden age:

  “I’ve never thought it an accident that Tolkien’s works waited more than ten years to explode into popularity . . . The Sixties were no fouler a decade than the Fifties . . . but they were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly . . . [Tolkien] is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams, and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either; he found them a place to live, a green alternative each day’s madness here in a poisoned world.”

  A vantage point on heaven is a priceless thing. The history of fantasy is defined by loss and nostalgia, but the image of paradise lost carries on through the ages, its image burned into the literature and the zeitgeist. It’s one of the last haven of dreams, and the unique power of dreams is their ability to illuminate.

  About the Author

  Christopher Mahon is a fantasy writer and essayist living in New York. He received his Bachelors in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University and graduated from NYU’s Summer Publishing Institute in 2014. In his free time he runs The Occult Triangle Lab, a blog on trigonometry, fantasy, and ungodly amounts of milk. Follow him on Twitter @DeadmanMu.

  Talkative Creatures and a Mesozoic Cocktail:

  A Conversation with Michael Swanwick

  Chris Urie

  Variety is the spice of short fiction. Within an hour, you can have an adventure under the seas of Europa, navigate Faerie, and be back on earth in time for an airship heist. One writer who has consistently surprised and delighted with his odd and eloquent stories is Michael Swanwick.

  Not So Much, Said the Cat is Swanwick’s latest collection of short fiction. Within its pages, you’ll find stories featuring enhanced critter con men, a bar at the end of the Mesozoic Era, a tiny toy horse containing a spirit protector, and many more tales to tickle your imagination. True to form, Swanwick’s collection is eclectic, charming, and moving.

  Michael Swanwick is the author of numerous short stories and novels. He’s a five-time Hugo Award winner, and his fiction has won the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy Award, and many other accolades. His short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, OMNI, Penthouse, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Dimensions, and more. His newest collection of short fiction, Not So Much, Said the Cat will be published by Tachyon this August.

  Why does the cat say “not so much?”

  He’s a character in a story about a young teenaged girl’s attempt to rescue her father from Hell. Beelzebub is there for whatever reasons a cat would be sent to perdition, and when he delivers that line he’s telling the girl that she might be lovely to look at for other humans, but for a cat . . . Which he does simply because he’s a contrarian and in Hell honesty is an offense to local community standards.

  I hadn’t thought of this before, but Beelzebub—“Not the famous one, obviously,” as he says—and I have a lot in common. We both enjoy telling the truth in unexpected ways.

  You have a keen talent for breathing life into inanimate objects and bestowing sapience on animals. How is the personality of that character informed by what it is?

  It’s just the same sort of thing a child does, playing with plastic dinosaurs in the sandbox. They have a genius for making toys act like themselves. Most of us are shamed out of this ability as we grow up, but somehow I’ve managed to retain it.

  In this collection, you pull inspiration from cultures and folk tales from around the world. What keeps you coming back to tales from Northern and Eastern Europe?

  Simply the fact that in my early decades those were the areas where the literature was richest and easiest to come by. I’m trying to up my game in other cultures—African cultures, in particular. But it’s not something you can get simply by reading a book. You have to read a lot of books, be moved by them, and then let their contents percolate through the subconscious for years before the stories will appear.

  Do you ever travel for research or does the travel instead provide the inspiration?

  Both. My Russian stories were inspired by things I saw and heard and felt on my visits there, The Dala Horse was inspired by my visit to Sweden, and so on. But when I decided to write Dancing With Bears, set largely in Moscow, a city I’d only ever spent four hours in, I knew I had to go. I stayed long enough that I dared go out into the city and get deliberately lost, knowing I’d be able to find my way back to my flat on the Garden Ring. A few weeks is far from enough time to enable someone to write a serious novel about Russia. But the Darger & Surplus books are comic, so all I really needed was a sense of the city and the complex emotions that various locations in it arouse in you.

  When I decided to write Chasing the Phoenix, Marianne and I arranged to tour China to research the book, but the day before the flight, I came down with a minor viral infection. Beijing International has thermometer gates and whoever passes through one running a fever gets thrown in quarantine. Marianne went without me and took copious notes, which helped immensely. And last year, after the novel was written, we went on a tour with a group that included Ellen Datlow and Eileen Gunn, so I got to see some of that great country—but none of it was tax-deductible, alas!

  Russia has figured in a number of your stories and novels, what is it about the country and culture that keeps you intrigued?

  I don’t know why it is, but everyone who goes to Russia falls in love with it. I do know that Russians feel very much like Americans in some ways and very unlike us in others; so perhaps it’s this dissonance that intrigues. The closest I’ve come to codifying this is that America and Russia are like twin brothers in a fairy tale, one of whom got all the good luck and the other of whom got all the bad—and neither of whom deserved what he got.

  How do you feel this collection differs from past compilations of your short fiction?

  For me, each collection is like a journal written by my subconscious imagination, covering the years when the stories were written. So this is what I’ve done and thought and felt this decade. There are two out-and-out love stories, a pastiche/alternate world version of Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, the latest Darger and Surplus adventure, a Mongolian Wizard story, and a lot more. It’s a varied collection.

  Some of the stories contain more personal material than I’ve used before. Not many people are going to notice that. The opening of “For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again” recounts the time Gerry Adams walked by me on O’Connell Street on the eightieth anniversary of the Easter Uprising. And “The Man in Grey” is all about my relationship with the characters in my stories.

  How do you think your short stories have evolved over the course of your career?

  They’ve gotten more compact, more efficient. When I started writing, the novelette was my default length. Now it’s the short story. They also seem to have gotten more elegant. The science fiction is more and more phrased in a fantastic voice, and the fantasy is increasingly hard-headed, so they almost but not quite overlap. You can always tell which is which.

  This may be the first collection where all the stories sound like they were written by the same author. I don’t know if that’s a gain or a loss, artistically.

  Technology appears within your stories in subtle and unexpected ways. What do you think of tech, the internet, and AI today? Where do you think it is heading?

  Our information technologies are at least a hundred years ahead of where, a quarter century ago, we would have predicted they’d be. That’s because there’s been so much profit at stake that every visionary who could be found was hired and given free rein to do whatever. Thus, its future is obvious enough that even a Silicon Valley CEO can predict it, and consequently isn’t very engaging to think about. (Well, except for the q
uestion of what artificial intelligence will be like, now that we know it’s not going to be at all like human intelligence.)

  I’m much more interested in the disruptions that robotics is poised to visit upon us. Small things like whether it should be legal to send your children to school, unsupervised, in a self-driving car. Medium things like the fact that equipping a robot with a gun and a stamped, self-addressed padded envelope so it can anonymously mail the loot home will make armed robbery as easy as illegally downloading one of my novels is now. Big things like what kind of society we’re going to have when hyper-automation has eliminated employment for all but a small fraction of the population.

  We’re all aware of the promises and dangers of biotech: An end to birth defects, and the advent of designer children. Extended lifespans, half of which will be spent in assisted living. Extinct species resurrected, and “wild” species tinkered with and improved upon until it’s acknowledged that there is no such thing anymore. But I think the neurosciences hold the greatest potential for change. Within the century we should have the ability to cure schizophrenia and other mental diseases, which will give us the ability to reshape the architecture of human thought. Put all this together, and we have the prospect of creating people who are no longer recognizably human, either physically or mentally.

  Did you know that we have machines right now that can read minds? They don’t do it very well. But the first Wright Flyer wasn’t very much of an airplane either. The potentials there, both good and bad, are pretty obvious.

  So Dickens had it right. The coming century will be the best of times and the worst of times. How we weather it will depend on how much thought we put into the consequences of our technology before they blindside us.

  A few songs found their way into some of your stories. Are you a musician as well as a writer?

  Hah! I was the only kid thrown out of the choir at St. Paul the Apostle Elementary School for my voice. In college, I wrote songs and played the guitar in coffeehouses—it was the Sixties and everybody did that—but beyond a certain, elementary level, I stopped getting any better at it and it’s been many years since last I tuned my guitar. So I’m just an appreciator of other people’s music.

  It’s probably just as well. If I could sing, I’d be doing it all the time. You wouldn’t be able to shut me up.

  If you found yourself in a bar at the end of the Mesozoic Era, what drink would you order?

  A gin martini, dry, straight up, with a twist. Boodles, of course.

  About the Author

  Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

  Another Word:

  Burning Bridges

  Peter Watts

  I’m told they only want one thing for this column. No critique, no crunchy science, none of the stuff I push on my blog or Nowa Fantastyka. ”Another Word” serves exclusively as a showcase for essays “tied closely to your professional involvement in the community.”

  Ew.

  I’m not big on “the community.” I’m not even sure such a thing exists. I know a lot of terrific people working in the shadow of this genre, in any number of capacities—but when you stir them in with everyone else who ever dogged a con, all those varied ingredients always seem to separate out into immiscible globules that can’t stand the sight of each other. You know the tribes. You know the names. You’d have to be blind not to see the fracture lines webbing across the landscape. Calling such disparate factions a community is a little like saying “United States of America” without putting ironic air quotes around the first word. Sometimes I think the best way to deal with them all is to just keep a safe distance while they tear each other to shreds.

  And yet I can’t. No author can. We feed on each other, after all. We write, you read, enough money changes hands to keep the cycle rolling (although most of us are so addicted to writing we’d do it anyway, a design flaw that unscrupulous publishers have used against us for generations). An author could spend their whole life steering clear of cons and book signings and they’d still be bound to the community like a vein to an artery. So Daniel Abraham talks about receding horizons of success in the writing biz; Margot Atwell points us to new markets opened up by online and e-book publishing; Ken Liu waxes about the benefits of laziness and the dawning age of computer-assisted storytelling.

  How to do stuff, in other words. How to maximize your odds of success: what fresh markets to explore, what tech to embrace, what habits to cultivate. And these insights, in turn, comprise the merest fraction of a vast and ever-growing archive of Received Wisdom from the Elders: the Clarion calls, the self-help books, the beta readers and writing groups and university courses taught by bitter Humanities profs who never made it out of the small presses.

  There’s a lot of it out there, whole libraries of the stuff. And yet when I sift through it in search of something useful to say I come up empty—because I never did most of those things, and when I did I usually sucked at them. I did pretty much everything wrong.

  I think I still do.

  You know the list. Write every day. Blog every two or three, lest your fans grow bored and wander back to Buzzfeed. Join SFWA. Schmooze every editor. Infest every social media platform you can find, promote yourself relentlessly every time you so much as publish a laundry list. (I know of one agent who refused to represent an absolutely brilliant author solely because said author wasn’t on Twitter. The agent didn’t even bother to read the work in question; I mean, how great can you be if you don’t talk nonstop about how great you are?) Never badmouth your publisher, certainly not in public; you’ll be painted as a diva and a troublemaker and you’ll never eat in this town again.

  Me? I’m lucky if I have time to blog once a week. I don’t twit, never have; I’m not on any social platform except Facebook, and the only reason I’m there is because I got sick of people saying hey did you read what that guy said about you on Facebook without being able to check it out. (That’s one habit I do share with every author on the planet; we ego-surf almost as much as we masturbate.) I managed to stick it out in the SFWA sandbox for maybe a year before fleeing in horror. I couldn’t schmooze if my life depended on it; back in ’04 I nearly got into a fistfight escaping from a friend who, in the misguided belief that I needed to “network,” was physically dragging me across the room to meet Gardner Dozois. I’m not even above badmouthing publishers, if they deserve it and if backstage efforts get me nowhere (just last January I apparently badmouthed a publisher without even meaning to). According to Received Wisdom, I starved to death in 2005.

  Hell, the most basic rule of the game is get paid for your work, and I don’t even do that very well; I started giving Blindsight away for free online (along with most of my backlist) just a couple of months after its hardcover release. That incredibly stupid, bridge-burning act turned out to be the smartest move I ever made. If not for the publicity it generated (by people with far bigger names than mine—Scalzi, Doctorow, Cramer, others to whom I will always be in debt) Blindsight would have sunk without a trace, and me with it.

  Just to be clear: you’re not witnessing any kind of principled nobility here. Rather, you’re dealing with an ego so fragile it’s more afraid of looking needy than it is of commercial failure. I crave fame and riches as much as anyone else on the midlist—I just don’t want to be that person who trumpets their own eligibility at the top of every awards season, who puts out a goddamn press release every time they get a story published in Prairie Fire. You can’t blame anyone for doing that, of course. We’re told to do that, we’re blamed if we don’t do it: by agents, by self-help books, by publishers who take more and more for less and less in the desperate hope that—if they squeeze their authors just a little harder—they might get out from under Amazon’s boot. But eve
n if it’s necessary, it’s never pretty. Every time I see a panelist introducing themselves by spreading their backlist across the table, I die a little inside.

  Fortunately, I haven’t had to do much of that stuff myself—because while I may not have much stomach for self-pimpery, I was once lucky enough to get shit-kicked and jailed by a cadre of unhinged border guards down in Michigan. I was even luckier to nearly die of flesh-eating disease the very next year (on Darwin Day, believe it or not). The year after that first incident, I won a Hugo. A few months after the second, I won the Shirley Jackson (for a story that debuted right here in Clarkesworld, in fact). Over in Poland, one night in 2011, I set my thumb on fire (it’s actually a thing they do there at parties), and I’ve lost count of the accolades I’ve received from those guys over the years.

  I don’t know whether I deserved any of these wins. I like to think so—but then again, I’ve seen the visitor spikes on my website. The timing is suggestive—I just happen to win the Jackson right after uploaded pictures of the Australia-sized hole in my leg inspires half the internet to toss their cookies?—and it’s not as though anyone seriously believes that there’s no correlation between publicity and awards. (Noting that correlation, I started stepping blindly into traffic after Echopraxia came out. Sadly, the only award that book won was some obscure bauble called the “Bookie,” from the CBC. Maybe because I never actually got run over.)