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Praise for the Writing of Michael Swanwick
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter
A New York Times Notable Book
“Eerie … extraordinary … Dickens meets Detroit, full of grimy, toiling waifs, dark factories, trolls with boomboxes, and sleek, decadent high elves … Sordid, violent, funny, absurd, angry, by turns, as intense in its pleasures as in its pains … Swanwick takes huge risks here, and reaps big rewards.” —Locus
“Entertaining reading … Flamboyant … Grotesquely Dickensian.” —Newsday
In the Drift
“This episodic tale of life, war and survival in post-meltdown Pennsylvania builds a potent new myth from the reality of radioactive waste.” —George R. R. Martin
“Shocking … powerful.” —Daily News (New York)
“A powerful and affecting novel … Chilling, believable and uncomfortably close to home.” —The Evening Sun (Baltimore)
Bones of the Earth
“Jurassic Park set amid the paradox of time travel … I dare anyone to read the first chapter and not keep reading all the way through to the last shocking page.” —James Rollins, New York Times–bestselling author of Subterranean and Bone Labyrinth
“Swanwick dramatizes of the world of dinosaurs with great flair and knowledge, even love. Bones of the Earth dances on the edge of an abyss.… [An] entertaining and deft performance.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Swanwick proves that sci-fi has plenty of room for wonder and literary values.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Jack Faust
“Jack Faust is madly ambitious and brilliantly executed, recasting the entire history of science in a wholly original version of our culture’s central myth of knowledge, power, and sorrow.” —William Gibson
“Superb … Wonderful and relentless … Provocative and evocative.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Powerful … Marvelous … Consistently surprising.” —The New York Times Book Review
Vacuum Flowers
“Slick and highly competent entertainment that starts fast and never slows down.” —The Washington Post
“Erotic and witty.” —The New York Times
“Quintessentially cyberpunk … eminently readable and provocative.” —Daily News (New York)
Tales of Old Earth
“A stunning collection from one of science fiction’s very best writers. Pay in blood, if necessary, but don’t miss these stories.” —Nancy Kress
“Michael Swanwick is darkly magnificent. Tales of Old Earth is just one brilliant ride after another, a midnight express with a master at the throttle.” —Jack McDevitt
“Swanwick has emerged as one of the country’s most respected authors.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
Tales of Old Earth
Stories
Michael Swanwick
This book is dedicated to
Virginia Kidd, Deborah Beale,
Martha Millard, and Jennifer Brehl
—the Other Women in my life.
Contents
Foreword A User’s Guide to Michael Swanwick
One The Very Pulse of the Machine
Two The Dead
Three Scherzo with Tyrannosaur
Four Ancient Engines
Five North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy
Six The Mask
Seven Mother Grasshopper
Eight Riding the Giganotosaur
Nine Wild Minds
Ten The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O
Eleven Microcosmic Dog
Twelve In Concert
Thirteen Radiant Doors
Fourteen Ice Age
Fifteen Walking Out
Sixteen The Changeling’s Tale
Seventeen Midnight Express
Eighteen The Wisdom of Old Earth
Nineteen Radio Waves
About the Author
Foreword
The User’s Guide to Michael Swanwick
Sometimes you have to step through the looking glass to get a proper look at someone standing next to you. During my science-fiction career, Michael Swanwick has been a hard guy to miss. He’s steady, prolific, publishes all over the place, and, just like me, he has lost about a hundred awards.
But I didn’t understand this guy’s work at all properly until I went to Russia. I was at a science fiction convention in Saint Petersburg where they were having learned, earnest panels about Michael Swanwick. His novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter was the talk of the town.
This dragon book of Swanwick’s is thoroughly unlike normal, tedious, off-the-rack dragon books. It’s a world of magical elves and trolls where everybody’s working in crappy, run-down factories, full of cruel backstabbing, many broken promises, strong-arm hustles, and pervasive despair. In other words, Russia. A shattered, rusty, “hard-fantasy” world, that is Russia to a T. I’ve spoken face-to-face to Russians, and they think I’m an interesting foreigner with some useful contacts outside their borders. But Michael Swanwick really speaks to Russians. They consider him a groundbreaking literary artist.
Then there is Swanwick the critic. I’m a critic myself, or I wouldn’t be writing this introduction. I take this critical gibberish pretty seriously. I don’t think an artist gets very far without a solid framework for objective understanding. You can sit there with a hammerlock on your muse, gushing prose under high pressure, and it may be pretty good stuff; but if you lack critical perspective, you’ll become a toy of your own historical epoch. Your work will date quickly, because you are making way too many unconscious obeisances to the shibboleths of your own time.
Michael Swanwick, however, is a guy who has thoroughly got it down with the shibboleth and obeisance thing. Not only has he mastered this problem himself, he’s quite good on the subject of other people’s difficulties. Swanwick’s “User’s Guide to the Postmoderns” is the most important critical document about Cyberpunks and Humanists that ever came from a guy who was neither a cyberpunk nor a humanist. That article is, in fact, The Mythos: Swanwick definitively coined the Common Wisdom there. I very much doubt that a better assessment will ever be written.
At the time, one had to wonder why Swanwick had become the self-appointed arbiter of other people’s quarrels. There certainly wasn’t much that he could gain from this personally, and it predictably created a ow, much of it centered, with total injustice, on him, Michael Swanwick. But time has richly rewarded his courage and foresight. He did the field a genuine critical service. Science fiction is a better place for his efforts.
Not that I concur with everything Swanwick says, especially his painfully accurate assessment of my own motives. Agreement, maybe not. Respect, very definitely. I don’t think that everything I write has to please Michael Swanwick. However, I would be very upset if he thought I was selling out or slacking off. Swanwick, a man and writer of firm integrity, has never sold out or slacked off. I cannot think of a single instance of this, ever, in the extensive Swanwick oeuvre. He is a strong, solid critic and he knows the evil smell of literary vices. Knowing that he’s out there, sniffing—well, it keeps me to the grind.
Now we come to the matter of Swanwick being a “difficult writer.” What’s this allegation about? Well, let me be up-front here: he’s not for mundane wimps. Forget about it. Terrible things happen in Swanwick fiction. People suffer, often gruesomely. Furthermore, it’s a rare Swanwick work which does not include some mind-altering, meticulous instance of evil sex.
So, yes, by the blinkered standards of the Christian Coalition he is somewhat disgusting and obscene. However, the true core of the matter is the Swanwic
k is an inherently and intrinsically strange human being. Oh sure, he’s married, has a child, pays his taxes, stays out of the slammer, but at his core he’s a high-voltage visionary. He’s not a professional writer dabbling in the sci-fi genre. He is that rarer and far more valuable thing, an inherently science-fictional thinker who has trained himself, through years of devoted effort, to speak fluently.
His approach to theme, plot, character, situation, are all completely orthogonal to the norm. When you start a Swanwick story, it’s as if a guy had knocked on your door and come in walking on his hands. And not as a mere stunt either, for he proceeds to make himself entirely at home; he does the dishes with his feet, fetches a beer from the fridge with the crook of his knee, settles on the couch with the remote control in his toes and starts making sardonic comments. They’re rather insightful, disturbing, off-the-wall assessments, replete with stick-to-your-skull images that demonstrate a lifetime of imaginative concentration. Your world is not the same when he leaves.
He’s not always graceful or easy, he never caters or panders, but Michael Swanwick is the Real Thing. He is entirely authentic and in full command of his material. He’s gone so far into science fiction that he’s coming out the far side at high velocity. So, my task is done here: you’re up to speed now, you have been warned. The rest is your own lookout.
I’m proud to call him my colleague.
Bruce Sterling
January 2000
1
The Very Pulse of the Machine
Click.
The radio came on.
“Hell.”
Martha kept her eyes forward, concentrated on walking. Jupiter to one shoulder, Daedalus’s plume to the other. Nothing to it. Just trudge, drag, trudge, drag. Piece of cake.
“Oh.”
She chinned the radio off.
Click.
“Hell. Oh. Kiv. El. Sen.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Martha gave the rope an angry jerk, making the sledge carrying Burton’s body jump and bounce on the sulfur hardpan. “You’re dead, Burton, I’ve checked, there’s a hole in your faceplace big enough to stick a fist through, and I really don’t want to crack up. I’m in kind of a tight spot here and I can’t afford it, okay? So be nice and just shut the fuck up.”
“Not. Bur. Ton.”
“Do it anyway.”
She chinned the radio off again.
Jupiter loomed low on the western horizon, big and bright and beautiful and, after two weeks on Io, easy to ignore. To her left, Daedalus was spewing sulfur and sulfur dioxide in a fan two hundred kilometers high. The plume caught the chill light from an unseen sun and her visor rendered it a pale and lovely blue. Most spectacular view in the universe, and she was in no mood to enjoy it.
Click.
Before the voice could speak again, Martha said, “I am not going crazy, you’re just the voice of my subconscious, I don’t have the time to waste trying to figure out what unresolved psychological conflicts gave rise to all this, and I am not going to listen to anything you have to say.”
Silence.
The moon rover had flipped over at least five times before crashing sideways against a boulder the size of the Sydney Opera House. Martha Kivelsen, timid groundling that she was, was strapped into her seat so tightly that when the universe stopped tumbling, she’d had a hard time unlatching the restraints. Juliet Burton, tall and athletic, so sure of her own luck and agility that she hadn’t bothered, had been thrown into a strut.
The vent-blizzard of sulfur dioxide snow was blinding, though. It was only when Martha had finally crawled out from under its raging whiteness that she was able to look at the suited body she’d dragged free of the wreckage.
She immediately turned away.
Whatever knob or flange had punched the hole in Burton’s helmet had been equally ruthless with her head.
Where a fraction of the vent-blizzard—“lateral plumes” the planetary geologists called them—had been deflected by the boulder, a bank of sulfur dioxide snow had built up. Automatically, without thinking, Martha scooped up double-handfuls and packed them into the helmet. Really, it was a nonsensical thing to do; in a vacuum, the body wasn’t about to rot. On the other hand, it hid that face.
Then Martha did some serious thinking.
For all the fury of the blizzard, there was no turbulence. Because there was no atmosphere to have turbulence in. The sulfur dioxide gushed out straight from the sudden crack that had opened in the rock, falling to the surface miles away in strict obedience to the laws of ballistics. Most of what struck the boulder they’d crashed against would simply stick to it, and the rest would be bounced down to the ground at its feet. So that—this was how she’d gotten out in the first place—it was possible to crawl under the near-horizontal spray and back to the ruins of the moon rover. If she went slowly, the helmet light and her sense of feel ought to be sufficient for a little judicious salvage.
Martha got down on her hands and knees. And as she did, just as quickly as the blizzard had begun—it stopped.
She stood, feeling strangely foolish.
Still, she couldn’t rely on the blizzard staying quiescent. Better hurry, she admonished herself. It might be an intermittent.
Quickly, almost fearfully, picking through the rich litter of wreckage, Martha discovered that the mother tank they used to replenish their airpacks had ruptured. Terrific. That left her own pack, which was one-third empty, two fully-charged backup packs, and Burton’s, also one-third empty. It was a ghoulish thing to strip Burton’s suit of her airpack, but it had to be done. Sorry, Julie. That gave her enough oxygen to last, let’s see, almost forty hours.
Then she took a curved section of what had been the moon rover’s hull and a coil of nylon rope, and, with two pieces of scrap for makeshift hammer and punch, fashioned a sledge for Burton’s body.
She’d be damned if she was going to leave it behind.
Click.
“This is. Better.”
“Says you.”
Ahead of her stretched the hard, cold sulfur plain. Smooth as glass. Brittle as frozen toffee. Cold as hell. She called up a visor-map and checked her progress. Only forty-five miles of mixed terrain to cross and she’d reach the lander. Then she’d be home free. No sweat, she thought. Io was in tidal lock with Jupiter. So the Father of Planets would stay glued to one fixed spot in the sky. That was as good as a navigation beacon. Just keep Jupiter to your right shoulder, and Daedalus to your left. You’ll come out fine.
“Sulfur is. Triboelectric.”
“Don’t hold it in. What are you really trying to say?”
“And now I see. With eye serene. The very. Pulse. Of the machine.” A pause. “Wordsworth.”
Which, except for the halting delivery, was so much like Burton, with her classical education and love of classical poets like Spencer and Ginsberg and Plath, that for a second Martha was taken aback. Burton was a terrible poetry bore, but her enthusiasm had been genuine, and now Martha was sorry for every time she’d met those quotations with rolled eyes or a flip remark. But there’d be time enough for grieving later. Right now she had to concentrate on the task at hand.
The colors of the plain were dim and brownish. With a few quick chin-taps, she cranked up their intensity. Her vision filled with yellows, oranges, reds—intense wax crayon colors. Martha decided she liked them best that way.
For all its Crayola vividness, this was the most desolate landscape in the universe. She was on her own here, small and weak in a harsh and unforgiving world. Burton was dead. There was nobody else on all of Io. Nobody to rely on but herself. Nobody to blame if she fucked up. Out of nowhere, she was filled with an elation as cold and bleak as the distant mountains. It was shameful how happy she felt.
After a minute, she said, “Know any songs?”
Oh the bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. To see what he could see.
“Wake. Up. Wake. Up.”
To see what he could—
“Wake. Up. Wake. Up. Wake.”
“Hah? What?”
“Crystal sulfur is orthorhombic.”
She was in a field of sulfur flowers. They stretched as far as the eye could see, crystalline formations the size of her hand. Like the poppies of Flanders field. Or the ones in the Wizard of Oz. Behind her was a trail of broken flowers, some crushed by her feet or under the weight of the sledge, others simply exploded by exposure to her suit’s waste heat. It was far from being a straight path. She had been walking on autopilot, and stumbled and turned and wandered upon striking the crystals.
Martha remembered how excited she and Burton had been when they first saw the fields of crystals. They had piled out of the moon rover with laughter and bounding leaps, and Burton had seized her by the waist and waltzed her around in a dance of jubilation. This was the big one, they’d thought, their chance at the history books. And even when they’d radioed Hols back in the orbiter and were somewhat condescendingly informed that there was no chance of this being a new life-form, but only sulfide formations such as could be found in any mineralogy text … even that had not killed their joy. It was still their first big discovery. They’d looked forward to many more.
Now, though, all she could think of was the fact that such crystal fields occurred in regions associated with sulfur geysers, lateral plumes, and volcanic hot spots.
Something funny was happening to the far edge of the field, though. She cranked up her helmet to extreme magnification and watched as the trail slowly erased itself. New flowers were rising up in place of those she had smashed, small but perfect and whole. And growing. She could not imagine by what process this could be happening. Electrodeposition? Molecular sulfur being drawn up from the soil in some kind of pseudocapillary action? Were the flowers somehow plucking sulfur ions from Io’s almost nonexistent atmosphere?
Yesterday, the questions would have excited her. Now, she had no capacity for wonder whatsoever. Moreover, her instruments were back in the moon rover. Save for the suit’s limited electronics, she had nothing to take measurements with. She had only herself, the sledge, the spare airpacks, and the corpse.
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