An Interview with Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick is an American science fiction author. His novel, Stations of the Tide, won the Nebula for best novel, and several of his shorter works have won such awards as the World Fantasy Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Hugo Award, to name but a few.

Aberrant Dreams: You have stated before that Jack Vance was quite an inspiration to you, and he is often compared to the legendary Clark Ashton Smith. Are you familiar with CAS and does he fit into the "Swanwick Equation"?
Michael Swanwick: I've read a great deal of Clark Ashton Smith's work and admire it greatly.  And of course his lost continent of Zothique was the inspiration for Jack Vance's Dying Earth, which in turn made possible the Urth of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which sets the standard for contemporary science fiction.  CAS's influence is so pervasive by now that I wouldn't need to have read a single story of his to be influenced by him.

Nevertheless, I am of that generation of fantasists which came into the field having read pretty much every work of fantasy that had been written to date.  That's not possible nowadays, but back then, fantasy was scarcer than griffins' teeth and had to be hunted down with cunning and enormous effort.  So I can truthfully claim to be influenced by Mervyn Peake, E. R. Eddison, Hope Mirrlees, C. S. Lewis, Robert E. Howard, Sylvia Townsend Warner, G. K. Chesterton, and all the other great originals of Twentieth Century fantasy.  So where one writer's influence leaves off and another's begins...that's a matter for scholars, should any of them be mad enough to attempt the project.

Aberrant Dreams: Stations of the Tide is a tremendous novel and arguable your most famous. In some discussions I have heard it referred to the best Allegorical SF novel of the 90's. Would you classify Stations of the Tide as Allegorical SF? What does it owe (if anything) to Walter Miller?
Michael Swanwick: I don't think it's an allegorical novel simply because I can't imagine what it would be an allegory of.  I suspect that what makes some think it's allegorical is that it was about the variety of ways that the world can be shaped and sorted by our consciousness.  It dealt with sex, magic, and television as intangible technologies which do their work within the brain. Thus making it harder to draw the distinctions between inner and outer worlds that are so important, in different ways, to both science fiction and the mainstream.
 
While I was writing Stations of the Tide, I was afraid that nobody was going to understand a word of it.  I thought that all that stuff about negative constellations and tantric sex and one-to-one mapping was simply too weird for the readership.  But it turned out to be one of the most intensely understood things I ever wrote.  I'm almost never asked questions about the book; its readers are afraid that something I say might ruin their comprehension of it.
 
Walter Miller is another of those writers whose influence is pervasive.  Believe it or not, he actually wrote a fan letter about my first published story.  The publisher sent a copy of New Dimensions 11 to him for a blurb, and he wrote back a letter enthusing about "The Feast of Saint Janis" that so pleased the editors that they kept it for themselves and gave me a Xerox.
 
That seemed to me a pretty auspicious way to begin a career.
 
Aberrant Dreams: You (via Vacuum Flowers) are credited with being an early progenitor of the Cyberpunk movement, do you have any desire to revisit that genre and/with or Rebel or Wyeth etc?
Michael Swanwick: Cyberpunk was already up and running by the time I wrote Vacuum Flowers.  In fact, I included a scene with a data broker in an ostentatiously empty room as a nod to the cyberpunks.  And when Chairman Bruce put together his cyberpunk anthology, I was left out in the cold.  So that's definitive.  I was never a cyberpunk.
 
But there was a kind of generational similarity of influence at that time which united both the cyberpunks and the humanists.  We all read and loved the same writers – Philip K. Dick, for example – and we were all rooting through the same cultural dumpster of ideas.  The distinctions between groups are perhaps as hard to make out from this distance in time as those between Canada geese and cackling geese, or two factions in a church fight.  But if I'm going to be written into the literary history, then so should the others – Stan Robinson, Jim Kelly, and the rest—who were my fellow excludees.
 
I have no desire to revive Rebel or Wyeth or their world.  They escaped from my persecuting pen and good luck to them!  I hope they're happy.  On the other hand I do have a rather cyberpunkish story called "Robot," which I began as a way of recycling leftover ideas from a story I did with Bill Gibson, and have been picking up and putting down ever since.  Someday I'll figure out whatever it is that it needs and finish it.  Then, possibly, it can go down in literary history as The Last Cyberpunk Story.
 
Aberrant Dreams: Tell us about your upcoming The Dragons of Babel novel?
Michael Swanwick: It just came out!  It's out and the reviewers love it.  Now to find out if the readers agree.
 
The novel is about a young fey named Will who is caught up in a modern war that sweeps through Faerie when a wounded dragon crawls into his village and threatens to explode his jet fuel if the villagers don't make him their king.  It follows Will's process of growth through his expulsion from the village, his life as a refugee, his career as a hero among the homeless living in the subways of the Tower of Babel, and his rise through the social levels of that dread city until he  reaches its literal and metaphorical peak in the Palace of Leaves.
 
At this point, if you've read a lot of fantasy, you have a pretty clear idea of how the novel will go.  But it doesn't.  I deliberately set out to subvert everything that modern fantasy has taught us to expect, while at the same time providing the traditional pleasures that good fantasy has to offer.
 
I've definitely got a love-hate relationship with the genre.  On the one hand, I love the work of writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, John Crowley, Fritz Leiber, Paul Park, and all the others, who've written magnificent works that only fantasy makes possible.  On the other hand, too many writers have learned how to write formulaic imitation fantasy.  Sometimes looking at the fantasy racks can be as depressing and discovering that the Shire has been gentrified and all the hobbits cleared away to make room for condominiums and Appleby's and Gap outlets.  It hurts the heart.
 
So I set out to do something about that.
 
Aberrant Dreams: What is the most common mistake you see new writers making?
Michael Swanwick: Overexplaining. 
 
I'm tempted to just leave that word by itself and go on to the next question, but that probably wouldn't be playing fair.  Most new writers begin by explaining who the protagonist is and what he wants and how he got to where he was by the beginning of the story.  If it's a space opera, you get a synopsis of the entire history of past wars and races.  I call that an "expository brick" because it's dumped right at the beginning of the story, where the reader's going to stumble over it.  When a writer's not-yet-publishable, you can usually take the first three pages of a story and rip them up unread, because nothing whatsoever happens in them.
 
That's wrong.  You want to start the story with the first sentence and get the reader caught up in it as fast as possible.  The opening page of a story or novel is like a doorway.  In fact, it's even shaped like one.  The reader picks up a book or magazine in the store and reads the first few words.  He's like a customer peering inside the door, trying to decide whether to enter or not.  The writer's job, then, is to place a friendly, reassuring hand on the reader's back and fling that brute through the doorway and down the stairs!  You want to get him pages into the story before he knows what's happening.
 
There'll be time enough for explanations later.
 
Aberrant Dreams: If you could collaborate with any author living or dead, who would that be and why?
Michael Swanwick: Right now I'm working on something like five separate stories with Eileen Gunn, and I have good hopes of finishing at least three this year.  Eileen has something rare and indefinable that makes her work special – Stable Strategies for Middle Management is one of my favorite stories ever – but her rate of production makes Howard Waldrop look like an overachiever.  So I'm trying to artificially boost her stats.  I tried collaborating with Terry Bisson once, but it turns out that's not the way he writes.  I'd get a kick out of writing something with Lucius Shepard, but I'll bet he's the same way.
 
All the collaborations I've done or attempted have had the same goal – to learn something from a writer who has some special virtue I'd like to master.  That's why I wrote Dogfight with William Gibson, and many, many stories with Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann.  To learn.
 
Dead writers aren't as much fun.  I've done a couple of posthumous collaborations with Avram Davidson that I'm proud of, and a few short-shorts with the likes of Edgar Alan Poe and H. G. Wells and Anthony Trollope, which are essentially clever tricks.  But with them you lose the chance of opening the mail to discover something that will make you howl with astonishment and admiration.
 
Aberrant Dreams: Back in the 80's you caused quite a stir in the SF community with "cyberpunk" and "literary humanist" camp perspective you wrote about, is this still how you see things? Why or why not?
Michael Swanwick: The divide wasn't of my making.  There was a self-identified group of cyberpunks (who never much liked that name, incidentally; Bruce called it "The Movement") who without provocation began attacking all the most talented writers of their generation who weren't part of the club.  I simply came up with a name for the humanists.
 
Obviously things have changed in the last – my God! – twenty years.  In the essay itself, I declared that cyberpunk was already dead and, while most people hadn't even heard of it at the time, I was absolutely right.  Everybody's gone their separate ways since.  Gibson is a mainstream writer.  Stan Robinson's writing environmental thriller trilogies.  Sterling is mostly teaching design and making the rounds on the pundit circuit.  And so on.
 
The literary climate is rather different today.  There are so many movements – New Weird, the Mundanes, the Interstitial Arts, and whoever else – that it's hard to keep track of them all.  And there are a great many very talented unallied writers.  Today's genre reader has no room to complain at all.
 
Aberrant Dreams: Who are some modern writers whose work you look forward to reading?
Michael Swanwick: Andy Duncan's always interesting; his Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse is on the Nebula ballot in spite of its not being genre at all.  Greer Gilman's fantasies are as scarce as manticore teeth, but absolutely unlike anything anybody else could come up with.. Gene Wolfe is still the best writer we have.  I admire Bruce Sterling for the wildness of his ideation and for his spit-in-your-eye disdain for the conventions of the well-made plot.  Lucius Shepard is absolutely mad and some of his best stories will last forever.  Ellen Klages is enormously promising and, fingers crossed, just hitting her stride.  Howard Waldrop is, well, Howard Waldrop.  Paul Park is not only a brilliant fantasist at novel length but, pretty much unnoticed, is a fantastic short story writer.  Tom Purdom has been writing for fifty years and is currently crafting stories that compete with the new writers on their own terms – I want to do that too.  Gregory Frost's Shadowbridge looks to be a classic, and I'm waiting for the second half of it to be published in June.
 
That's just off the top of my head; there are dozens more I could have mentioned, but I had to stop somewhere.  It's an extremely rich time for the adventurous reader.
 
Aberrant Dreams: At Chattacon you told me about your recent exploits in China, can you shed some light on the differences in perception of SF that someone from China might have as opposed to an American or a Brit?
Michael Swanwick: Chinese readers tend to be young, enthusiastic, and passionate about science. Science Fiction Age, which is based in Chengu, Sichuan Province, has something like two hundred thousand readers, making it the largest science fiction magazine in the world.  That's the good aspect of Chinese SF.
 
The readership for SF in China peaks in the senior year of high school, dwindles through the university years, and drops to almost nothing upon graduation.  As it was explained to me, the fiction itself is very much like our "Golden Age" SF – straightforward, idea oriented, and heavily focused on the science.  That's the different but neither better nor worse part.
 
The bad side?  Like everything else in China, science fiction is censored by the government.  Serialized novels have been known to disappear from the magazines midway through.  The government has decided that SF can be a useful tool for helping young people learn to think creatively – which is true – so it's being actively encouraged.  But the government is sensitive about things it wouldn't even occur to us are political.  I hope that eventually they'll realize that the free play of ideas is not a threat to social order.  We'll see.
 
I've read very little Chinese fiction, unfortunately, simply because very little of it has been translated into English.   But there are efforts behind the scenes to meliorate that, at least slightly.  I've got my fingers crossed.
 
Aberrant Dreams: What's next?
Michael Swanwick: A Darger and Surplus novel.  D & S are Postutopian con men and gentlemen rogues who in their first adventure together (recorded in "The Dog Said Bow-Wow") accidentally set fire to London.   The lads are infinitely distractible.  In the two or three stories since, they've established a pattern of setting out for some destination at the end of one tale and popping up someplace else entirely at the beginning of the next.  Always, they're headed for Moscow, where they hope to make their fortune.  I figured that if ever they reached Russia, that epic event would require an entire book to itself.  So, when I finished The Dragons of Babel and cast about for the best thing I could be working on, the idea presented itself. 
 
Because I'd only been in Moscow for a total of four hours in my entire life, I went back there for two weeks as research.  Which really is no time at all.  But all the old Russia hands say that if you must write your book fast, while you still think you know something, or else you'll put it off for twenty years.

I've written the first chapter already, and my wife and son assure me that it is worthy of its protagonists.  So I am hopeful that it will turn out well.

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