Michael
Swanwick is an American author born in 1950 who has written a dozen
novels and hundreds of short stories and essays. Science fiction,
fantasy, magic realism and frequently a combination of all three. We can also add flash fiction. Michael Swanwick is a writer with one supercharged imagination.
Being Michael Swanwick
- in a series of in-depth interviews covering the author's writing
career from 1980 to 2022, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro provides Swanwick fans with
oodles of insights into his life and all phases of his creative process
and published corpus. Also, and this is an important point I'd like to
emphasize, Alvaro's book will appeal to readers, like myself, who are
not familiar with Swanwick. Additionally, this volume contains an
informative Introduction compliments of Gregory Frost and an up close and personal Afterwards written by Swanwick's wife and leading fan, Marianne Porter.
To
share a modest taste of what a reader will encounter when turning the
pages, I'll link my comments with a number of juicy Swanwick quotes
taken from the interviews. Here goes:
"Samuel R. Delany was a huge influence on me, most particularly the first of his books that I really got into, The Einstein Intersection.
He did something that was very clever of him and very useful to me: he
put all the literary tricks of the trade he was using right on the
surface. You could see them. You could see the way that he was
structuring the words and the ideas in ascending or descending
sequences. Usually we do that kind of thing and then smooth it over and
hide it. He left it out on the surface, so that reading it carefully I
learned a lot about how to write, the way that thought can be structured
and how clauses can be joined together."
Readers will enjoy
Swanwick speaking at length about the various writers who influenced him
and what specifically he learned from each writer.
“I love
visual art. I cannot draw at all. But when I’m working on a novel I’ll
make little drawings of things that are going to appear in it, even of
the characters. They’re all dreadful. Ironically, I’m a very visual
writer. I have to find a way to express in words what I cannot say in
drawings. I visualize how things go.”
A fascinating detail, to be
sure. For a writer, an ability to draw imagines isn't necessary; what's
needed is the facility to express visual images in words.
“Stan
Robinson, and Connie Willis, and Nancy Kress, and so on. They were the
stand-in for my audience. People ask if you write to an audience. I’ve
never been able to picture what the audience looked like, but these
writers were the kind of readers I wanted to impress.”
Another
key person who Swanwick wanted to appreciate his writing: his longtime
editor and friend, Gardner Dozois. A good number of pages are dedicated
to Swanwick's close associating and collaboration with Gardner Dozpois
in Philadelphia.
“When you talk to people who really love his
(Philip K Dick) fiction, we’ve all got different favorite works. I never
met anybody else whose favorite was Galactic Pot Healer.”
Ha! Too bad Michael Swanwick and I never met since Galactic Pot Healer
is my absolute favorite of Dick's novels. Michael speaks of specific
bizarre scenes and unforgettable robots along with other
extraterrestrial life forms. I appreciated all of what Michael speaks of
– and, in addition, I especially pick up on the Jungian archetypes.
“What
made this interesting to me is that it was a great way to explore
whether it’s possible to have free will in a deterministic universe. As
I’ve said before, that’s one of those things that concerns me greatly,
probably more than it should.”
There's no doubt Michael Swanwick
is highly inquisitive and doesn't shy away from the big questions and
knotty philosophical conundrums. This to say, he's a thinking person's
author. And, as one might expect, a writer Michael returns to again and
again - Thomas Pynchon.
“Philadelphia had a mad woman
uncharitably called the Duck Lady. She’d make these sounds like a duck
quacking and then say, “Hey, Mac, give me twenty bucks!” You’d say “No”
and she’d look at you with astonishment. It was a common rumor that
someone had seen her being picked up in a limousine at the end of the
day, that she was an eccentric old lady who was rich. When she died, it
turned
out she was homeless, and these were just myths that had risen up to protect us from the reality.”
Oh,
wow! I myself recall seeing the Duck Lady sitting on a bench, quacking,
in Rittenhouse Square Park. I particularly enjoy Michael's incisive
insights sprinkled throughout the interviews regarding the ways we as
humans shield ourselves from a harsh, brutal, chaotic reality.
“With Iain Banks, I’ll admit that I was a fan of the Culture novels but preferred some of his so-called mainstream books. The Wasp Factory and The Bridge were two that knocked me out. They were so different and fresh.”
I've
included this quote for two reasons: 1) Citing Iain Banks is an example
of just how wide-ranging are Michael's horizons when it comes to books;
2) Like Michael, I also was quite taken by Banks' The Wasp Factory and The Bridge. Check out my reviews of these two extraordinary novels.
“Stories
are the most powerful thing in our lives, and often in history. Ronald
Regan, for example, ran across a story of a welfare queen who was riding
around New York City in a Cadillac. Nobody could locate this welfare
queen or even find out exactly where he heard the story. But he heard
the story, and believed it, and that’s where a lot of his economic
policy came from. A fact is a unit of truth, but a story is a unit of
conviction. Once you attach a fact—or a lie—to a story, the fact or lie
becomes much more powerful.”
I'm with Michael here. That's why I
can't take overly serious, overly judgemental people all that seriously –
since, from my experience, they're living completely and totally within
the bubble of their own little story.
"Writing is difficult for
me. I spend a lot of time not getting anywhere with my fiction. So if I
have a good idea, there’s room to play with it, so there’s no reason to
strategically put off anything. I have a lot of pieces underway. I have
forty or so partially-written stories and when no new ideas come, I
start opening files and see if I can coax one to life. If I can’t, I’ll
mope around the house. As you know, writing is not a very glamorous
life."
Honest and sincere words from a master. Having some issues
with your own writing? Take heart! Even a writer like Michael Swanwich
must deal with rough patches.
Thank you, Alvaro! You've given us a splendid book. 
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, born 1979
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