Volume 6, Issue 6 – June, 2003
The Periodic Prime of Michael Swanwick
According to Michael Swanwick, it takes ten years for a writer to become an overnight success. He should know. He wrote for ten years before he sold “Guinungagap” and “The Feast of St. Janis,” both of which became finalists for the short story category of the Nebula Awards in 1981. They didn’t win — an experience Swanick highly recommends to new writers. Of course, he also writes a column on his website purportedly designed to “cut new talent off at the knees and thus keep down the number of writers I have to compete against.” So follow his advice at your peril — or with a pinch of your favorite element from his Periodic Table of Science Fiction.
However you choose to look at it, Swanwick not only survived his near-misses, he profited from them. Since his first publication in 1980, Swanwick’s awards and nominations number almost too many to count. His honors include that temporarily elusive Nebula Award as well as the Hugo, Theodore Sturgeon and World Fantasy Awards. However, 2003 may mark a new peak in a remarkable career. His novel Bones of the Earth, his novelette “Slow Life,” his short stories “‘Hello,’ Said the Stick” and “The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport” are all nominees for this year’s Hugo Awards.
Crescent Blues: Bones of the Earth and the award winning short story “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” both take the reader on a journey to the age of dinosaurs. What keeps drawing you back to the pre-human past?
Michael Swanwick: The cover of the New Yorker for the day I was born was a Charles Addams cartoon of a night watchman in a museum pointing his flashlight at a freshly hatched dinosaur egg with small footprints in the dust leading away from it. So maybe it was fated! I’ve loved dinosaurs from infancy, and they were one of a number of subjects I always meant to get around to writing about but never had any ideas for. Then I attended a dino symposium and was nailed by the passion and intensity that paleontologists brought to their science, and that shift of focus from the object of study to the people doing the studying was enough to open up a world of story possibilities.
Time travel was just a necessary evil. Despite what the physicists say, it’s hard to believe it could ever happen. Just the fact that the Bible says nothing about Jerusalem being flooded with tourists in Bermuda shorts at the time of the Crucifixion disproves it.
You are still going strong with Michael Swanwick’s Periodic Table of Science Fiction. What prompted you to take on such an enormous project?
It was the challenge, the very real possibility that I might fail, that appealed to me. It made the sequence into a kind of performance art, something akin to being a trapeze artist, which is a possibility not normally open to a writer.
This project has made me a figure of terror and superstitious fear to other writers. They turn pale and cross themselves when I enter the room. I can’t deny that’s been a big part of the fun as well.
Is it becoming more difficult to find story ideas for the later elements? And has any one put up odds on whether you’ll finish the series or not?
It has always been difficult! But nobody’s offered odds on my finishing because after the first couple of months everybody’s assumed it was easy as pie for me.
I began, of course, simply hoping I could come up with something — anything! — on each element. Some of which, like hassium or vanadium (don’t talk to me about vanadium!), were more trouble than others. But as the series progressed, the attempt to keep the stories varied and unpredictable imposed a sort of overall shape on the series. I now picture the totality as being a sort of crazy-quilt portrait of the science fiction genre.
The delight of these stories, as I’m writing them, lies in the frequency with which I get to write “God sits weeping in a corner,” or “Shakespeare was an electric pickle,” or “At night the water in the Ocean of Dreams is phosphorescent.” In a novel, it can be a long wait between such nuggets of concentrated estrangement. But short-shorts are all effect and very little scaffolding. Every story gives me the chance to come up with “The vitriol of London is very, very strong,” or “Upload a copy of the Baltimore Catechism into this poor heathen soul,” or “This must be the luckiest penny in the world!”
Yet another series you’re working on is the Sleep of Reason for Infinite Matrix, based on Los Caprichos, a series of prints by Spanish artist Francisco Goya. How does writing stories for series like these compare with creating individual, one-off pieces?
It’s a lot easier, in part because Goya was there first, creating emotionally-charged scenarios, and in part because there are so many recurring characters who evolve over the course of their stories. Some of them, like Prick the Donkey and Elena the Man-Hearted were a positive joy to return to. Grace, though… She started out as a blameless victim, like the condemned woman in the three parts of “A Sad Story,” but as her sorrows continued and multiplied and she consistently made every bad choice she possibly could, I lost all patience with her. When she came to her inevitable bad end, I felt glad she was gone and then guilty that I felt glad. Which is exactly the reaction I wanted to evoke from the readers. We’ve all known people like Grace, alas. Prick, on the other hand, started out as a mean-spirited parody of a certain president of the United States and through a kind of alchemy became sweet and lovable. Elena started out as a mere destroyer but, to my surprise, grew into a complex and nuanced character.
I’m convinced that the most successful art form of the second half of the 20th century was the soap opera. It’s pretty much swallowed up all the other narrative forms. Look at the various Star Trek series and Star Wars movies, and then all those serial novels that never do end. For the most part, it’s been a bad influence, but working within that format (disaster piled upon tsurris, absurd plot twists, frequent crossovers), I’ve come to appreciate its appeal. It’s very much like how we view our own lives.
A while back, when the series was half-finished, I sat down in a kind of frenzy and wrote the last forty stories in three days. There was a gathering logic to each of the separate plot lines, so I was able to drive the main characters to their individual destinies, and the series to a collective conclusion. Prick ends up much better than he deserves. Elena reaches an odd sort of apotheosis which may or may not be a good thing. The witches, who have caused so much evil but must be forgiven because they take their clothes off frequently, are consigned to the dustbin of history. And so on. The series ends on a note of hope, for which there is no justification in the etchings, but like it or not prose is linear and the sequence inevitably built toward a conclusion. An ending that came down like a giant thumb to crush the reader flat would have permeated the whole with a feeling of sourness that the Goyas, for all their anger, simply do not have.
On your Web site there is a short entitled “Scribble, Scribble, Scribble,” where a short story writer goes on display in a zoo because of the rarity of short fiction writers and outlets for their works. How much more difficult is it to be a short fiction writer today compared with when you sold “Ginungagap” and “The Feast of Saint Janis?”
It’s always been a hardscrabble thing. When I came up, the expectation was that you’d supplement the pittance you earned writing short fiction by living in abject squalor and not eating as often as you liked. That’s the approach we all took, and it explains why at public functions you could always find the writers standing around the refreshments buffet, wrapping wedges of cheese in paper napkins and stuffing them in their pockets.
Even that can’t be done today, however, because the markets are dwindling. It used to be that girlie magazines bought up a lot of quality fiction because the courts had ruled that a magazine had to be considered as a whole when deciding whether it was pornographic. If it was just unclad women, that was obscene. But a story by Harlan Ellison or William Tenn negated a lot of naked breasts and made the magazine an artistic endeavor. In practice, it was kind of a libertarian government subsidy for the arts. That’s gone now. Penthouse has given up on fiction entirely and Playboy, which used to be one of the most respected fiction markets in the world, has downplayed it enormously. Maybe among the lesser magazines you could find one or two that still publishes fiction, but I wouldn’t pick up a copy of Juggs expecting to find something really cool by Howard Waldrop.
Ironically enough, for those very reasons this is a wonderful time to be a short fiction reader, at least in science fiction. Because the people writing short fiction are doing it for the love of the form. Opportunistic hacks have very sensibly gone elsewhere.
How did you first get published on the Internet?
I was invited. When Eileen Gunn began The Infinite Matrix, she solicited a weekly series of short-shorts because I’d done Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, one story for every letter of the alphabet, in The New York Review of Science Fiction and she knew I was capable of it. Then, one story into Michael Swanwick’s Periodic Table of Science Fiction, the dotcom crash hit Eileen’s sponsor, and her e-zine folded. She took it on herself to contact Ellen Datlow at Sci Fiction and see if she wanted to adopt the series (this sort of selfless concern for their writers is typical of the successful editors in this field – wannabe editors, take note!), which Ellen did. Sometime later, Eileen was able to restart The Infinite Matrix, and asked if I’d create another series for her. The thought of doing two stories a week was a little daunting, but I figured I owed it to her. I had another idea, that of writing stories for each of the eighty etchings in Goya’s Los Caprichos, that I meant to get around to sometime years and years in the future, so I sold her on the idea of The Sleep of Reason.
Of the two, the Periodic Table is the more popular. But the Goya series is more literarily ambitious.
Do you see the internet being a powerful potential market in the future, or will it just become a “bed of thorns?”
The Internet has really stood Adam Smith on his head. There’s an enormous demand for “content” and an extremely limited supply of material that people want to read. So theoretically writers like Lucius Shepard and Terry Bisson ought to be rich. But in practice what happens is that I get tons of requests from people who want to post my life’s work on their site for free. And because all this Web stuff is still being invented, I’ve had stories commissioned, accepted and then bounced by editors who suddenly discovered that they had been given neither full editorial authority nor a clear description of exactly what they were supposed to buy. To say nothing of Steven Brill’s attempted theft of other people’s copyrights. This sort of treatment never happens to me with books or magazines. So an editor of an online zine is going to have to work a lot harder to get a story from me than Shawna McCarthy or Stan Schmidt will.
On the other hand, Sci Fiction pays well and treats its writers with respect, as is reflected in the quality of fiction you can find there. Part of that is Ellen Datlow, who is both highly regarded as an editor and very supportive of her writers. But a lot of it is that the zine is sponsored by SciFi.Com, which exists to publicize and promote the Sci Fi Channel. (And, judging by the fans I know, doing an extremely good job of it.) The parent corporation assumes the role that five hundred years ago was filled by Renaissance princes like the de Medicis or the Borgias, who supported Michelangelo, Da Vinci, et al. in order to enhance their own prestige. All the other fiction sites are underfunded labors of love. So right now it looks like corporate sponsorship is the only functioning model.
This could change, of course. Everything about being a writer does.
You have written a great number of short stories and several novels. What do you consider the biggest thrill about writing in each format? What do you consider to be the biggest challenge of each format?
A short story can be as keen and ruthlessly efficient and as perfectly suited to its task as a knife, while a novel can be as commodious, inclusive, and full of surprises as a house. A lot of people neglect short fiction for that latter reason, preferring fiction they can move into for extended periods of time. This is a mistake because short fiction is the forge wherein literary innovation is created. Those of us who were reading short fiction when Neuromancer came out were astonished at the public acclaim it received because everything it was praised for already existed, in parvo, in “Burning Chrome. Not that their excitement was misplaced. But where were they when “Chrome” came out?
The biggest thrill to any work of fiction is the moment it’s done and you can say, “Okay, this is as good as I can make it.” Points to short fiction there. But a novel gets lots more attention. A mediocre first novel from one of the major houses — Eos, Tor, Baen, etc. — is guaranteed to get more reviews that whatever wins the Hugo for best novella, novelette, or short story. And each of those reviews is going to be longer than anything the short work gets.
As for challenges — wow. All serious fiction is a challenge (and I’m not being a snob here; I’d include the early Jeeves novels, before the plot was reduced to a formula, in this category) in very much the same way. You have to invent a new form for each one, the same way the sculptor has to find the shape within the stone.
The smallest thing can derail a short story, because its structure is so stripped down that a minor bit of roughness will make the gears freeze up. The novel ambles forward like an amiable bear but for that very reason is prone to going astray. If you don’t keep a vigilant watch on it, it’ll wind up in the wrong county, halfway up a tree with not the slightest idea of how to get down.
Other than that, I don’t know. Each work of fiction is its own animal. Or mechanism, as the case may be.
You said in previous interviews that you write very slowly, between two to four pages a day. What do you see as the benefits and the disadvantages of your writing pace?
The big benefit is that when I finish a novel there’s a great deal of interest in it, simply because it’s not something that happens every year. The big disadvantage is economic. Writers exist in a hunter-gatherer economy. When you finish a novel, it’s like landing a whale, and you eat big for a long, long time. Then there are years when you subsist on chipmunk stew.
Artistically, there’s enough time to polish a sentence to a fine sheen, and — in the case of novels — to throw in little treats, references, symbolism (something I was taught in college and never saw the point to; but what the heck — it doesn’t hurt anything and maybe another English major will get a kick out of it), hidden jokes, things that not everybody will catch but that will amuse those who do. This comes at the price, however, of all the books and stories I’ll never get around to writing. When I die, there will be as many stories begun but not finished as there were published, and (scrawled, cryptic, indecipherable) notes for hundreds more. Because you can’t judge the merit of a story until it’s finished, some of those left unwritten might even be my best work.
Do you follow a set routine in your writing, or is it something that you fit in around your family life?
Both, really. As a freelancer I had the incredible privilege of being able to walk my son to school every day, and holidays and minor illnesses weren’t the crises they can be when both parents work outside the house; those were great perks. Now that Sean’s in college, my schedule is astonishingly boring. I have breakfast and then slog upstairs to my office and write for eight or nine hours, with a break for lunch. It’s like having a desk job without the office gossip or paid sick leave.
Then again, when the weather gets warm, I can get out the fishing gear and take my work down to Wissahickon Creek. So I don’t expect anybody to feel particularly sorry for me.
You have an impressive collection of signatures on the petition for SF Professionals against the War on Iraq. What kind of effect do you think the war, with all its high tech and terrorist emphasis will have on the SF/Fantasy publishing world?
In the short run it’ll probably be good for people who write science fiction and fantasy war novels, like my friend David Sherman does. Real war is not much fun, as David himself can tell you, and the horrific televised images from the Vietnam War really depressed that segment of the market for a long time, so those guys deserve a break.
In the long run, it might well bring a burst of new energy into the field. When “wonder war” stories are popular, they’re typically the stories that new young writers begin with, because they don’t require much characterization and there’s the potential for the sort of cleverness that the young excel at. So they can be lots of fun. And if you start out by having fun, you’re more likely to go the distance. Even an acknowledged high-art writer like Tom Disch… If you look at his early stuff, dark though it was, he was clearly having a ball.
None of which justifies the unprovoked invasion of another country, of course. But Dick Cheney and company didn’t invade Iraq for our sakes, so our consciences are clean.
On your web page it says you started this petition because the Science Fiction Writers of America refused to organize one. What do you hope this petition will accomplish now that U.S. forces are occupying Iraq?
It helps to keep perspective. In the grand scheme of things, neither I nor the signers of the petition nor SFWA is of much importance or influence here. And given that the current administration stated flat-out that they were going to have the war whether the American people wanted it or not, there never was much of a chance of anybody stopping it.
What happened was, when I heard that Sam Lundwall had quit an organization he’d been active in for decades over this issue, it touched my conscience. It seemed to me that the least I could do was go on record as opposing the war. So I wrote the statement and told a few friends about it, and it turned out there were quite a few people who wanted to do something, however small, to register their opposition.
I’ve actually had people praise me for the “courage” it took to post that statement. No. It took no courage whatsoever. Nobody’s going to smash down my door in the middle of the night, or blacklist me, or burn a cross in my yard. This is still, despite all the assaults being made on our liberties, a free country. It’s an extraordinary enterprise whose special virtues are well worth defending and preserving from its enemies both abroad and in the Oval Office. So, being born here, I have an obligation to speak out.
As an American citizen, I can do no less.
As for what might be achieved, this and a hundred thousand other acts of conscience might help muffle the drumbeat to cash in Social Security and buy a few more wars in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, to mention only places which people within the administration are currently lobbying to invade. Also, the presence of so many American names on the petition is at least a small gesture of reassurance toward such former American allies as Canada, France, and Mexico that not all Americans are caught up in an Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator-X death fantasy.
Which of your stories or novels do you feel would make the best movie and why?
Midway through Spirited Away, there was a scene where Chihiro races across collapsing industrial pipes, and another set in an institutional kitchen with grease-stained windows that could have been taken directly from the factory section of The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. Hayao Miyazaki understands the grimy beauty that such places can have, and their evocative power, right down to the bone. I’d love to be able to set him loose on Melanchthon and the hammer giants and the meryons and… well, pretty much everything in that book. Unfortunately for me, he doesn’t need my input. The stories he comes up with on his own work just fine.
One Hollywood producer swore to me that he would’ve bought Bones of the Earth if it weren’t for the fact that there’s a dinosaur movie already in production. Maybe so, maybe no. But there’s all that great technology for producing realistic dinosaurs — it would be nice to see them portrayed on the screen as real animals, rather than as just monsters.
Your stories and novels include a wide range of subjects from chemistry to dinosaurs to zombies and elves. Do you have any particularly favorite subjects you like to write about?
It sounds banal, but I like outer space a lot, particularly the real estate within the solar system, because people really are going to go out there, explore it, exploit it, probably even colonize it. The three biggest events in the history of life on this planet were its initial appearance, its emergence from the ocean onto land and its emergence from Earth into the larger universe. We’re present at an event potentially more significant that the entire history of mankind! How could anybody not want to write about that?
There’s a strange pessimism afoot about the future of space exploration, as if it were a prelapsarian technology we’ve lost and are never going to be good enough to deserve again. That’s nonsense. There are people in orbit right now, and non-NASA space programs around the world. China has a moon program! Look at the next hundred years and tell me how, short of a catastrophic industrial collapse, we’re going to avoid going out there.
The Shuttle disasters were heartbreaking, because they killed people who were among the best this planet has to offer while they were engaged in the peak accomplishment of their lives. But honest to God, they knew what the dangers were. They weren’t called “brave” just out of politeness. They had courage and vision and knew what they were doing and where they wanted to go. I wish we had politicians who could say the same.
I also like to write about technology that changes people in some fundamental way, that challenges our ideas of who and what we are.
People have drawn parallels between your Jack Faust and Hitler? What attracts you, as a writer, to legendary and near legendary characters?
I made those parallels implicit in Jack Faust, because I wanted to do a critique of the last five hundred years of scientific and industrial history. I was a science kid growing up, so I identified with Faust’s ambition, but since I was a Roman Catholic his willingness to sell his soul for knowledge was literally terrifying to me. Most non-Catholics don’t take Hell very seriously, possibly because they don’t have nuns drawing verbal pictures of it daily in extremely graphic Grand Guignol terms. So I had to bring in things like the Holocaust, in order to make my point, which was that there are limits to how much knowledge is desirable. Yes, there are indeed some things “Man was not meant to know.” The sound of a child screaming in agony is one of them. The fact that it happens every day changes nothing.
Do you frequently draw your characters from real people or famous personalities?
Actually, I tend to avoid it. There are a number of historical personages in Jack Faust, but they tend to be people you’d have to do a lot of research to identify. The poet Richard Sbrulius, for example, or the scholar Balthasar Phaccus, but no Queen Elizabeth or Sir Francis Drake, though they’re around somewhere in the background. Partly it’s that the fame card has been overplayed in our field. But James Patrick Kelly has observed that I never write sympathetically about the rich and powerful. So it may just be that my experience with that class of people has predisposed me against them.
What methods do you use to research for your novels? How important do you feel good research is in speculative fiction?
I’m not a very organized researcher. I’ll read enormous amounts of related non-fiction, constantly digressing from the subject at hand (Quick! I need a book on Bruegel — and information on robot fish!), simply because I don’t know what I’m looking for until I find it. For Bones of the Earth, I attended symposia, traveled to distant museums to look at specific fossils, and interviewed paleontologists about their work and their feelings toward it. I called up Tom Holtz, who is an authority on theropods, several times a week with questions — he came up with two separate techniques for killing a juvenile tyrannosaur using only a pointed stick, both of which I used — and as I finished each chapter I ran it past dinosaur professionals Bob Walters and Ralph Chapman, who gently pointed out to me the many, many mistakes I’d made.
Even at that, errors got through. My editor sent galleys to Dr. Michael Brett-Surman for a blurb, which he very graciously provided, along with a sheath of corrections he wanted made. Forty-eight of which have been incorporated into the paperback edition.
Good research is to speculative fiction what good engineering is to a bridge. Mostly people aren’t interested in the engineering; they just want to get where the bridge goes. Similarly, most of the research for a novel isn’t going to show. You need to know that an elephant can’t get all four feet off the ground at once just so the knowledgeable reader won’t throw the book down in disgust when your elephant nimbly leaps over a ravine. But you don’t want to have one of your characters saying, “As you know, Fred, an elephant can’t get all four feet…”
Bones was an exception to this rule, because paleontologists really do eat, drink, and breathe their science. They talk about it all the time, and their knowledge of the subject is encyclopedic. So having them talk any other way would be a violation of mimesis.
Do you use different research techniques for writing fantasy to the methods you use to write SF?
Hard to say. Fantasy — my fantasy at least — tends to be very much rooted in place, so I’ll spend a lot of time searching out locales similar to those in my fantasy, so I can visualize them. For The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, I was forever poking around in old factories and clambering over rusting locomotives. The Baldwynne Steam Dragon Works was laid out identically to Baldwin Locomotive’s long-defunct Eddystone plant, because I found a pamphlet mapping the entire site, with photos of the buildings and explanations of what was done in each of them. Knowing exactly what was where and the distances from one place to another made that section far more convincing than it would have been if I’d merely invented each building as the plot required it and then slapped it down someplace handy.
Then again, for Stations of the Tide, which was science fiction, I created a land which was an blend of Tidewater Virginia and northern Vermont, up around Derby Line, two areas that I knew extremely well. (I used to go out in the woods and dig for sea shells, when I lived in the Tidewater.) So maybe there’s not a great difference after all.
Have you ever considered writing in other genres? If so, which ones and why?
I just follow the idea where it takes me, without worrying too much about categories. Stations of the Tide was a very fantasy-flavored science fiction novel and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter was a very SF-flavored fantasy novel, so when I came to Jack Faust I was very curious how it would be received. As SF — because it’s a mad scientist story? Or as fantasy — because it was a deal-with-the-devil story? As it turned out, in the States it was packaged as mainstream and in Britain as horror. I can easily imagine myself writing something mainstream — though a odd kind of mainstream — completely by accident.
Come to think of it, The Sleep of Reason is, for the most part, mainstream. It’s shot through with fantastic elements, but much of it is simply an exploration of the ways in which human beings are no damn good — a classic theme of literature from the beginning.
I’ve been writing more non-fiction lately. I wrote a long biographical essay on the fantasist Hope Mirrlees for Foundation. Mirrlees was an interesting woman — a friend of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, wealthy, aristocratic, and the author of one influential modernist poem, “Paris,” and a very important fantasy novel, Lud-in-the-Mist. Researching her put me in touch with feminist academics, British antiquarians, and her nephew, Count Robin de La Lanne Mirrlees, which was a hoot. To an American, getting mail from a count is like hearing from a talking rabbit, something totally outside of one’s normal experience.
I also published a book-length interview, Being Gardner Dozois, which was an examination of all of Gardner’s short fiction in order of publication, and a shorter interview with Greer Gilman examining her story, “Jack Daw’s Pack.” These were not very profitable projects monetarily, but they involved me with the prose in a way that’s not possible with fiction. They were done just for the fun of it.
What type of books do you like to read for pleasure?
All of ’em, fiction and non-fiction alike. I still read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, which after all these years of publication is more of an accomplishment than you would think. Writers tend to stop reading in their own area after a time, simply because you get so familiar with it that it becomes increasingly harder to find something that astonishes and amazes. But it’s a mistake, particularly for science fiction writers. You can tell when they stopped reading the competition because their work fossilizes at that period and begins to grow stale and smell quaint. In stark contrast, a writer like Tom Purdom, who began selling in the 1950s, is still capable of going one-on-one with writers like Steve Baxter or Ken MacLeod in large part because he knows what the competition is up to and what standards he has to match.
The only area of writing that I enjoy but (usually) don’t read is mysteries, and that’s simply because avoiding them frees up so much reading time. I met Lawrence Block at a reading and bought a book so I could get his autograph, and when I read it I immediately felt the urge to read a dozen more by him, and then start burning through the other mystery writers I’d somehow missed. But I fought it down. I’m convinced this is why so many people have such a reflexive down on science fiction — because if they admitted it was literature, they’d lose so much time catching up that they never would get around to reading Proust.
Can you give our readers a sneak preview of your current projects?
In short fiction, not counting the short-shorts, I’ve got 37 stories alive and partially written and ideas for more than I can count. These include a couple more Darger and Surplus stories, a dino story or two, a really weird collaboration with Eileen Gunn, and something called “Urdumheim,” which I began the other day and may turn out to be the strangest fantasy story I’ve ever written. Some of these thirty-seven stories will probably never be finished, though I have no idea which ones. Sometimes I’ll pick up something I gave up on as dead decades ago and have it burst into flame. You never can tell.
My next novel is in the early stages so it’s hard to say what it’ll be. Most likely either a hard SF novel featuring Lizzie O’Brien, the protagonist of “Slow Life,” or a hard fantasy that takes up where “King Dragon” (coming soon in The Dragon Quintet, edited by Marvin Kaye) leaves off. With an outside chance of it being about an airship voyage around the world, starting from 1816 Philadelphia. Or else something else entirely.
CB likes to give its interviewees an open forum where they can talk about anything they like, no holds barred. Have you got anything you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered?
I don’t have any complaints right now, so I’ll take advantage of your offer by giving the hopeful gonnabe writers out there a little useful advice. On those rare occasions when I’ve taught writing, the students always want to know two things: What kind of stories editors are really anxious to buy, and what hot new movement is around on which they might be able to leap aboard.
My answer to the first question always disappoints them. I say that editors want well-written SF stories with spaceships and science. And they do! Back when Ellen Datlow was fiction editor of Omni, and thus widely reviled as Great Satan Literature herself, she asked what I was up to, and when I described a fantasy I was really excited about, she looked disappointed and said, “That’s nice, Michael, but I want something good with spaceships and real science in it.” Gardner Dozois put it even more bluntly. I went by to visit him once, and as I was leaving he stood on the stoop and bellowed after me, “Write me some more science fiction, Michael! None of this fantasy crap! None of this magic realism crap! Hard science fiction – with spaceships!!!”
Of course the kicker here is that both Ellen and Gardner expect good stories — just throwing in a spaceship is not going to do it for them. Which brings me to my second, even more disappointing answer: It doesn’t matter whether or not there’s a hot new movement around because by the time anybody notices it, it’s too late to become a part of it. Bill Gibson and Bruce Sterling did extremely well with cyberpunk, but the second-generation cyberpunks did not, partly because they came on board too late and partly because so much of their work was imitative and derivative. So I always tell my students: You are the next big thing. Those qualities and insights that you as a writer have and nobody else does are exactly what the editors are looking for. They want to be amazed and astounded. They want to see something new.
So if you want a shortcut to sales and popularity, go with spaceships and real science. It worked for Larry Niven. But don’t write imitation Niven stories or imitation anybody stories. Imagine it afresh, from the ground up. Make it new. Make it your own. That’s what the editors want. And it’s what we readers want.
Click here to learn more about Michael Swanick.
Stephen Smith
Stephen Smith divides his talents between Webmastering, fiction writing and house keeping. Currently possessed by the Demon Comedic Muse, he is writing a comic fantasy entitled, Huw’s the Hero, an urban fantasy, vampire detective novel, Valencius Covers his Tracks. His science fiction romance Cyberius III was published in December 2005 by New Concepts Publishing under the pseudonym of S.J. Willing and he is working on the sequel, Poseidon VII. More information can be found at his normal website and at S.J. Willing’s webpage.