association-list

I really do. Sadly, most of his work, save for the quite good but not nearly the best Bones of the Earth, are out of print. This is a crime. So there will be little link­ing in this post, because there’s really noth­ing to link to. Go to your used book­store to seek this stuff out, or check online.

His nov­el­is­tic career began with In the Drift which is an ambigu­ous little book about fanati­cism in a post-​​apocalyptic land­scape, set close to home (he lives in Philadel­phia). Three Mile Island has melted down and poi­soned the land­scape. Weird Things Happen. It’s his first novel. I read it a long time ago and it didn’t leave much of a mark.

He hits his stride with Vacuum Flow­ers, a novel writ­ten at more or less the height of cyber­punk, but more full of more inter­est­ing ideas than any­thing other than per­haps Schi­ma­trix, by Bruce Ster­ling (you should read that, too). Swan­wick explores here what it might mean for human­ity when the brain is a known quan­tity. Earth, the planet, has been lost to Earth, the hive mind, know as the Com­prise. Every­one else lives in space, because speed of light jitter keeps Earth from branch­ing out too far. The story revolves around a Mys­te­ri­ous Qual­ity held by the by the implanted per­son­al­ity of the view­point char­ac­ter. To figure it out, every­one and their dog and their run­away planet will Stop At Noth­ing to get a hold of her and cut up her brain to figure it out. She runs and she hides, and therein lies the real show. You, the reader, get an awe­some guided tour of the sur­vivor state left by the birth of god, where people change per­son­al­i­ties like clothes and make deals with the devil (Earth again) to make their dead­lines. You meet a man with per­haps the most inter­est­ing case of self-​​inflicted mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties com­mit­ted to the page. Tyler Durden really has noth­ing on Wyeth. The char­ac­ters here are weird, as Swan­wick is in full bore Oth­er­ing mode, forc­ing the reader to try and under­stand the expe­ri­ences of people whose lives are barely com­pre­hen­si­ble if you stop to think about them, which, given the short length and rapid pace of the novel, you’re rarely inclined to do. For all that, they’re warm and human and you care about them, although you might not entirely under­stand their con­cerns. After all, these are people who alter and replace bits of their minds like the char­ac­ters in a Warren Ellis comic treat their limbs and sexual organs.

From there, we take a mighty leap for­wards time and upwards in vision and style to Sta­tions of the Tide. The book won the Nebula for best novel in 1991, apro­pos of noth­ing, other than that it’s out of print now, which, to repeat myself, is a crime against all that’s good and pleas­ant in the world. The nar­ra­tive details the jour­ney of an name­less bureau­crat sent by the Depart­ment of Tech­nol­ogy Trans­fer to recover some poten­tially stolen tech­nol­ogy on the sur­face of an embar­goed world called Miranda, where the natives may or may not be sen­tient, and they may or may not be extinct, and most all of the ani­mals have an aquatic for and a form for land, because the unex­plained Jubilee Tides over­whelm most of the world every so often. The book notably con­tains many nods to pre­vi­ous works of sci­ence fic­tion, which hon­estly are its weak­est point. The real meat of the story con­cerns the bureaucrat’s inter­nal jour­ney towards under­stand­ing his and his Department’s role the hinted-​​at inter­stel­lar polity which pro­vides the frame for the story. Earth is men­tioned only once, but sig­nif­i­cantly. The major­ity of his story is couched in the chaotic fin de siecle ambiance with some­thing of the rot­ting glam­our of New Orleans as it’s often seen in lit­er­a­ture com­bined with the wild west enthu­si­asm of a dying town where law and order have gen­er­ally already packed up left. I am com­pletely fail­ing to cap­ture here how thor­oughly and con­vinc­ingly Swan­wick estab­lishes and main­tains this atmos­phere. Every detail, from the most mun­dane to the almost painfully sur­real, helps to fur­ther embed the reader into the weave of the story. Again, the trip is the thing, here. The solu­tion to the cen­tral mys­tery is almost sec­ondary by the time you reach it, for you are enthralled first and fore­most with the bureaucrat’s inter­nal crisis and debate over a change of direc­tion. Sta­tions of the Tide is def­i­nitely one of the better SF books writ­ting in the last 20 years, and would be on any of the lists I keep threat­en­ing to com­pile about what you should read.

The Iron Dragon’s Daugh­ter looks like it’s get­ting a hard­cover re-​​release some­time this year. This is a good thing, but hon­estly it’s more than a little weird, as this isn’t a book that’s easy to market. There’s no cover image yet, and I imag­ine that it’ll be at least as bad as the cover for Neal Asher’s The Skin­ner. As always, I’m totally will­ing to be proved wrong, but the cur­rent trend seems to point to covers that get worse and worse and worse and worse. Expect a sep­a­rate post about that soon. Anyway. I can’t imag­ine how they’re going to market this, except as a small release so that all of us who have ratty paper­back copies can buy some­thing that might last more than another read­ing or two. It’s awfully weird and won­der­ful, empha­sis on the weird, I sup­pose, for the gen­eral reader. There’s a seam­less meld­ing here of celtic inspired fan­tasy, con­tem­po­rary fic­tion and sci­ence fic­tion. You never really get a clear idea of just how seri­ously the book is taking itself. It’s been quite a while since I’ve read it, because my copy has been passed from hand to hand to hand and it isn’t quite clear where it’s set­tled. I’ll re-​​read it soon, and per­haps update. It wasn’t as much to my taste as Sta­tions of the Tide, but it’s huge and enter­tain­ing and filled to burst­ing with won­der­ful ideas and rich characters.

To be honest, I’m doing Swan­wick a dis­ser­vice by focus­ing on his novels, as excel­lent as they are. Some, per­haps most, of his best work is at shorter lenghts, and there are a couple of North Atlantic Books short story col­lec­tions of his work, two of which are still avail­able. Tales of Old Earth and Gravity’s Angels, if you live some­where with­out a decent local book­store who can do spe­cial orders for you. To be honest, I don’t own either of them, but I should and will and I feel that I can rec­om­mend them to you with­out reser­va­tion, as Swanwick’s short sto­ries are gen­er­ally excel­lent and it’s pretty mag­nif­i­cent to be able to pick up most of his short sto­ries for less than 25 dol­lars. And remem­ber, kids, when you’re short of cash, your local library will often sur­prise you with the breadth of its offerings.

Also worth check­ing out is his web­site, which is full of neat stuff.