The prolific and talented Michael Swanwick has received the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon and World Fantasy Awards for his work, which appeared in places such as Omni, Asimov's, Amazing, Triquarterly, and numerous Best of the Year anthologies. He moves effortlessly between fantasy and science fiction when writing, and the results are invariably highly pleasing. His website is located at www.michaelswanwick.com.
Q: So why flash? Is it just a way to write more stories, the maximize your writing time?
MS: It began simply as a way I could give something original to convention program books and select other publications without surrendering first serial rights to my serious work or giving them something second-rate. Then Eileen Gunn commissioned The Sleep of Reason for The Infinite Matrix and Ellen Datlow commissioned The Periodic Table of Science Fiction for Sci Fictionand the next thing I knew people were calling me "prolific," just because for a couple of years I always had at least two stories coming out every week.
Q: What appeals to you about the form?
Mostly, I like being called prolific.
Q: You've said "short-short fiction is an inherently modest form... It's only there to entertain you." Is the short-short the literary equivalent of a well-told anecdote or is it more like a conceit, a bauble spun of words and fluff in order to amuse? Can't either side of that be argued for?
Individually, you could argue it either way. What's interesting is how well short-shorts work in series. I've written two stories, "Coyote at the End of History" and "Smoke and Mirrors: Four Scenes from the Postutopian Future," which are collections of stand-alone flash fictions that, taken together, tell a larger story. And The Sleep of Reason has something like six story-threads that occasionally intersect and ultimately combine to tell a single story. I began that series intending to write unrelated tales. But the form found itself and insisted on something more complicated and involving.
Q: What flash writers do you look to; who do you love to read?
Julio Cortazar's Chronopios and Famas is a delight and I urge every literate person to dig up a copy. Franz Kafka's parables are particularly wonderful for how they manage not to be at all twee or fairytalish or hausmarchen-esque, despite their format. I took the messenger from "The Great Wall of China" and inserted him into Jack Faust in a way that subverts and extends the original story. And of course Terry Bisson's "They're Made of Meat"is one of a vanishingly small number of flash fiction classics. I did a gentle parody of it in "They're Made of Carbon" for The Periodic Table of Science Fiction.
Q: What's the best flash title you've ever come up with?
Wow. There are a lot I like. "Lost Civilizations of the Cretaceous" because it conjures up such fantasies in the reader's minds that the story itself is almost beside the point. "Programmable Breasts." "Living in the Shadow of the Molly-Be-Damned" "How the Witches Love to Pluck!" "The Clyster of San Bernardino." Maybe "What Would Bob the Angry Flower Do?" because for those who are familiar with Stephen Notley's cartoon it sets up expectations of violence and emotional extremism which the story then subverts while remaining true to the character.
Q: What are your flash metrics like, how long does it take you to write a 250 word piece? How much revision occurs?
Not a lot of time at all. A couple of hours for something tricky, but most of that time is spent revising because I'm not happy with a story until it's letter-perfect. When I'm working on a lot of stories, I'll write the short-shorts at night while I'm watching TV or otherwise engaged in something that doesn't take up a lot of attention. Of course, unlike my other fiction which I work on whether I feel like ti or not, I only write flash fiction when I'm feeling inspired. So that makes it easier for me.
Q: Will there be more scientifically aligned, like the Periodic Table, flash in your future?
I've got a couple of ideas for other series, but they await the time and motivation. Right now I've got a novel to finish and nobody's offering me serious money for another series, and I've got dozens of projects I'm anxious to get to. So I'm in no hurry here.
Q: Is your essay on Cabell out? If not, when will it appear? What other forgotten fantasy writers are you thinking of exhuming?
Is Cabell forgotten? How sad. Before Tolkien, he was the most famous fantasy writer of the Twentieth Century - and much more highly respected in literary circles than Tolkien ever was during his lifetime. Mark Twain loved his work. Theodore Roosevelt invited him to the White House. Alastair Crowley wrote fan letters. Sinclair Lewis mentioned him in his Nobel Prize speech. And now . . .
The essay isn't done yet. It takes a long time to read and analyze everything ever written by a writer as prolific as James Branch Cabell, and my intention is to sort through his life's work and decide what's worth an adventurous reader's time exploring, and what isn't. It's called "What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage?" because the central thesis is that James Branch Cabell took the mighty ship of his reputation and sailed it straight and unerringly onto the rocks. I expect it'll see print in 2007.
I don't yet have any plans to move on to another fantasy writer when this is done. Cabell is only the second fantasist I've written about at length. Very briefly, when I was researching "Hope-in-the-Mist," I was the world's foremost authority on Hope Mirrlees, author of Lud-in-the-Mist and personal friend of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. But these things take years to research and bring in practically no money at all, so I have to treat them as a hobby. But I expect that, when this project is done, another writer will present him- or herself to my magpie eye.
Q: You were recently in Croatia for a convention. What was Croatia like? Will you be writing stories set in Zagreb now? Did you learn any good drinking toasts?
Croatia is beautiful, small, egalitarian, a great place for sidewalk cafes and wandering about in Roman ruins and still-functioning Venetian cities, but possessed of a complex and terrible history. And the food is terrific. Marianne and I stayed for several days in an small apartment just within the Silver Gate of Diocletian's palace in Split and while there I imagined my favorite characters, Darger and Surplus, arriving on a packet boat hauled into the harbor by plesiosaurs. We'll see if I ever get around to writing that one. I'd be tempted to set something in the Plitvice Lakes, a long and magical valley containing literally hundreds of waterfalls, but Marianne is convinced that Terry Pratchett beat me to it with Thud.
No toasts, but we did discover that Croatian men like to sing a capella in the bars - exquisitely melancholy old songs in multi-part harmony. If angels went slumming, this is what they'd sound like.
Mostly, though, I liked the people. Good folks, fun to hang out with, and some of them are great storytellers.
Q: Is The Iron Dragon's Daughter a Marxist fairy tale?
Well, it's certainly not a fairy tale - I was trying to deal with some serious matters in as straightforward and truthful a manner as I could. But as Kafka demonstrated, sometimes that involves turning a man into vermin or putting a sword in the hand of the Statue of Liberty. You could say that it's Marxist in the sense that I don't pretend that class differences don't exist. But it's not really informed by leftist sensibilities at all. It's more like a world in which everything has been turned inside out so that the essential mysteries of human consciousness are more obvious.
Q: What was the atmosphere you wanted to convey in the book?
I wanted to write a high fantasy but I'm allergic to horses, a mediocre archer, a worse fencer, and I was thirty-two when I first set foot in a castle. So my experiences left me woefully unqualified to go toe-to-toe with J.R.R. Tolkien or E.R. Eddison. But all that Medievalia is just settings and furniture, really, for the serious work those writers were doing. I replaced that stuff with factories and strip joints and mega-malls - places I know and understand - and this in turn made the world more convincing to me.
There's a kind of a bleak, lonesome beauty to a sunset seen from a factory parking lot. That's the kind of feeling I was going for - that the world is magical even if it's the one we're most familiar with. You can be incredibly unhappy and still feel that, still feel privileged to be alive.
Q: Are you writing more set in that world?
I'm in the final throes of The Dragons of Babel, which I'm coming around to thinking is in the same world as The Iron Dragon's Daughter. The opening chapters were published as "King Dragon" in The Dragon Quintet and picked up by several best-of-the-year anthologies. I've subsequently adapted other sections as "The Word That Sings the Scythe," "An Episode of Moondust," "Lord Weary's Empire," and "A Small Room in Koboldtown," all published or to be published in Asimov's.
Q: If you place yourself "midway between the cyberpunks and the humanists", doesn't that make you a humanpunk?
At the time, it made me a convenient target for brickbats from both sides. Now it makes me something of a curiosity, the literary equivalent of somebody who used to hang out with the Hatfields and the McCoys. Nobody's really very clear on which were which anymore or exactly what all the fuss was about, but they like hearing the old stories from somebody who was there.
