Majkl Suenvik - Tales of Old Earth [A collection of short-stories]

A New York Times Notable Book

Eerie extraordinary Dickens meets Detroit, full of grimy, toiling waifs, dark factories, trolls with boomboxes, and sleek, decadent high elves Sordid, violent, funny, absurd, angry, by turns, as intense in its pleasures as in its pains Swanwick takes huge risks here, and reaps big rewards. Locus

Entertaining reading Flamboyant Grotesquely Dickensian. Newsday

This episodic tale of life, war and survival in post-meltdown Pennsylvania builds a potent new myth from the reality of radioactive waste. George R. R. Martin

Shocking powerful. Daily News (New York)

A powerful and affecting novel Chilling, believable and uncomfortably close to home. The Evening Sun (Baltimore)

Jurassic Park set amid the paradox of time travel I dare anyone to read the first chapter and not keep reading all the way through to the last shocking page. James Rollins, New York Timesbestselling author of Subterranean and Bone Labyrinth

Swanwick dramatizes of the world of dinosaurs with great flair and knowledge, even love. Bones of the Earth dances on the edge of an abyss. [An] entertaining and deft performance. The Philadelphia Inquirer

Swanwick proves that sci-fi has plenty of room for wonder and literary values. San Francisco Chronicle

Jack Faust is madly ambitious and brilliantly executed, recasting the entire history of science in a wholly original version of our cultures central myth of knowledge, power, and sorrow. William Gibson

Superb Wonderful and relentless Provocative and evocative. The Washington Post Book World

Powerful Marvelous Consistently surprising. The New York Times Book Review

Slick and highly competent entertainment that starts fast and never slows down. The Washington Post

Erotic and witty. The New York Times

Quintessentially cyberpunk eminently readable and provocative. Daily News (New York)

A stunning collection from one of science fictions very best writers. Pay in blood, if necessary, but dont miss these stories. Nancy Kress

Michael Swanwick is darkly magnificent. Tales of Old Earth is just one brilliant ride after another, a midnight express with a master at the throttle. Jack McDevitt

Swanwick has emerged as one of the countrys most respected authors. The Philadelphia Inquirer

Contents

Foreword A Users Guide to Michael Swanwick

One The Very Pulse of the Machine

Two The Dead

Three Scherzo with Tyrannosaur

Four Ancient Engines

Five North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy

Six The Mask

Seven Mother Grasshopper

Eight Riding the Giganotosaur

Nine Wild Minds

Ten The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O

Eleven Microcosmic Dog

Twelve In Concert

Thirteen Radiant Doors

Fourteen Ice Age

Fifteen Walking Out

Sixteen The Changelings Tale

Seventeen Midnight Express

Eighteen The Wisdom of Old Earth

Nineteen Radio Waves

About the Author

Sometimes you have to step through the looking glass to get a proper look at someone standing next to you. During my science-fiction career, Michael Swanwick has been a hard guy to miss. Hes steady, prolific, publishes all over the place, and, just like me, he has lost about a hundred awards.

But I didnt understand this guys work at all properly until I went to Russia. I was at a science fiction convention in Saint Petersburg where they were having learned, earnest panels about Michael Swanwick. His novel The Iron Dragons Daughter was the talk of the town.

This dragon book of Swanwicks is thoroughly unlike normal, tedious, off-the-rack dragon books. Its a world of magical elves and trolls where everybodys working in crappy, run-down factories, full of cruel backstabbing, many broken promises, strong-arm hustles, and pervasive despair. In other words, Russia. A shattered, rusty, hard-fantasy world, that is Russia to a T. Ive spoken face-to-face to Russians, and they think Im an interesting foreigner with some useful contacts outside their borders. But Michael Swanwick really speaks to Russians. They consider him a groundbreaking literary artist.

Then there is Swanwick the critic. Im a critic myself, or I wouldnt be writing this introduction. I take this critical gibberish pretty seriously. I dont think an artist gets very far without a solid framework for objective understanding. You can sit there with a hammerlock on your muse, gushing prose under high pressure, and it may be pretty good stuff; but if you lack critical perspective, youll become a toy of your own historical epoch. Your work will date quickly, because you are making way too many unconscious obeisances to the shibboleths of your own time.

Michael Swanwick, however, is a guy who has thoroughly got it down with the shibboleth and obeisance thing. Not only has he mastered this problem himself, hes quite good on the subject of other peoples difficulties. Swanwicks Users Guide to the Postmoderns is the most important critical document about Cyberpunks and Humanists that ever came from a guy who was neither a cyberpunk nor a humanist. That article is, in fact, The Mythos: Swanwick definitively coined the Common Wisdom there. I very much doubt that a better assessment will ever be written.

At the time, one had to wonder why Swanwick had become the self-appointed arbiter of other peoples quarrels. There certainly wasnt much that he could gain from this personally, and it predictably created a ow, much of it centered, with total injustice, on him, Michael Swanwick. But time has richly rewarded his courage and foresight. He did the field a genuine critical service. Science fiction is a better place for his efforts.

Not that I concur with everything Swanwick says, especially his painfully accurate assessment of my own motives. Agreement, maybe not. Respect, very definitely. I dont think that everything I write has to please Michael Swanwick. However, I would be very upset if he thought I was selling out or slacking off. Swanwick, a man and writer of firm integrity, has never sold out or slacked off. I cannot think of a single instance of this, ever, in the extensive Swanwick oeuvre. He is a strong, solid critic and he knows the evil smell of literary vices. Knowing that hes out there, sniffingwell, it keeps me to the grind.

Now we come to the matter of Swanwick being a difficult writer. Whats this allegation about? Well, let me be up-front here: hes not for mundane wimps. Forget about it. Terrible things happen in Swanwick fiction. People suffer, often gruesomely. Furthermore, its a rare Swanwick work which does not include some mind-altering, meticulous instance of evil sex.

So, yes, by the blinkered standards of the Christian Coalition he is somewhat disgusting and obscene. However, the true core of the matter is the Swanwick is an inherently and intrinsically strange human being. Oh sure, hes married, has a child, pays his taxes, stays out of the slammer, but at his core hes a high-voltage visionary. Hes not a professional writer dabbling in the sci-fi genre. He is that rarer and far more valuable thing, an inherently science-fictional thinker who has trained himself, through years of devoted effort, to speak fluently.