From rec.arts.sf.reviews Fri Feb 14 15:42:03 1992 Path: herkules.sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!seunet!mcsun!uunet!think.com!ames!bionet!raven.alaska.edu!never-reply-to-path-lines From: ecl@mtgzy.att.com (Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: GRIFFIN'S EGG by Michael Swanwick Message-ID: <1992Feb13.191555.7961@raven.alaska.edu> Date: 13 Feb 92 19:15:55 GMT Sender: wisner@raven.alaska.edu (Bill Wisner) Organization: University of Alaska Computer Network Lines: 51 Approved: wisner@ims.alaska.edu GRIFFIN'S EGG by Michael Swanwick A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper In response to complaints about rising prices for novels--somewhere around US$25 for a hardback these days--and also that novels are getting too long and bloated, some publishers are responding by publishing novellas in book form at lower prices. (Pulphouse took this a step further and is doing short stories in paperback at US$1.95 each.) The first such novella I noticed was THE HEMINGWAY HOAX by Joe Haldeman (though it turned out that that had been fleshed out to novel length--about 150 pages, or 45,000 words); now we have GRIFFIN'S EGG by Michael Swanwick. How successful this trend will be is unclear. Unit pricing has always been popular with readers; years ago a friend of ours had a "penny-a-page" rule for books which by now must have been modified to at least a penny-and-a-half. Perhaps realizing this, Haldeman said in his acceptance speech for the Hugo for Best Novella for "The Hemingway Hoax" that people had asked if they should buy the novel if they already had the novella and he wanted to assure them that the only difference between the novella version and the novel version was that for the novella version he had cut 15,000-20,000 words of explicit sex from the novel. At any rate, whether US$16 for a 100-page book will be more acceptable than US$25 for a 500-page book remains to be seen. Now admittedly everything I've said so far is crassly commercial and has nothing to do with art or entertainment, which are presumably what books are about. So what about the novella itself? Set on the moon in a future in which mining and manufacturing are carried out on the moon to avoid destroying the earth's ecosphere, it seems to be about how this is destroying the moon. Then a thermonuclear exchange occurs on earth and it seems to be a "how will we survive in isolation" story a la Heinlein. Then it shifts to bio-chemical warfare, mind-altering drugs, .... There is just too much here for a novella--the plots twists are too rapid-fire. It's ironic, but this would have been better as a novel. As a novella, all the good ideas are just too dizzying. (The title is from a Vachel Lindsay poem quoted before the title page. It is, alas, extremely sexist and its inclusion, coupled with some of the events in the story, gives the story a slant that I suspect Swanwick did not intend.) %T Griffin's Egg %A Michael Swanwick %C New York %D January 1992 %I St. Martin's Press %O hardback, US$15.95 %G ISBN 0-312-06989-8 %P 92pp Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | att!mtgzy!ecl or ecl@mtgzy.att.com From new Thu Jun 16 19:02:09 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!trane.uninett.no!eunet.no!nuug!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!convex!news.duke.edu!godot.cc.duq.edu!hudson.lm.com!telerama.lm.com!not-for-mail From: dani@telerama.lm.com Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Swanwick: The Iron Dragon's Daughter Date: 24 May 1994 16:36:48 -0400 Organization: Telerama Public Access Internet, Pittsburgh, PA USA Lines: 37 Message-ID: <2rtoh0$ndr@telerama.lm.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: telerama.lm.com "The Iron Dragon's Daughter" is Michael Swanwick's venture into fantasy -- if you're willing to stretch the term. Jane is a changeling -- a human child in a world of elves and trolls and dwarves and gargoyles and so on and on. The novel opens in Dickensian circumstances, in a Steam Dragon factory, where she and other children are worked -- most of them to an early death. Through circumstances which at first seem coincidental, she acquires a grimoire -- the operations manual of a war dragon. Like so many of the concepts in the book, this one balances between magic and technology: A dragon is manufactured, but it is also alive, with its own will and imperatives. The dragon Jane eventually finds is hidden in the factory junkyard -- damaged, but not nearly as badly damaged as its stealth technology makes it appear -- and its main imperative is one of destruction. They make an unequal bargain which leads to their escape into the wider world beyond the factory. Jane makes her way through this world, first in school, then at university, then in society. She is often a sympathetic character, but only occasionally an admirable one: As an underdog in this world she generally does whatever it takes to make her way, and a lot of people seem to get used up in the process. It's an excellent book. Swanwick creates a world recognizably based on our own, despite the prevalence of magic and of creatures of myth, but avoids the too-common step of making the worlds similar to the point of parody. The parallels and differences are sometimes quirky ("My roommate ate my homework!"), but they are never allowed to obscure the life-and- death seriousness of Jane's situation. The whole book is a successful balancing act. ----- Dani Zweig dani@netcom.com dani@telerama.lm.com 'T is with our judgements as our watches, none Go alike, yet each believes his own --Alexander Pope From /tmp/sf.4146 Tue Aug 9 01:42:59 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!usc!yeshua.marcam.com!hookup!news.sprintlink.net!dg-rtp!sheol!dont-reply-to-paths From: jjfink@skcla.monsanto.com (Joel Finkle) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Michael Swanwick: The Iron Dragon's Daughter Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Organization: Searle R&D Message-ID: <1994Feb16.150815.25489@tin.monsanto.com> Date: 17 Feb 94 02:51:40 GMT Lines: 64 Review of Michael Swanwick's _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_ Recently, two of my favorite SF authors came out with fantasy books, and it so happened that both were the first books I've bought by these authors as new hardcovers. Lois McMaster Bujold's _The Spirit Ring_ was a romantic fantasy set in the middle ages, with a firm tie to history and then state-of-the- art alchemy. It worked pretty well, playing on Bujold's strength in characterization. I was a little hesitant to see that Michael Swanwick's latest book was fantasy, not SF, but I snatched it up anyway, expecting at the very least wild strangeness. I was not disappointed. One of the most overmined sub-genres in fantasy seems to be the mixing of science fiction with fantasy: magic found in a futuristic society. I have enjoyed some of this type of stuff, but it starts to grate. _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_ (IDD from now on) is a look in a very different direction. IDD is set in an industrial faerie. This brings back the 'beautiful and terrible' aspects of faerie: There is great beauty and wonder, pollution and class struggles. It is as if the magical world kept advancing in technology as did our own, and abuse of power is magnified from this world, just as the power is. Sort of faeriepunk (sorry, I had to say it). Some of Swanwick's themes found in Vacuum Flowers and Stations of the Tide appear here: Rebellion against fate, the nature of reality, the power of sexual magic. This is by no means a light romp, a la Piers Anthony or Terry Pratchett. The book deals with Jane, a changeling brought over from the lower world (here), working in the dragon mills, and her fate intertwined with a world-hating dragon, and two souls who keep reappearing in her life. She escapes this life, but with each step raising herself up socially she becomes more entangled in tragedy. There's funny stuff here, such as a class in Comparative and Speculative Anatomy, using laser spectrometry for divination, but Jane's life itself is grim, doomed. Is there a predestined fate for each of us? Can we make our own lives, our own identities? The end of the book seems rushed, another 20 pages might have smoothed things up a bit. But perhaps that is the point -- that the end can't be smoothed out. Overall, if you enjoy Swanwick's writing, you should enjoy this book. If industrial magic makes you gag, you may want to steer clear. %A Michael Swanwick %T The Iron Dragon's Daughter %I AvoNova %G ISBN 0-688-13174-3 %O $23 US %D 1994 -- Joel Finkle Searle R&D jjfink@skcla.monsanto.com "And when I die don't bury me / in a box in a cemetery. Out in the garden would be much better, I could be pushin' up home grown tomatoes" -- Guy Clark, "Home Grown Tomatoes" From /tmp/sf.4146 Tue Aug 9 01:54:59 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!news.intercon.com!news1.digex.net!rtp.vnet.net!news.sprintlink.net!dg-rtp!sheol!dont-reply-to-paths From: ansible@cix.compulink.co.uk (David Langford) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Michael Swanwick review: The Iron Dragon's Daughter Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: Date: Sun, 10 Apr 1994 21:15:39 GMT Lines: 94 %A Michael Swanwick %T The Iron Dragon's Daughter %I Millennium %C London %D 1993 %G 1-85798-081-6 %P 343pp %O large paperback UKP 8.99 reviewed by Dave Langford [A version of this review is to appear in the British SF Association's critical journal VECTOR.] When John Crowley's _Little, Big_ appeared in 1981, it carried (and has carried ever since) a commendation from Ursula Le Guin: `a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.' This begs the question, of course ... can we have a _re_definition when definition has always been elusive? It may be less so when John Clute has finished weaving the hypertextual Net To Catch Fantasy that will structure the coming Clute/Grant _Fantasy Encyclopedia_. For now let's say that, like _Little, Big_ yet far removed from it, _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_ gives one hell of a jolt to received ideas of what is possible in fantasy. Swanwick's otherworld setting is simultaneously magical and steampunk-like, a dreamland ravaged by Industrial Revolution. Its opening sequence in the vast factory where iron dragons (cybermagical war machines) are made _seems_ to cue a standard picaresque: when Jane the indentured changeling has flown an iron dragon to safety, she and it will have adventures at all the interesting places on the map, right? In fact the dragon Melanchthon recedes for a time into the background, and Jane's story weaves on through a series of surprises. School life with a class of weirdly assorted nonhumans alternates with shoplifting down at the local mall, with fantasy and realism brutally interwoven. The child-catcher sent to retrieve Jane for the factory engages in a battle of electronic countermeasures with the dragon, under the guise of a riddle game. A friend chosen for a year of bliss followed by glorious burning in a wicker cage is of course constantly appearing on TV (and hides a dirty little secret which in our own world, the other side of Dream Gate, could only be allegorical). The school principal's basilisk provides one memorably nasty bit of description. In the next sequence at university, Jane's initiation into how alchemy really works -- not to mention the real difference between exoteric and esoteric -- has a bizarre ring of conviction. (Not to mention humour. I loved the passage where Jane and another female student discuss the essential giving of a name to their, ahem, fount of sexual power: `Siege Perilous', for example, or `The Ineluctable Cavern of Despair'.) Swanwick's invention never flags, and there are plenty more ingenious set-pieces, outlined with hallucinated intensity. Besides illuminations there are mysteries, lines of perplexity which all lead to Spiral Castle: not a castle but a singularity, a beginning and ending place, a multidimensional manifold supporting or enclosing the universe. One withered and blasted explorer lectures to the University about his disastrous expedition through Hell Gate almost to Spiral Castle, with slides ... this is called the Deep Grammar lecture. Through tangles of space, time and recarnation, people may have many simultaneous avatars, and in each section of the book Jane's life becomes tortuously entangled with a different boy/man who is always the same and always doomed. Other characters recur: one senile and ineffectual-seeming elf (elves are the upper class as always, and total bastards) keeps reappearing as something greater, while each new glimpse of Melanchthon shows him more powerful, ambitious and insane. The iron dragon manipulates Jane mercilessly; no longer a nice girl, she herself has become a dab hand at sexual manipulation and exploitation; the world (not her own) compels it. In the end, the metaphysical connections with our own reality seem almost clear. The _awen_, the trance of inspiration, offers Dream-Gate visions and glossolalia from our world, its commercials, political slogans, historic phrases: `one small step for man' ... there is an element of jokiness here and in some of the allusions to mythagos, Friar Bacon's Brazen Head, _Little, Big_, _1066 and All That_, even one dread Lovecraftian tome. Swanwick oversteps just once, with a magick Word of Power which sacrifices everything for the insider's giggle on realizing its syllables are acronyms -- SF Writers of America Young-Adult Special Interest Group -- oh, come off it! Penultimately we follow Jane and Melanchthon through Hell Gate into chaos on an impossible mission of destruction, edge-of-the-seat pursuit and black betrayal. The conclusion takes us satisfyingly beyond Spiral Castle and an encounter with its Goddess. It ought to be read. Indeed the whole of _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_ should be read. It's garish, quirky and new. It will have imitators. Come back in a dozen years and we'll discuss whether it's lasted as well as _Little, Big_ can be seen to have lasted today. Swanwick's chances look pretty good to me. [Ends] David Langford ansible@cix.compulink.co.uk From rec.arts.sf.reviews Fri May 5 17:47:04 1995 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!sunic.sunet.se!news.luth.se!eru.mt.luth.se!news.kth.se!nac.no!Norway.EU.net!EU.net!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!nobody From: rdiller@midway.uchicago.edu (Mark Diller) Subject: review: The Iron Dragon's Daughter Message-ID: <199505031535.KAA20664@midway.uchicago.edu> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Date: Wed, 3 May 1995 16:53:26 GMT Approved: wex@media.mit.edu (Alan Wexelblat) Lines: 55 Swanwick, Michael The Iron Dragon's Daughter review by Mark Diller This is a book which might be termed "realist fantasy", oxymoronic though that might seem. Like Orson Scott Card's _Wyrms_, _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_ is a book which freely mixes fantasy elements with grim and gritty details of some of the less pleasant aspects of everyday life. Where Card's work was set in a medieval period, though, Swanwick writes about a modernist environment in which automobiles have lively personalities, red dwarves hang out at the mall, and a young changeling's greatest concern is whether she can get a date with a cute elf named Peter. Jane, the changeling, is at the center of the narrative and she is a full and complex character, well-drawn and sympathetic. So too the "iron dragon" of the title, a mechanical construction endowed with self-knowledge and purposes of its own, is an effective and interesting player on Swanwick's stage. Any good writer can tell you that quality fiction is character-driven, and this book has very strong characters. So why did I find it so boring? Ultimately Swanwick's work serves as a necessary corrective for the guideline noted above: good fiction is based on strong characters, but characterization cannot be an end in itself. Though Jane is a compelling protagonist, her story proceeds at such a plodding tempo that I found myself flipping forward to see how many more pages I would have to read before something finally happened. When the book opens Jane is toiling in a child- labor sweatshop, and we have no trouble immediately identifying with her and hoping that she escapes her situation. There follows a necessary build-up to her escape attempt, in league with the iron dragon, a brief flurry of activity, and then the chapter ends and we find ourselves mired in another long, long period of inactivity. I liked Jane, and I wanted her to come out well, but reading this book was like watching paint dry. I think that maybe this book was mistakenly labelled a work of fantasy/SF. It would be far more appropriately shelved in the young adult fiction area; a bored, alienated, lonely 15-year-old girl may well find in Jane a character she can identify with and learn from in a way that I could not. Unfortunately, lacking this identification I found little else to enjoy in the book. It is skillfully executed, but in the final analysis just not a very good story. %A Swanwick, Michael %T The Iron Dragon's Daughter %I William Morrow %C New York %D 1994 %G ISBN 0-688-13174-3 %O hardcover, US$23.00 [1995] -- --Alan Wexelblat, Reality Hacker, Author, and Cyberspace Bard MIT Media Lab - Intelligent Agents Group finger(1) for PGP key Voice: 617-253-9833 Pager: 617-945-1842 wex@media.mit.edu http://wex.www.media.mit.edu/people/wex/ "Are we fugitives from the law?" "Yes." "Idiocy is our only option." From rec.arts.sf.reviews Mon Apr 17 00:09:18 2000 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.ida.liu.se!newsfeed.sunet.se!news01.sunet.se!news-peer-europe.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!nycmny1-snh1.gtei.net!news.gtei.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!dreaderd!not-for-mail Sender: wex@deepspace.media.mit.edu From: tillman@aztec.asu.edu (P.D. TILLMAN) Subject: Vacuum Flowers et. al. -- a Swanwick retrospective Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Reply-To: tillman@aztec.asu.edu Date: 12 Apr 2000 17:00:52 -0400 Message-ID: Organization: Software Agents Group X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.7/Emacs 20.4 Lines: 158 NNTP-Posting-Host: deepspace.media.mit.edu X-Trace: dreaderd 955573255 21253 18.85.23.65 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2680 [The review author notes: "The essay resulted in an interesting correspondence with Himself. And my being called in as a geologic consultant for the upcoming dino/time-travel novel. Whee!" ] Vacuum Flowers (et. al.), by Michael Swanwick Review Copyright 2000 Peter D. Tillman Rating: "A" -- energetic, inventive space opera. Highly recommended. Vacuum Flowers is a grand tour of the inhabited Solar System, set in a medium-term future. The book opens in Eros Kluster, one of many asteroid-based settlements that form the bulk of Human space, after all of humanity on Earth was absorbed into the Comprise, a world-wide AI- and net-mediated group mind. The Klusters are frontier capitalist polities, more or less, with advanced biotech and neuro-engineering -- most people spend their workday wetware-programmed by their employer, a (+/-) reversible process. There is, umm, potential for abuse and Swanwick has fun exploring the consequences of this technology. For example, a police raid wouldn't require many *police* -- temp-deputies could be imprinted on the spot... People's Mars, an unappealing collectivist state based on classical Sparta, is nonetheless making good progress terraforming Mars. The cislunar settlements, a no-man's land between Humanity and the Comprise, are the dark anarchic Mean Streets. The remote Dyson settlements in the Oort are bucolic biophile semi-utopias, offstage. Swanwick notes that he "tried to display a range of plausible governmental systems throughout the System, all of them flawed the way that governments are in the real world." Nicely done, one of the highlights of Vacuum Flowers. Oh, and the Flowers are pretty little plants, engineered to live in the vacuum and eat garbage, that have become a weedy nuisance -- another nice touch. Swanwick is, surprisingly, one of the few SF authors who've borrowed Freeman Dyson's remarkable biotech space-settlement ideas. Dyson is an extraordinarily inventive and graceful scientist-writer, and I seldom miss a chance to recommend his books -- see for a bit of Dyson info. This was Swanwick's second novel, and first really successful one. Despite some rough spots -- notably, the cyberpunkish opening -- Vacuum Flowers remains an exemplary modern space-opera, one of the best in the extraordinary reinvention of my favorite subgenre during the past two decades. I've now read VF three times (1987, 1993, & 2000), and I expect to enjoy it again in 2007 or so. Highly recommended. Works that carry on VF's sfnal dialog include Ken MacLeod's Cassini Division (etc.) -- for imaginative, non-obvious Solar economies and politics, and for biophilia-in-space; Wil McCarthy's Bloom -- for another aggressive, weird post-human Earth; and many more. This is one of my favorite parts of following SF: watching talented writers toss Neat Ideas back and forth. Benford has written about this dialog at some length, and I'd give a cite if I could find it.... Swanwick's other SF/F efforts also feature careful world-building, thoughtful searches for non-obvious consequences of technological change, and an increasingly distinctive literary style. His works similar to VF include the early, vigorous and clever "Ginungagap" (1980), and the sombre, scary and underrated short novel Griffin's Egg (1991, 2000 reprint in Moon Dogs, NESFA), both of which repay rereading. OK, now that I've started -- I found his first novel, In the Drift (1984), 'what-if Three Mile Island had been *really* bad?', OK but unremarkable. Stations of the Tide (1991), a far-future Tempest retelling (with sea-changes!) won him a well-deserved Nebula. I thought it was the best book of 1991. On second reading (1998), I found it a bit murky and florid, but still excellent. Note that Stations appears to be set in VF's future. And the bureaucrat looks like Gene Wolfe! The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1994), set in a hard-edged industrial Faerie, might be his best novel so far. Like many, I found his reworking of Jack Faust (1997) disappointing, but I'll give it another shot in 2003 or so. Next up is a time travel/dinosaur novel! -- I presume the recent dino shorts in Asimovs are previews. No publication date yet. Swanwick, a prolific short-story writer, has several collections: Gravity's Angels (1991) & A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997, out of print), both with lots of Good Stuff -- and four(!) new collections are forthcoming -- one, Moondogs, is now out: Still to come are Tales Of Old Earth; Cigar-Box Faust, a collection of short-shorts; and Puck Aleshire's Abecedary, a chapbook. Most of his recent shorts are first published in Asimov's, another reason to subscribe. Swanwick's short fiction is not always to my taste, but always worth reading -- see the online-fiction sampler below. I'm not going to play 'what's my favorite Swanwick story?' right now, but don't let that dissuade you.... In VF Swanwick acknowledges financial support from the 'MC Porter Endowment for the Arts', which led Tom Easton to praise said Endowment in his Analog review. Swanwick abashedly wrote back that he was being cute in thanking his patient wife, Marianne Porter, for carrying her notoriously slow-writing spouse through his lean early years. "Write faster, Swanwick," she said (he said). Amen. Links: There are two good interviews of MS online, both of which are required reading for Swanwick fans: http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/nonfiction/intms.htm (12-99) http://realitybreak.sff.net/archive/swanwick.htp (1-94) -- and here's an excerpt from the 1998 Locus interview: http://locusmag.com/1998/Issues/03/Profile.html I couldn't find a dedicated Swanwick site -- who knows, maybe this could be the start of one. In the meanwhile, basics are available at: http://www.steampunk.com/newsfch/Authors/S/Michael_Swanwick/ http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/pbiblio.cgi?Michael_Swanwick If you know of a good Swanwick link that isn't here, please send it! I'd be willing to provide content for a Swanwick website and help to keep it updated, but I'm not in a position to start one from scratch. Short fiction online: "Riding the Gigantosaur" (1999): http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_991011/riding.htm "The Very Pulse of the Machine" -- 1999 Hugo winner: http://www.sfsite.com/asimovs/hugos/pulse.html "Radiant Doors" & "Wild Minds" (1999 Hugo nominees): http://www.sfsite.com/asimovs/hugos/radiantdoors.html http://www.sfsite.com/asimovs/hugos/wildminds.html Green Fire (1999), Isaac Asimov saves the Universe! RAH assists.... by Eileen Gunn, Andy Duncan, Pat Murphy, and Michael Swanwick http://eventhorizon.com/sfzine/collab/pages/green_fire.html "The Wireless Folly" (1997): http://www.yardbird.com/wirelessfollyswanwick.htm "The Changeling's Tale" (1994): http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/stories/chang.htm Note: all books mentioned are in print (in US &/or UK), unless otherwise noted. An earlier version of this essay sparked an interesting discussion on Usenet: http://www.deja.com/viewthread.xp?AN=595203791 %T Vacuum Flowers (et. al.) %A Michael Swanwick %D 1987 %D 1997 reprint %I Ace %O US$6 %P 256 pp %G ISBN 0441858767 Read more of my reviews: http://www.silcom.com/~manatee/reviewer.html#tillman