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Michael Swanwick | |
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Visit the Michael Swanwick website. |
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Michael Swanwick has received the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards for his work. Stations of the Tide was honored with the Nebula Award and was also nominated for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. "The Edge of the World," was awarded the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1989. It was also nominated for both the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. "Radio Waves" received the World Fantasy Award in 1996. "The Very Pulse of the Machine" received the Hugo Award in 1999, as did "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" in 2000 and "The Dog said Bow-Wow in 2002."
Swanwick's stories have appeared in Omni, Penthouse, Amazing, Asimov's, High Times, New Dimensions, Starlight, Universe, Full Spectrum, Triquarterly and elsewhere. Many have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies, and translated for Japanese, Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, French and Croatian publications. His books include In the Drift, an Ace Special; Vacuum Flowers; Griffin's Egg; Stations of the Tide; The Iron Dragon's Daughter, a New York Times Notable Book, and Jack Faust; his short fiction has been collected in Gravity's Angels (Tachyon), A Geography of Unknown Lands, Moon Dogs, and Tales of Old Earth, a Tachyon Publications-Frog Ltd. title and 2001 Locus award-winner for best short story collection. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter, and their son, Sean. |
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Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures
by Michael Swanwick
Other titles by Michael Swanwick
The Dog Said Bow-Wow
Tales of Old Earth
Gravity's Angels
Michael Swanwick's Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna
The Postmodern Archipelago
Cover illustration and design by Freddie Baer
This collection of award-winning author Michael Swanwick's short-short fiction is a work of masterfully-sustained whimsy for adults unlike anything you've ever read. Cigar-Box Faust contains over seventy stories in fewer than a hundred pages. Often humorous, sometimes chilling, always entertaining, these are the works that have resurrected a moribund literary form and made it live and breathe again.
-True Review One of the most powerful and consistently inventive short story writers of his generation. -Gardner Dozois Always brilliant, Swanwick shines in these quirky short pieces, with over 70 gathered in this collection, including An Abecedary of the Imagination, with six new entries." -Locus Magazine Review from The Washington Post Book World 10/26-11/1/03; Bill Sheehan The World in Miniature Michael Swanwick made his initial reputation with stories like "The Feast of Saint Janis" and "Mummer Kiss," and followed these with a string of exceptional novels such as Stations of the Tide and The Iron Dragon's Daughter. He has always been versatile, and lately his versatility has extended to miniaturized, tightly compressed fictions that are alternately startling, funny and mysterious, and often possess the resonance of especially vivid dreams. Dreams, in fact, play a significant role in Cigar-Box Faust (Tachyon, $14.95), Swanwick's slender collection of equally slender tales. An entire section, "Writing in My Sleep," contains literal transcriptions of prose pieces composed by the author in his sleep. If you ever wanted to know how to identify a troll or where all the best stories come from (The Storyteller Rock, of course), then these bizarre fragments are just what you've been looking for. Elsewhere in the collection, Swanwick reduces Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus" to a 90-second mini-drama in which heaven, hell and everything in between fit neatly into a cigar box. "Archaic Planets" is a series of stories set - with the help of the author's son Sean - on every planet in the solar system. "An Abecedary of the Imagination" uses fewer than 20 pages to tell 26 stories whose subjects range from Atlantis to zygotes. (These are actually rather modest efforts for Swanwick, whose more ambitious stunts include a series of stories based on the elements of the periodic table.) Some of the most memorable miniatures in this book combine fiction, fact and cultural commentary in surprising new ways. One of the high points is "Eight Takes on Kindred Themes," a beautifully articulated meditation on the life and work of Philip K(indred) Dick, a man whose search for the "White Whale of Truth" dominated his abbreviated life. "Brief Essays" reveals the hidden purpose of science fiction conventions, locates the essence of the American experience in the erosion of ethnicity and describes the evolving role of the Superman myth in the cultural history of the 20th century - all in the space of a few paragraphs. The funniest "story" in Cigar-Box Faust is the epistolary jeu d'esprit, "Letters to the Editor," in which Swanwick - responding to a form letter from Asimov's Magazine - updates his curriculum vitae with a series of witty, irreverent pseudo-self-portraits. ('Since last we communicated, I have achieved full spiritual masterhood and been recognized by the Dalai Lama . . . as the one true Western Bodhisattva.') In Swanwick's hands, even the traditionally dull author bio yields unexpected rewards, as do most of the entries in this whimsical, wonderfully eccentric collection. Review from Fantastic Metropolis's Listmania 2003 1/17/04; by Eileen Gunn To read this collection of tiny stories is to have a series of unusually personal interactions with the storyteller. In each story, the author seems to be completely at your disposal, with no goal other than your amusement. The barrier of the book disappears. Novels, even the most compelling, can be impersonal - the author may be distant, and the characters usually feel the wrath of people and forces that do not have their best interests at heart. Short stories, too, have their own agendas - they have tales to tell, they have business to transact. Even a coherent sequence of short-shorts, such as Swanwick's "The Sleep of Reason" or "The Periodic Table," has responsibilities and ambitions outside of keeping you, personally, entertained. Cigar-Box Faust, however, has no ulterior motive, no evident career plan. Reading it is the adult equivalent of having your dad tell you stories in which the main character has your name. Each story speaks directly to you, its ideal reader. Some were written specifically to amuse Swanwick's wife, or son, or favorite editors, and these happy origins may contribute to the effect. It's not a children's book - there's no sugar here, rather, an intoxicating, slightly tart, effervescence. Here's how it works: Swanwick lays down a sentence. It's short, it's punchy, it promises a pay-off. You read it, smile, nod, and move on to the next sentence. That one pays off the sentence before it, and promises an even better payoff if you move on to the one following. You do so, collect the even-better payoff as promised, and continue to be led through the story by increasing promises and even more rewarding payoffs. Very quickly, you come to the end of the story, because it's very short. You have both hands full: felicities, surprises, bon-mots, witticisms, epiphanies, goodies of every description. But, alas, it's over. Oh, look: there's another story right after it. Can Swanwick do it again? Yes, he can. |
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