The Dog Said Bow-Wow

by Michael Swanwick

ISBN: 9781892391520

Published: 2007

Available Format(s): Trade Paperback and eBooks, Limited Hardcover Edition (Sold Out)

Great literature has never been this much fun before. The reigning master of short fiction reinvents science fiction and fantasy in a dazzling new collection unlike anything you’ve ever read. Time-traveling dinosaurs wreak havoc on a placid Vermont town. An ogre is murdered in a locked room in Faerie. An uncanny bordello proves as dangerous as it is alluring. Language is stolen from the builders of Babel. Those strangely loveable Post-Utopian scoundrels and con men Darger and Surplus swindle their way through London, Paris, and Arcadia.

The Dog Said Bow-Wow includes three Hugo Award–winning stories and an original novelette of swashbuckling romance and adventure, “The Skysailor’s Tale.” Ranging from the hardest of science fiction to the highest of fantasy, this irresistible collection amuses and enlightens as only Michael Swanwick can.

“In addition to their individual quality, the 16 stories in this rollicking collection amply demonstrate Hugo-winner Swanwick’s impressive versatility…intriguing characters and lovingly told stories.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Witty, smart, challenging, marveling in off-beat invention and beautifully written….”
—SF Site, featured review

“Every reader with a dollop of humanity will admire Michael Swanwick’s rowdy good humor. His towering creativity seems so effortless that it is easily overlooked—so effortless, and so immense. You won’t want to put this book down.”
—Gene Wolfe

“By turns funny, clever, mysterious, and possessing hidden depths, the stories in Swanwick’s latest collection demonstrate he’s at the top of his game. Delightful, thoughtful work, sure to please his readers.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of The Third Bear

“For most writers, it’s a good day when a story is witty or has great ideas or characters. Michael Swanwick consistently wins on all three.”
—Vernor Vinge

“Michael Swanwick is one of my all-time favorite short-story writers. Sometimes he makes me laugh, sometimes he makes me shudder, sometimes he makes me weep. He always makes me think. And that’s just when I am talking to him.”
—Jane Yolen

“In The Dog Said Bow-Wow, a valuable author has taken the disreputable duckling of category fiction and nurtured it into a swan of elegant speculation, as the wick of disciplined fancy draws the reader’s inflamed imagination ever downward through the waxen feast. Swan and wick: an essential conjunction yielding wonder, warmth, wit, and many a synergistic epiphany.”
—James Morrow, author of Shambling Toward Hiroshima

“Michael Swanwick’s stories start soft, sneak close, and punch hard. And nobody else—nobody!—in science fiction has his range.”
—Nancy Kress, author of After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

“Michael Swanwick’s The Dog Said Bow-Wow is an extraordinarily strong collection. His fierce imagination, subtle humor, and genius for implication are evident in each of these stories.”
—Jeffrey Ford

“…arguably [the] best collection of his stories, populated by tricksters, dinosaurs, gods, and explorers, Swanwick takes a variety of old themes and styles and twists them into something fresh and new.”
—Rain Taxi

“Swanwick’s graceful prose, prodigious inventiveness, and sense of humor are very much in evidence here….”
—Tangent

“…surpassingly brilliant…storytelling of the highest order.”
—Locus

“Witty, smart, challenging, marveling in off-beat invention and beautifully written….”
—SF Site

Michael Swanwick is one of the most acclaimed science-fiction and fantasy short-story writers of his generation, having received five consecutive Hugo Awards. He has also won the Theodore Sturgeon and World Fantasy awards. Swanwick’s novels include The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, a New York Times Notable Book, and the Nebula Award–winning Stations of the Tide. His short fiction has appeared in many venues, including OMNI, Penthouse, Amazing, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Dimensions, and Full Spectrum, and his work has been translated into more than ten languages.

Praise for Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna

“Swanwick has written a short-short story for each of the 13 dinosaurs from the Mesozoic era…. The stories are very funny, often ironic, and well worth the very brief time they take to read. Highlights include ‘The Thief of Time,’ which ironically plays with the different meanings of the egg-stealing Eoraptor, the hilarious ‘A Matter of Size,’ which gives an unexpected look at how the Giantosaurus of South America may have regarded its North American cousins, ‘Three Conversations,’ which gives a sting-in-the-tale ending to a short adventure in kite-flying, ‘Pocket Brontosaurs,’ where Swanwick shows that Michael Crichton and Steven Speilberg may have missed the real commercial appeal of bringing dinosaurs back to life, and the darkly funny ‘Herbivores,” which you should read for yourself. All are worth seeking out….”
—Locus

Praise for Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures

“…wonderful strangeness.”
—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

“[Swanwick] 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…. A whimsical, wonderfully eccentric collection.”
—Washington Post Book World

“Felicities, surprises, bon-mots, witticisms, epiphanies, goodies of every description.”
—Fantastic Metropolis

Praise for Gravity’s Angels

“I don’t think I’ve come upon as finely crafted, as deft a collection of stories in quite some time…. Buy this book. I mean it—it’s one of the best science fiction collections I’ve ever read.”
—Fantasy & Science Fiction

“The stories collected here are luminous with the promise of his ambition, smart and allusive, dense with ideas and images, sacred and profane.”
—Interzone

“…Gravity’s Angels is an extremely impressive collection.”
—Locus

“This volume chronicles the career of one of the most impressive science-fiction writers of the 80s…. Swanwick’s work illustrates the power and potential of contemporary
science fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Swanwick speaks to your heart and sensibilities about relationships, about spirituality about despair, about real people in fantastic situations, about hopes, dreams, and desire.”
—True Review

Visit the Michael Swanwick website.

Introduction by Terry Bisson

‘Hello,’ Said the Stick A Great Day for Brontosaurs
A Small Room in Koboldtown
An Episode of Stardust
Dirty Little War
Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play
Legions of Time
Slow Life
The Bordello in Faerie
The Dog Said Bow-Wow
The Last Geek
The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport
The Skysailor’s Tale
Tin Marsh
Tricerotops Summer
Urdumheim