Category: Michael Swanwick

The Dragon Slayer by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dragon Slayer by Michael Swanwick (The Book of Dragons, 2020) begins with Olav’s backstory, and we learn that he is a wanderer and adventurer and was briefly married to a witch—until he caught her coupling with a demon and slew them both. When we catch up with him he is working as a guard for a desert caravan, which is later ambushed by brigands. Only Olav and (what he thinks is) a young boy survive. Then, when they camp that night, a demon comes out of the forest for Olav, and they only just escape after Olav sets the dry undergrowth on the periphery ablaze.
When the pair arrive at the city of Kheshem, Olav works as a cutpurse to get them the money they need:

The day’s haul was such that he bought the two of them a rich meal with wine and then a long soak in hot water at the private baths. When Nahal, face slick with grease, fiercely declared himself in no need of such fripperies, Olav lifted him, struggling, into the air and dropped him in the bath. Then, wading in (himself already naked), he stripped the wet clothes off the boy.
Which was how Olav discovered that Nahal was actually Nahala—a girl. Her guardians had chopped her hair short and taught her to swear like a boy in order to protect her from the rough sorts with whom traveling merchants must necessarily deal.
The discovery made no great difference in their relationship. Nahala was every bit as sullen as Nahal had been, and no less industrious. She knew how to cook, mend, clean, and perform all the chores a man needed to do on the road. Olav considered buying cloth and having her make a dress for herself but, for much the same reasons as her guardians before him, decided to leave things be. When she came of age—soon, he imagined—they would deal with such matters. Until then, it was easier to let her remain a boy.
At her insistence, he continued the lessons in weapons use.

Olav ends up working for a wizard called Ushted the Uncanny after Ushted materialises in their room and tells Olav that if he continues to steal purses he will be caught. The wizard explains that he can time-travel, and has talked to a condemned future-Olav in his cell. To prove his point, Ushted then takes the current Olav forward in time to show him what happened, and brings back an ashen-faced one in need of drink.
After this there are two other developments, Nahala makes a friend of her own age called Sliv (he doesn’t know she is a girl), and the demon from earlier in the story sets up a lair on a hillside near the city.
The story eventually concludes with Olav, Nahala, Ushted and Sliv going to confront the demon (the creature is terrorising the area and Ushted has volunteered his services to the city’s rulers), and the story proceeds to a busy conclusion which includes (spoilers): (a) Sliv discovering that Nahala is a girl and consequently showing his contempt; (b) Ushted the wizard making a deal with the demon (who is revealed as Olav’s witch-wife) for a time-travelling amulet; (c) Ushted giving Sliv the amulet after Sliv is revealed as the younger Ushted; (d) Nahala acquiring the amulet but being unable to use it; (e) a future-Nahala arriving and killing Ushted the wizard and the dragon-witch. After all this Nahala admires her future self, and the future-Nahala admires the unconscious Olav; she then tells the younger Nahala to tell him it was he who slew the dragon when he wakes up (“you know what a child he can be”).
If this all sounds over-complicated, it is—and it doesn’t explain why the time-travelling Ushted didn’t see what was coming. A pity, as it is reasonably entertaining story to that point.
** (Average). 6,450 words.

The White Leopard by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The White Leopard by Michael Swanwick (New Worlds, 2022) sees Ray, the war veteran protagonist, buy an old ground drone at a yard sale:

What it was, was an RQ-6G Leopard.
The 6G was, in Ray’s opinion, the finest patrol and reconnaissance ground drone ever made. He had qualified on it during Operation Bolivian Freedom, back when he was young. He had hunted down insurgents with one, working from a combat recliner in a secure base across the border in Argentina. He’d known what it felt like to be the most dangerous thing in the jungle at night. He had never experienced anything like that before.
He wanted to feel something like that again.  pp. 87-88

After repairing the Leopard, Ray hooks up to a VR set one night and sends the drone out into the forest. After chasing raccoons and the like for a while, he senses another Leopard in the forest. He contacts the operator, and finds out it is a woman called Helen: she challenges him to find her. When he does they explore the forest together.
Eventually, after a period getting to know each other, they arrange to meet in person at a restaurant. When they arrive, however, they are horrified by what they see across the room: Helen is older than Ray expected, and using a walker, and she is equally horrified by the old, pot-bellied and balding Ray. They both flee. Then, when Ray gets home to his wife Doris, an alcoholic shrew of a woman—but a smart one who has used her previous tech skills to work out what Ray has been doing—she guesses what has happened at the restaurant, and turns the knife, “She was old, wasn’t she? Old like you.”
Ray flees downstairs and straps on his VR set, and sees that Helen’s Leopard is perched on the limb of a nearby tree waiting for his drone—“That’s not who I am,” she says.
The rest of the story details (spoiler), in parallel with the Ray and Helen’s further excursions, Doris’s increasing bitterness about Ray’s extra-marital relationship: she eventually threatens to tell the police about his “terrorist weapon” unless he blows it up and then kills Helen with his own hands. Ray and Helen then conspire to kill Olive, and the story proceeds to an ending where Olive gets the drop on both of them (those tech skills again): she scares off Helen, and then wears a triumphant smile as the Leopard comes down into the basement for Ray. There is a good payoff line:

There was the strong, willful woman he had fallen in love with all those many long years ago.  p. 98

The beginning of this is pretty good in its depiction of old people wanting to recapture their youth, but the back end is more a series of plot manoeuvres, and there is perhaps a little too much going on in that part of the story. Still, not a bad piece.
*** (Good). 3,900 words.

Nirvana or Bust by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Nirvana or Bust by Michael Swanwick (Analog, March-April 2022) opens with an exo-skeleton wearing woman called Huiling dangling her feet into the Grand Canyon when she is found by another woman called Catherine McClury. McClury tells Huiling that an assassin is coming for her. After this the pair sit in silence for a short while, and then McClury asks Huiling if she is going to introduce her exoskeleton:

“Nerve, this is Catherine McClury. She was my advisor at Cornell, my mentor, my everything. Catherine, this is Nirvana or Bust, my research partner.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Catherine said.
“Charmed,” the exoskeleton replied. “But also a little puzzled. Exactly who is it you told you could find Huiling?”
“The folks at the department of technology security. Not just her; I promised to locate you both. Good thing I did, too.”  p. 49

After McClury shows them the assassin’s ship’s path towards them on an app the exo-skeleton downloads, the two woman go to a nearby cabin. They have tea, and later make love.
When (spoiler) the politely spoken assassin (“a chromed mantisform a good seven feet tall”) arrives, it tells Huiling that it is there to communicate and reason with her (although it concludes these opening remarks with the observation that murder is a form of communication!) Then we get to the meat of the story, which is that Huiling and Nirvana or Bust are a merged being, something between symbionts and a complete union. When the assassin confirms this is the case—during the interview it asks Nirvana or Bust why an AI would do this—it states that they must die. But, before the assassin can do anything, McClury intervenes and executes a dataphage that was hidden in the applet—and Nirvana or Bust is erased. The assassin, satisfied with what McClury has done, leaves. McClury tells Huiling that it was a mistake creating AIs in the first place and, “we’re not going to make that same mistake twice.”
The final part of the tale sees Huiling rebooting the exoskeleton on with a copy of the AI, and then there is an final authorial comment: “This is the story of how our civilisation was born.”
This isn’t bad but there is far too much going on here in far too short a space—as with a lot of Swanwick’s stories—and in this case it is mostly talking heads explaining matters to each other.
** (Average). 3,200 words.

1. The Analog magazine version of this story has a really bad text error at the end of the story—ignore the material in black (an errant cut and paste of the biographical material at the end).

The Beast of Tara by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on The Beast of Tara by Michael Swanwick

The Beast of Tara by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) is a “companion piece” to last year’s Dream Atlas (Asimov’s SF March/April 2021)1 and, by the by, also has similarities with Scherzo with Tyrannosaur (Asimov’s SF, July 1999).2 All these (spoiler) involve people from the future interfering with the past.
In this story that intervention comes in the form of a young schoolboy called Gallagher, who turns up at an Irish archaeological site because he wants to write an article for his school paper. The team he visits are using an experimental machine to recover historical sounds (“A stone contains within itself the diminishing vibrations of every sound that ever bounced against it”), and Gallagher “accidentally” damages it on two separate occasions. On his third attempt to do so, Finn, the local fixer/bouncer, intervenes, and Gallagher reveals he is an agent of (not from) the future. He explains he is there to stop development of their new technology because, once they progress, they will find that they will be able to recover sounds from the future as well as the past (there is some waffle about the “quantum realm” here).
After Gallagher disappears in a puff of dust, the team leader, Dr Leithauser, decides to continue with their work, and the story concludes with the revelation that Finn is also an agent from the future (from a faction opposed to Gallagher’s). The team then recover the sound of a harpist playing at the coronation of an Irish king.
This is okay, but the the not entirely convincing plot is formulaic time-traveller material—and tarting it up with bits of Ireland, old and new, doesn’t disguise that.
** (Average). 3,400 words.

1. My review of Dream Atlas.

2. My review of Scherzo with Tyrannosaur.

A Midwinter’s Tale by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Midwinter’s Tale by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1988)1 opens with a far-future soldier, who is trying to seduce a woman, tell her a tale about his childhood:

That Christmas Eve is an island of stability in my sea-changing memories, as solid in my mind as the Stone House itself, that Neolithic cavern in which we led such basic lives that I was never quite sure in which era of history we dwelt. Sometimes the men came in from the hunt, a larl or two pacing ahead content and sleepy-eyed, to lean bloody spears against the walls, and it might be that we lived on Old Earth itself then. Other times, as when they brought in projectors to fill the common room with colored lights, scintillae nesting in the branches of the season’s tree, and cool, harmless flames dancing atop the presents, we seemed to belong to a much later age, in some mythologized province of the future.  p. 24

There are other exotic details:

Before I could grow angry, my cousins hurried by, on their way to hoist the straw men into the trees out front, and swept me up along with them. Uncle Chittagong, who looked like a lizard and had to stay in a glass tank for reasons of health, winked at me as I skirled past. From the corner of my eye, I saw my second-eldest sister beside him, limned in blue fire.  p. 25

The central episode of the story occurs when Flip, the narrator, gets bored with a procession outside and returns to the Stone House; while he is at the fireside a larl, a large predatory beast indigenous to the planet, comes out of the shadows and, to Flip’s surprise, starts speaking to him.
The larl begins by telling Flip how his kind pass on their memories by eating the brains of their dead, and how “he” was eating his grandfather’s when humans first came to this planet (presumably this is one of those inherited memories). The larl goes on to tell him that, after a period of peace between his people and the new arrivals, one of the larls killed a human. The man’s wife, Magda, pursued the larl on her snowstrider, even though she had her young baby with her, and chased the larl to his people’s sacrifice rock (the larl realised he could not outrun the woman and her machine, so decided to pass on the information he had gathered about how to evade her—temporarily at least—to his people).
Magda catches up with the larl at the rock, and watches from a distance while other larls kill and eat her quarry. She notes (spoiler) how they react when they absorb the creature’s flesh and knowledge—and then sees them turn towards her. They hunt her down, a long process that eventually forces her, after she loses the snowstrider, to circle back to the sacrifice rock. There she lays her baby down and offers herself up: when the larls kill and consume her, they become more than animals:

Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed. “Are you following this?” he asked. “Can you separate truth from fantasy, tell what is fact and what the mad imagery of emotions we did not share? No more could I. All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. Blind with awe, I understood the personal tragedy and the communal triumph of that event, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it. A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor and was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.
“As the woman had intended. She had died thinking of the child’s birth, in order that we might share in it. She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us language. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.” The larl stroked my cheek with his great, smooth paw, the ivory claws hooded but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.
I hardly dared breathe.  p. 37-38

The larl goes tells Flip that his people took the baby back to the humans’ Captain, and how the two groups lived in peace thereafter. The larl adds that they didn’t tell the Captain about the woman, and that they take a human every now and then to maintain their closeness to humanity. He then tells Flip that, if he is good, then maybe it will be him they eat.
The last section returns to the soldier at the beginning of the story (indentifiable now as the older Flip), where we see him try to complete his seduction. This part artfully makes the older Flip’s world more real while making his childhood world more doubtful: was it something he imagined, something that was real, or was the larl telling him a story?

Did any of this actually happen? Sometimes I wonder. But it’s growing late, and your parents are away. My room is small but snug, my bed warm but empty. We can burrow deep in the blankets and scare away the cavebears by playing the oldest winter games there are.
You’re blushing! Don’t tug away your hand. I’ll be gone soon to some distant world to fight in a war for people who are as unknown to you as they are to me. Soldiers grow old slowly, you know. We’re shipped frozen between the stars. When you are old and plump and happily surrounded by grandchildren, I’ll still be young and thinking of you. You’ll remember me then, and our thoughts will touch in the void. Will you have nothing to regret? Is that really what you want?
Come, don’t be shy. Let’s put the past aside and get on with our lives.
That’s better. Blow the candle out, love, and there’s an end to my tale.
All this happened long ago, on a planet whose name has been burned from my memory.2

This is very well told story, rich in detail, and even the possible ludicrousness of the memories-from-brains gimmick didn’t register for a couple of days. A deserving winner of that year’s Asimov’s Science Fiction Reader’s Poll.
**** (Very good). 5,950 words.

1. The 1989 Asimov’s Science Fiction Reader’s Poll Winners at ISFDB. It is worth comparing this list with the Hugo nominees and the Nebula nominees. They are all quite different that year.

2. I note that this section (I haven’t checked the rest of it) is rewritten for the Spirits of Christmas, 1989 anthology version. Original in normal font, revision in italics:

Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed.

[No change]

“Are you following this?” he asked. “Can you separate truth from fantasy, tell what is fact and what the mad imagery of emotions we did not share? No more could I. All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant.

“Can you understand?” he asked. “What it meant to me? All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. I felt it with full human comprehension.

Blind with awe, I understood the personal tragedy and the communal triumph of that event, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it.

I understood the personal tragedy and the community triumph, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it.

A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor and was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.

[“all” deleted]

“As the woman had intended. She had died thinking of the child’s birth, in order that we might share in it.

“As the woman had hoped I would be. She had died with her child’s birth foremost in her mind.

She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us language. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.”

[No change]

The larl stroked my cheek with his great, smooth paw, the ivory claws hooded but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.
I hardly dared breathe.

[“smooth” changed to “velvety”, “hooded” changed to “sheathed”]

NB The first two quoted sections are from the reprinted version I read (but have the Asimov’s page reference); the third quoted section is from the Asimov’s version.

Dream Atlas by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Dream Atlas by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2021) has a scientist studying dreams meet her future self while having one. She is subsequently told that the dream continuum stretches through space and time and can be used to see the past and future. Future scientist then tells her the eighteen principles she needs to complete her work and earn a Nobel Prize, much wealth, and fame. However, (spoiler) before future scientist can finish her spiel, far-future beings1 interrupt the process and tell the present day scientist it would be too hazardous for the people of her time to have that knowledge.
This is an entertaining enough squib but it is slight, and doesn’t really make any sense if you think about it too much: how would the future scientist come into existence if the far-future beings intervene?
** (Average). 2,100 words.

1. The far-future beings sound like the same kind of deal as The Unchanging in his story Scherzo with Tyrannosaur (Asimov’s SF, July 1999), reviewed here recently.

Scherzo with Tyrannosaur by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Scherzo with Tyrannosaur by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s SF, July 1999) opens with the supervisor of a time travel event called The Cretaceous Ball, which is held in the past, describing the family at one of the tables. The wealthy couple seated there have a daughter, Melusine, who is eyeing Hawkins, the young palaeontologist assigned to their table. They also have a son called Phillipe, who is wildly enthusiastic about dinosaurs.
Later on, and after the supervisor is called back to the future to deal with an incident (TSOs—Time Safety Officers—have busted a couple of waiters for trying to pass information from the future to the past), he returns and is accosted by Hawkins, who reports that Melusine has been hitting on him. Matthews begs to be relieved of his hosting duties, and the supervisor tells him to write a memo about the incident and avoid his tent for the rest of the evening.
The supervisor subsequently takes over as the family’s host, and he gives Phillipe a serrated dinosaur tooth just before an aging T. Rex called Satan is drawn to the enclosure in front of the protected dining area by a blood lure. Satan subsequently charges the armoured glass and the boy is hugely impressed. After the supervisor has finished talking to the boy about his job ambitions, he recovers a fallen napkin for Melusine and gives it to her—inside there is a promotional leaflet with a note saying to meet at a specific tent later—but signed not with the supervisor’s name but with Matthews’.
The final piece of the setup takes place shortly afterwards, when the supervisor sleeps with Melusine in Matthews’ dark tent; she is unaware of who she is with. Meanwhile the supervisor, thanks to a note from his future self, thinks about Matthews outside the compound—where he is about to be killed by Satan.
The denouement of the story unwinds the setup (spoiler), and this begins when the supervisor reads Hawkins’ memo later on. This reveals that Hawkins is the grown up Phillipe, and that he isn’t Melusine’s brother but her son, who was transported back in time so the grandparents could bring up him and Melusine as sister and brother. Then the supervisor realises that he is Phillipe’s father—that the boy is the result of the encounter he has just had with Melusine—and he sits down to send a note to himself in the past that will prevent his son’s death. However, before he can do that, a much older version of himself turns up and advises against his intended actions (saying, among other things, that the mysterious “Unchanging” will remove humanity’s ability to time travel). The older man finally hands the supervisor a version of the memo that simply tells of Hawkins’ death, and the story closes with the supervisor making a decision about which one to send.
This is a very cleverly plotted and inventive story but it is also a little unengaging. This is maybe because the supervisor is an unlikeable character, and it’s hard to care what his decision will be, and also, perhaps, that the story is pretty tightly packed and everything seems to rush by (which makes Swanwick’s stories the mirror image of much of today’s bloat).
Although it’s a good enough story it wouldn’t have been my choice for the 2000 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. 1
*** (Good). 4,550 words.

1. The story’s other award nominations can be seen on its ISFDB page. It seems to have been fighting it out with another Swanwick story, Ancient Engines (Asimov’s SF, February 1999).