Michael Swanwick is one of the most inventive,
non-conforming writers on the market.
Though starting his career with a fairly straight-forward novel (In the Drift), he has slowly and
steadily turned his imagination and spirit loose, culminating most recently in
the idea-explosion that is the Darger and Surplus novels. It is thus in short fiction that one finds
Swanwick at his most focused and careful.
And the relative limitations are beneficial. I’m on the fence, but I would listen to
arguments that short stories are, in fact, Swanwick’s greatest asset. Tales
of the Old Earth, Swanwick’s 2000 collection, is nineteen potential
reasons.
Opening the collection is “The Very Pulse of the
Machine”. An abstract riff (natch) on a
Wordsworth poem, the story tells of the astronaut Martha and what happens after
her vehicle has an accident on the surface of Jupiter’s moon, Io. Her teammate dying in the crash, Martha
elects to attempt to drag the body across the moon to their base. Voices that are either the AI in the dead
body’s vacsuit or in Martha’s head accompanying Martha every step of the way,
things start to look dire no matter how much meth she huffs, the ground around
her even seeming to come alive. In
perhaps the best written yet most Weird story in the collection, “Mother
Grasshopper” tells of the strange happenings to a young man part of a colony on
a space grasshopper (yes, space grasshopper).
Confronted by a magician/god one day, he is compelled to follow the man
across the land, spreading pestilence and disease. A fortuitous meeting one day changes his
direction, but perhaps not his will.
Inspired by Andy Duncan’s “Beluthahatchie” but also
possessing a few drops of Jackie Brown and
Fritz Leiber’s “Gonna Roll the Bones”, “North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy” is a tale of
the train to Hell. A young man who escaped
a fire and brimstone fate now rides the rails as a train attendant. But he gets in a little bit of trouble when
a certain passenger breaks the rules. “The
Dead” is a straight-forward metaphor denouncing corporate disregard for
humanism. Zombies standing in for the
laid-off, the story tells of a businessman and his dealings with a particularly
selfish manager. The selfishness portrayed
in macabre fashion, the story’s message is clear.
A story that shouldn’t work on paper yet does very successfully
in reality, “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O” is a Jungian milieu of archetypes told
across the breadth of human history. Its
success achieved by sustained focus and vivid capture of one archetype (rebel woman
in love with a man on a motorcycle), Swanwick captures the essence of Jung’s
idea in vigorous, energetic form. Good
story. A clash of the young and old in a
science fictional context, “Ancient Engines” is a brief affair, and is essentially
a conversation between an elderly man and a mechanically augmented young man in
a bar. While nicely highlighting the
fleetingness of the ‘latest technology’, it remains simplistic in the face of
possibilities inherent to technological evolution. In another story cutting human ambition down
to size, “The Wisdom of Old Earth” features a woman with a strong opinion of
her own intelligence. Putting her in a
tough science fictional situation, Swanwick shows evolution is not always an
upward trajectory.
A unique and well-developed metaphor, “Radio Waves’ tells of
a dead-man walking upside-down along roadway electrical wires to stay grounded. Seeking domestic redemption while putting off
inevitably being sucked into the sky, it is a ghost story in only the technical
sense, and full of real heart. An odd
story that doesn’t reveal its conceit until the latter stages, “Microcosmic
Dog” is a talking dog story in Truman
Show fashion. About a woman living
in New York City that isn’t quite New York City, when a friend leaves her a dog
to take care of, life in the city becomes never the same. A Weird teleportation story, “Radiant Doors”
(not to be confiused with “Radio Waves”), tells of a strange society and the
immigration problem they are dealing with from another dimension. Not certain this is Swanwick’s most
comprehensive story, but it does string along nicely.
The evolution of civilization in a tea cup, in “Ice Age” a
husband and wife discover a mastodon frozen in one of the ice cubes in their
freezer. Looking a little deeper into
the frozen environement, they discover an ice age society developing, and
before long an industrial evolution, and not long after… It is, of course, the endpoint of this arc of
social evolution where Swanwick makes his point. Gimmicky but page-turning: how will it/us
end? A kind of mini-Brave New World, “Wild Minds” is a spot
of post-human humanism in which an unaugmented man (who also happens to be a
murderer acquitted by a panel of future minds for being “too human”) meets an
augmented woman, and the tension that ensues.
There is a dinosaur on the cover of the printing of Tales of Old Earth I read, and indeed a couple
of the stories deploy the giant lizards in some manner. “Scherzo with
Tyrannosaur” is the story of the manager at a time travel station in the
Cretaceous period who helps give tourists a glimpse of what dinosaur life was like. Swanwick would later expand the story into
the novel Bones of the Earth, and is something
that seems necessary given the bare bones (no pun intended), unpolished feel to
the short storz. “Riding the
Giganotosaur” is about a professor who undergoes a procedure to have the body
of a gigantosaur and is sent back in time to study dinosaur behavior. Atavism ending up competing with the
professor’s civilized side in a manner not unlike Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Swanwick portrays a duality of human nature
in an overt metaphor.
In the end, Tales of
Old Earth is a dynamic collection of short stories that displays Swanwick
in bright light. Nearly every premise
original and wholly imaginative, the writer supports his ideas with meaty prose
and an unfettered freedom to take each creation wherever he would like, all the
while managing to inject a strong dose of humanism into most of the
stories. Swanwick doesn't give a fuck about genre lines, but remains dedicated to maintaining relevancy--a very vibrant outlook. I daresay the best of the lot
is “The Changeling’s Tale”, followed closely by “Mother Grasshopper”, “The
Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O”, “The Wisdom of Old Earth”, and “Radio Waves”, though
there are many other very solid, worthwhile stories. Overall, an easily recommended and
re-readable collection. Let the
arguments for Swanwick’s short fiction being his best aspect roll in…
The following are the nineteen stories collected in Tales of Old Earth:
The Very Pulse of the Machine
The Dead
Scherzo with Tyrannosaur
Ancient Engines
North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy
The Mask
Mother Grasshopper
Riding the Giganotosaur
Wild Minds
The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O
Microcosmic Dog
In Concert
Radiant Doors
Ice Age
Walking Out
The Changeling's Tale
Midnight Express
The Wisdom of Old Earth
Radio Waves
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