Quote:Since his first short story appeared over 20 years ago, Michael Swanwick has been one of American SF's most stylish and subversive writers, bringing to his intense, finely wrought stories and novels a sardonic intelligence that has few literary peers. His output is spare: He publishes relatively infrequently, averaging one novel every three or four years, and all of his works share an economy of length that only serves to emphasize how compressedly rich a volume of symbolic and speculative material each of them contains. To open a Swanwick text is to broach an aesthetic Pandora's box: fascination and disturbance inevitably and rewardingly follow. - Nick Gevers Michael Swanwick first came to prominence in the early 80's as part of that incandescent generation of SF writers which included William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Kim Stanley Robinson. In fact his first novel, In The Drift (1985), was published as part of Terry Carr's auspicious Ace SF Specials series, alongside Gibson's Neuromancer and Lucius Shepard's Green Eyes.
Quote:This episodic tale of life, war and survival in post-meltdown Pennsylvania builds a potent new myth from the grim reality of radioactive waste. Swanwick's clean, strong prose makes the story compulsively readable. - George R. R. Martin
A tough, keen-edged blade of a story ... powerful and moving! - Roger Zelazny Swanwick's reputation was further cemented with his second novel, 1987's Vacuum Flowers, a picaresque tour of colonized asteroids and orbiting settlements which the New York Daily news labled "quintessentially Cyberpunk" and "emminently readable".
Quote:A dance of ideas and action at the razor edge of technology. - Roger Zelazny
A pyrotechnic and fast moving tale, jam-packed with inventive detail, that moves at a headlong pace across the solar system. - Gardner Dozois
Swanwick's 1991 novel, Stations of the Tide, a brilliant and indescribably strange future tale, earned him a well deserved Nebula, as well as nominations for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards.
This success was quickly followed by The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), a highly experimental fantasy that drew frenzied praise from the SF&F community.
Quote:Celtic myth blasted, bulldozed, and industrialized ... a bleak gut-wrenching tale that may be the best high fantasy published this year. It lifts the rock and looks at the ugliness underneath many of high fantasy's more cherished cliches ... - Science Fiction Age His later novels Jack Faust (1997) and Bones of the Earth (2002) have garnered equally wide critical acclaim, with Bones' having been nominated for this year's Hugo award, along with no less than three other of his shorter works ("Slow Life" took home the prize for Best Novelette).
Swanwick is one of the last of the great prolific short story writers in Science Fiction, and you can read some very short works here (click on each element), and also on his official website (click on "fiction", then see "Short Story of the Month"). His short fiction has earned him a previous Hugo award, as well as the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Collections include: Cigar Box Faust, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Gravity's Angels, Moon Dogs, and Tales of Old Earth.
Quote:MICHAEL SWANWICK IS A TRUE SEER IN THE BEST SENSE OF THAT WORD. - David Zindell
<i>Edited by: AlphSeeker at: 10/30/03 8:09 pm </i>
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