Paul Di Filippo Reviews Being Michael Swanwick by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Being Michael Swanwick, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (Fairwood Press 978-1958880142, trade paperback, 328pp, $20.95) November 2023

Consider the case of author Fran Leibowitz. Essentially the creator of a one- or two-book oeuvre, and featuring an absence of new publications over several decades, she is still sought-after for frequent interviews, and even had a recent documentary made about her by none other than Martin Scorsese: Pretend It’s a City (2020). Justifiably or not, folks still cherish her opinions and insights and personality despite her lack of new formal writings.

Now consider the case of Michael Swanwick, the Prolific Phantasmagorical Penman of Philadelphia. Perpetually active author of over one hundred stories and almost a dozen novels—some of the best and most memorable work the genre of fantastika has ever seen—he maintains a low profile, is not notably mobbed by the press, and, after a decades-long streak of awards and nominations, has lately fallen off the arguably corrupted ballots of the twenty-first century. Life just does not seem fair in its apportionment of fame and attention, does it?

But now comes a very welcome partial redressing of such a cosmic imbalance in the literary world. One of the field’s best and most dedicated critics, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (whose upcoming first novel, Equimedian, is happily heralded in the press kit here) brings us a book-length one-on-one with Swanwick, in which Swanwick’s entire career is subjected to loving analysis, thoughtful dissection, and shocking (absolutely shocking!) personal revelations. Did you know that in his youth, the man actually consumed several illegal drugs?!? Now it can be told!

All joking aside, I found myself pulled into this book as if I were an eager specter, lonely for the living, hovering over the conversation between these two sharp-witted guys. Not only does this extended dialogue anatomize what has made Swanwick’s work so good and where the work has its roots, it also limns a broad portrait of the whole field for the past forty years; serves as a limited biography of the author; charts the path from amateur to consummate professional; and investigates in general what makes SF and fantasy so especially attractive to readers.

The book has its genesis in two predecessors. First comes 2001’s Being Gardner Dozois, in which Swanwick pulled the exact same legerdemain on his pal Dozois. In his review of that volume, critic Nick Gevers found it to be “very entertaining, and uncommonly valuable in its critical insights”—a verdict that applies to the Zinos-Amaro & Swanwick production as well. And then, in 2016, with Traveler of Worlds, Zinos-Amaro attained the same magic with Robert Silverberg, a conversation-in-print that I reviewed in these very pages.

As in the Silverberg outing, our interlocutors reveal themselves to be very simpatico. And yet the conversation never devolves into mere mutual admiration or pats on the back. Zinos-Amaro will bring up insights that Swanwick has never formulated, and Swanwick will either endorse them or politely shoot them down. But more often, they are in agreement with their estimations of the relative value of the stories and their meanings, hidden or explicit.

The book is nicely arranged into a linear chronology. Each chapter covers roughly five years of Swanwick’s career, and employs about the same number of pages. (The exceptions are Chapters Nine and Ten, which deal with flash fictions and collaborations.)

Chapter One finds us in the years 1980 to 1984. It chronicles a heady time, when Swanwick was learning how to write, what he wanted to write, and how to sell it. His integration into the SF community proceeds in parallel. He speaks of his influences as a young reader, and how he got to meet his idols. “[Michael Bishop] was another one of my heroes. And a really nice guy…. Wonderful writer, and I admired him immensely.” At the outset, Swanwick proves himself a generous gentleman, full of praise for his peers and never mean-spirited. And also in this chapter, we learn implicitly that Zinos-Amaro has read every word of Swanwick’s with close attention, since his questions always strike right to the heart of each story.

“Chapter Two: 1985-1989” conjures up the cyberpunk era and the endtimes of Philip K. Dick. Swanwick expresses his satisfaction and love for these early pieces of his, but also remains authentically modest: “A lot of these early stories you can tell are written by a young man. I think that maybe towards the end here I’m beginning to grow up. Fingers crossed!”

“Chapter Three: 1990-1994” sees Swanwick delving into his passion for the work of Tolkien, and stretching his ambitions. Zinos-Amaro opens the next section, “Chapter Four: 1995-1999”, with a typically cogent observation that can only be supplied during such a retrospective examination: “We kick off the mid-90s with an unusually grim group of stories.” All throughout the literary analyses, we get great anecdotes from Swanwick’s life, either directly related to his inspirations, or just straight-out illuminating of his quotidian existence, such as this passage, occasioned by a discussion of “The Bordello in Faerie”, from “Chapter Five: 2000-2004”.

ZINOS-AMARO: Have you ever visited a brothel?
SWANWICK: I have not. I was very careful to avoid them. In all my young reading as an adolescent I read carefully what writers had written about their own experiences in brothels, and it always turned out to be a bad thing.

The last three chapters—”Chapter Six: 2005-2009”; “Chapter Seven: 2010-2014”; and “Chapter Eight: 2015-2022”—find Swanwick at the top of his game, and the level of discourse on his greatly ambitious work attains a new depth. Along the way he delivers scattered observations on the world at large: “Americans and Russians are like twin brothers separated at birth: one of them got all the good luck, one of them got all the bad luck, and neither one deserved it.”

The last few pages of Chapter Eight offer a touching look backwards by Swanwick along the entire arc of his career. He concludes thus: “In a way, at seventy-one years of age, I feel like I’m now truly getting a grip on the craft of stories. The longer I can manage to hold on, the better the chance I have to write something really good.” Words that echo those of another humble master, the painter Hokusai, at age eighty-nine: “If heaven will afford me five more years of life, then I’ll manage to become a true artist.”

When I was a lad, I discovered Sam Moskowitz’s book of portraits of SF writers, Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction. I was enthralled by these backstage glimpses of the writers whose work I adored. It seems to me that there is probably a cadre of young readers who will find this volume just as magical.

Finally, might I suggest that you pair this conversational book with Swanwick’s recent Best Of, Volume 2? If you need any further convincing, check out my coverage at the link.

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