Community Corner
Local Science Fiction Writer Honored
Roxborough's Michael Swanwick won the Asimov Reader's Award on May 21.
On May 21 in Washington D.C., Roxborough-based Science fiction writer Michael Swanwick was awarded the prestigious Asimov's Reader's Award for short story. Swanwick, who's been living and working in Roxborough for 30 years, was honored for Libertarian Russia.
"The award is given by vote of the Asimov readership," explained Swanwick, who lives with his wife Marianne n Leverington Avenue. "It's actually a very meaningful award because the readers are the people I'm trying to reach. And this particular story is a very odd one. If you had asked me, I would not have thought that this would be a particularly popular story. The award showed me how wrong I was."
Set 100 years in the future, Libertarian Russia is about an America-enamored young man who motorcycles through a dystopic-Russian state that has been rendered effectively ungovernable by an economic collapse.
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"He goes out in the company of a prostitute too," added Swanwick.
It's science fiction's tolerance for such quixotic tales, and the world of narrative possibility such tolerance allows, that caught and has kept Swanwick's interest. Save some "dabbling on the edges" of other genres, he publishes exclusively in science fiction and fantasy.
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"There's a great many more possibilities in science fiction—it's like having a whole specialized set of tools," Swanwick said. "I once wrote a story set in a universe where consciousness is reversed. So you would know everything that happened to you from this moment up until the instant of your death, but you wouldn't know what happened to you a minute ago or who the person in your bed is: it could be your wife, or it could be a pickup you don't know."
"If you wrote that as a mainstream story, the only possible explanation would be that the character is mad—and that's not very interesting—but if you wrote it in a science fiction story you could explore questions of predetermination and free will. Which is an extraordinary thing to be able to do."
Swanwick decided he wanted to be an explorer of these extraordinary questions relatively early in his adult life. Unlike the many novelists who try on a few careers before settling in the profession, Swanwick is a lifer. And he's only had eyes for science fiction.
"I very quickly decided that I wanted to write. I was an English major. And I was in college in 1972, so at that time realistic novels were in pretty bad shape—it's gotten much better now—but then they were a pretty drab business, and science fiction novels were very alive intellectually," he said.
Writing is, for Swanwick, a nine-to-five job like any other. He wakes up in the morning, has breakfast, lumbers up the stairs to his office, and breaks for lunch. All this locomotion produces a novel every few years, short stories more regularly than that, and an essay here or there for good measure.
And at 60-years-old, he's in his prime.
"I'm of aware of the fact that I only have so many years to write," said Swanwick. "But I'm writing as fast and as well as I've ever written. I'm still getting better, and I have enough ideas to keep me going for decades."
Swanwick's newest novel, Dancing with Bears, was released on May 17.