Michael Swanwick

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Michael Swanwick

At the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, August 2005
Born November 18, 1950
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Occupation Novelist, short story writer
Nationality American
Writing period 1980's-Present
Genres Science fiction, fantasy
Influences
Official website

Michael Swanwick (born November 18, 1950) is an American science fiction author. Based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he began publishing in the early 1980s.

Contents

[edit] Biography

His published novels are: In the Drift (an Ace Special, 1985), a look at the results of a more catastrophic Three Mile Island incident; Vacuum Flowers (1987), an adventurous tour of an inhabited Solar System, where the people of Earth have been subsumed by a cybernetic mass-mind; Stations of the Tide (1991), the story of a bureaucrat's pursuit of a magician on a world soon to be flooded by its melting icecaps; The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), a fantasy with elves in Armani suits and dragons as jet fighters; Jack Faust (1997), a retelling of the Faust legend with modern science and technology; Bones of the Earth (2002), a time-travel story involving dinosaurs; and The Dragons of Babel (2008), which is set in a similar fantasy world as The Iron Dragon's Daughter.

His short fiction has been collected in Gravity's Angels (1991), Moon Dogs (2000), Tales of Old Earth (2000), Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures (2003), and The Dog Said Bow-Wow (2007). A novella, Griffin's Egg, was published in book form in 1991 and is also collected in Moon Dogs. He has collaborated with other authors on several short works, including Gardner Dozois ("Ancestral Voices", "City of God", "Snow Job") and William Gibson ("Dogfight").

Stations of the Tide won the Nebula for best novel, and several of his shorter works have won awards as well: the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for "The Edge of the World" in 1989, the World Fantasy Award for "Radio Waves" in 1996, and Hugos for "The Very Pulse of the Machine" in 1999, "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" in 2000, "The Dog Said Bow-Wow" in 2002, "Slow Life" in 2003, and "Legions in Time" in 2004.

Swanwick has written about the field as well. He published two long essays on the state of the science fiction (The User's Guide to the Postmoderns, 1986) and fantasy ("In the Tradition...", 1994), the former of which was controversial for its categorization of new SF writers into "cyberpunk" and "literary humanist" camps. Both essays were collected together in The Postmodern Archipelago 1997. A book-length interview with Gardner Dozois, Being Gardner Dozois, was published in 2001. A new collection of Swanwick's most recent stories, The Dog Said Bow-Wow was published by Tachyon Publications in the fall of 2007.

[edit] Selected Bibliography

(a complete bibliography may be found at the author's website)

[edit] Novels

[edit] Collections

[edit] Short stories

[edit] Essays

  • User's Guide to the Postmoderns, Asimov's, 1986
  • The Postmodern Archipelago (1997)

[edit] External links