SWANWICK, Michael (Jenkins)

(1950-)

   US writer who began to publish sf with "The Feast of St Janis" for New Dimensions 11 (anth 1980) ed Marta RANDALL and Robert SILVERBERG, and who became known, very rapidly, as an author of intensely crafted, complex tales whose multiple layering allows his conventional sf plots and venues to be understood as exercises in mythopoesis, somewhat after the manner of Gene WOLFE's shorter works, though less perplexingly. MS was not prolific in the 1980s, but his short fiction - assembled as GRAVITY'S ANGELS (coll 1991) - ran a wide gamut, from "The Man who Met Picasso"(1982), a slightly sentimental fable of redemption, to "Ginungagap" (1980), a HARD-SF tale set in the ASTEROID belt whose imagery and language comprehensively prefigure CYBERPUNK; the more recent "A Midwinter's Tale" (1988), though making nods to both Wolfe and A.E. VAN VOGT, seems in theend to be written in MS's mature voice - warm, cruel, contemplative, moral.His 5 novels show a steady progress towards that voice. In the Drift (fixup 1985), set in an ALTERNATE WORLD in which Three Mile Island did infact explode, describes its post- HOLOCAUST balkanized USA through a series of linked episodes which ultimately fail to cohere sufficiently, so that the transcendental implications of the final sequences seem forced. Vacuum Flowers (1987), which builds upon the world foreshadowed in"Ginungagap", very much more cogently combines a tour-of-the-Solar-System plot-carrying the reader downward from the corporation-dominated asteroid belt to an AI-run Earth - with a dense load of extrapolation about the nature of identity when persona-chips can be bought and plugged in. The protagonist, a persona bum who has hijacked an attractive new identity for herself, runs an extremely complex gamut before turning-perhaps inevitably in MS's work - towards transcendence. Griffin's Egg (1991 UK) applies his by-now-expected multiplex extrapolations to the NEAR FUTURE in a tale set on the MOON - controlled by corporations - during a period when Earth seems at the edge of self-destruction, and a long cold hegira may be in store for any survivors of the HOLOCAUST. The titles of both these novels serve as metaphors for the evolving human species and as banners to proclaim the continuation of the species under new conditions.Unlike his first 3 books, STATIONS OF THE TIDE (1991), which won a NEBULA, takes place centuries hence and far from Earth, on a planet quarantined from the higher technologies now controlled by a far-flung humanity. After a Prometheus/Caliban figure has stolen some of these technologies from theinterstellar network that monitors quarantine, the protagonist descends to the planet, which is due to suffer a vast periodic climatic transformation, traces the "thief", and apprehends what it is necessary for him to apprehend - the knowledge, the meaning of life on the planet, the meaning of his own existence, and a sense of how best (he is a Prospero figure) to relieve himself of power and servants. The complexityof this brief, dense, and fast-moving book is very considerable; and the interstellar network - whose HQ takes the shape of a Renaissance Theatre of Memory - is convincing in its own right and as a focus for MS's continued speculations about the refractions of identity in a world where autonomous subset personality-copies held on computers (they resemble the "partials" in Greg BEAR's EON [1985]) do much of the work of being human.The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993 UK), a fantasy, taxingly examines human action (and guilt) in fantasy worlds themselves taxingly examined. In the 1980s "debate" between "humanists" and cyberpunks, MS was variouslyassociated with one or both "schools". In the end-like the similarly treated Kim Stanley ROBINSON-he was not so easily assimilated. The most telling thing to say about MS is that he is fiercely contemporary.

   JC

   See also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARKHAM HOUSE; END OF THE WORLD; GAMES AND SPORTS; GOTHIC SF; INTERZONE; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE;MYTHOLOGY; NANOTECHNOLOGY; NUCLEAR POWER; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; POSTMODERNISM AND SF; SPACE HABITATS; THEODORE STURGEON MEMORIAL AWARD.