The Best of Michael Swanwick

Customer Reviews

• 5 out of 5
  
  
  by Adam from The United States | Feb 2, 2009
  

  
  I agree with the title. Even when one of these stories is not to my taste I still respect the construction. Then when everything hits right I feel Swanwick can make concoctions like no else, as shown by such masterful and bizarre events like “The Very Pulse of the Machine”, “Mother Grasshopper”, and “The Dog Said Bow Wow.” The heart and soul of his work is in these short stories more than his sometimes messy novels (some of which I like a lot). One theme that he definitely handles well is the acceptance of death and the many permutations this metaphysical moment can represent. But he is never gloomy even when it’s presented in something like the menacing “The Very Pulse of the Machine”, you still wonder whether this about death, an embrace, or an act of faith.
  

  
  

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• 5 out of 5
  
  
  by John from New York, NY | Mar 7, 2009
  

  It wasn't until I was about a third of the way through this book that I started to believe Michael Swanwick capable of writing a pretty awesome story, and it wasn't until reading "The Very Pulse of the Machine," and everything that comes after it, that Swanwick became a strong contender for my favorite writer ever.
  
  For the first third of this collection I had to struggle to find a way in to these stories: "The feast of Saint Janis" and "Ginungagap" were snappy tales with interesting premises but which felt more like a surrealist writer's take on wacky science fiction. "A midwinter's tale" and "The edge of the world" were decent stories that had their moments but were otherwise unremarkable. And "Griffin's egg," "The changeling's tale," and "Trojan Horse" sailed clear over my head.
  
  Maybe it took Swanwick a while to find his groove, or maybe it just took me a dozen or stories to get the feel of this wonderfully outlandish writer, but either way I'm glad I stuck with it. The flavor of these later stories is somewhat darker - refugees from a future holocaust whose horribly violent nature is only hinted at flee through a time portal in "Radiant Doors"; a woman stumbles into a far future slave earth in "Legions in Time"; scarcity-induced genocide is hard-wired into an alien society in "From Babel's fall'n glory we fled"; and in both "Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Slow Life" doomed women on distant planets in our solar system make incredible discoveries - but what makes these stories sing is the depth of the characters, typically a spunky woman, who, through their actions tell more of the strange worlds they inhabit than the spare and highly caffeinated prose (Swanwick's descriptions feel more like rough charcoal pencil sketches, all smudged and scribbly, than the clean Edward Hopper-esque scene painting I've come to love in the work of Lucius Shepard).
  
  Despite the fact that the first third of the book left me somewhat cold, most of the stories in the final two thirds of this retrospective are so wildly good as to tax my capacity for hyperbole.
  

  
  
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• 2 out of 5
  
  
  by Steve from Takoma Park, MD | Aug 18, 2009
  

  An interesting mix of stories, but none of them totally captured my attention in the way the that sci-fi greats have. Some inventive situations never got developed as far as they might have to really break out and shine. "Scherzo With Tyrannosaur" and "Triceratops Summer" were my faves (strange that the both involve dinosaurs...), with really interesting takes on time-travel and the havoc it might wreak. Also, I'm by no stretch a prude, but many of the stories contained sex scenes that were not germane to the story -- they seemed to be just added in to titillate his target audience, and not to further our understanding of the characters or themes.

  
  

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• 5 out of 5
  
  
  by Nick from Boulder, CO | Apr 4, 2009
  

  I really enjoy Micheal Swanwick's quirky sense of humor and the rampant creativity that comes through in all of these stories. I'd read some of them before but was more than happy to read them again.

  
  

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• 2 out of 5
  
  
  by Jennie from Petaluma, CA | Aug 6, 2009
  

  I was already in love with the elegance of "Hello, Said the Stick," with "Triceratops Summer" and "The Dog Said Bow-wow," all of which I'd read elsewhere, but found most of the other stories in this book more heavy-handed, less original.

  
  

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