Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick is an American fantasy and science fiction author who began publishing in the early 1980s

Swanwick’s fiction writing began with short stories, starting in 1980 when he published “Ginungagap” in TriQuarterly and “The Feast of St. Janis” in New Dimensions 11. Both stories were nominees for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1981.[2] His first novel was In the Drift (an Ace Special, 1985), a look at the results of a more catastrophic Three Mile Island incident, which expands on his earlier short story “Mummer’s Kiss”. This was followed in 1987 by Vacuum Flowers, an adventurous tour of an inhabited Solar System, where the people of Earth have been subsumed by a cybernetic mass-mind. Some characters’ bodies contain multiple personalities, which can be recorded and edited (or damaged) as if they were wetware.

In the 1990s, Swanwick moved towards the intersection between science fiction and fantasy and Magical Realism. Stations of the Tide (1991) is the story of a bureaucrat’s pursuit of a magician on a world soon to be altered by its 50-year tide swell; it is set far in the future, blurring the line between magic and technology. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993) is a fantasy set in a Fairyland based on modern America, with elves wearing Armani suits and dragons serving as jet fighters. The main character, a changeling stolen from the real world, struggles to survive a factory, a high school, and a university, all the while being manipulated by a dragon. In Jack Faust (1997), a retelling of the Faust legend, the scholar does not gain magical power but modern scientific knowledge and, with which he begins the Industrial Revolution centuries early.