#michael swanwick

[walterkov]

LOVE + DEATH + ROBOTS S3EP3 "The Very Pulse of The Machine" @giftober 2024 | Day 19: Purple ►

[itsmelissadj]

Love Death + Robots: The Very Pulse of the Machine

[mordredpendragon]

The Dragon Line by Michael Swanwick

[suppuration]

Click.

"The marble index of a mind forever. Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. Wordsworth."

"What?"

"Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest thing in the solar system. If the human eye could see it, it would appear two and a half times wider in the sky than the sun does."

"I knew that," she said, irrationally annoyed.

"Quotation is. Easy. Speech is. Not."

"Don't speak, then."

"Trying. To communicate!"

She shrugged. "So go ahead—communicate."

Silence. Then, "What does. This. Sound like?"

"What does what sound like?"

"Io is a sulfur-rich, iron-cored moon in a circular orbit around Jupiter. What does this. Sound like? Tidal forces from Jupiter and Ganymede pull and squeeze Io sufficiently to melt Tartarus, its sub-surface sulfur ocean. Tartarus vents its excess energy with sulfur and sulfur dioxide volcanoes. What does. This sound like? Io's metallic core generates a magnetic field which punches a hole in Jupiter's magnetosphere, and also creates a high-energy ion flux tube connecting its own poles with the north and south poles of Jupiter. What. Does this sound like? Io sweeps up and absorbs all the electrons in the million-volt range. Its volcanoes pump out sulfur dioxide; its magnetic field breaks down a percentage of that into sulfur and oxygen ions; and these ions are pumped into the hole punched in the magnetosphere, creating a rotating field commonly called the Io torus. What does this sound like? Torus. Flux tube. Magnetosphere. Volcanoes. Sulfur ions. Molten ocean. Tidal heating. Circular orbit. What does this sound like?"

Against her will, Martha had found herself first listening, then intrigued, and finally involved. It was like a riddle or a word puzzle. There was a right answer to the question. Burton or Hols would have gotten it immediately. Martha had to think it through.

There was a faint hum of the radio's carrier beam. A patient, waiting noise.

At last, she cautiously said, "It sounds like a machine."

"Yes. Yes. Yes. Machine. Yes. Am machine. Am machine. Am machine. Yes. Yes. Machine. Yes."

"Wait. You're saying that Io is a machine? That you're a machine? That you're Io?"

"Sulfur is triboelectric. Sledge picks up charges. Burton's brain is intact. Language is data. Radio is medium. Am machine."

"I don't believe you."

— Michael Swanwick's "The Very Pulse of the Machine" [X]

[triplicatesgirl]

reread the very pulse of the machine again I am normal I am normal I am normal

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

[yuriskies]

I would like to float Michael Swanwick's 1999 Hugo Award winning short story "The Very Pulse of the Machine" as an ur-example of Miyazawan yuri. For me it has a very similar vibe to the sci-fi/landscape elements of Otherside Picnic, and I think fans of that might be interested in reading it. More below the break in case you want to go in without spoilers. Read it! It's good!

So like, brief summary in case you didn't read it, Martha and Juliet are the first humans to land on Io, and the story picks up immediately after a catastrophic rover crash that has killed Juliet and left Martha in an extreme survival situation. With a limited amount of air, Martha has to trudge across the hostile landscape of Io's surface. As she uses on methamphetamine to make the trip, Martha begins seeing ethereal visions and Juliet's corpse quotes poetry and hints at a vast machine-like intelligence inhabiting the moon's sulfur deposits.

The Very Pulse of the Machine is strange and defies any easy story categorization. I definitely wouldn't call it a "true" yuri SF, but there are aspects that I twigged on that resonate with Iori Miyazawa's aesthetic. There isn't a romantic relationship between Martha and Juliet, but little aspects of the narration hint at something complex and ill-defined between them.

The story plays around with a sense of finality between the two - how much of Juliet's speech is Martha's drug-addled memories of Juliet quoting poetry verses, the reanimated thoughts of the dead, or the machine-like intelligence attempting to communicate through Juliet's knowledge is kept intentionally vague. It becomes the springboard for Swanwick to explore Martha's sense of loss, feelings of social inadequacy, and her desperate struggle to keep self-serving dreams and reality separate really resonate with what Miyazawa was calling "yuri of absence".

I think there are also aspects to this story that also illustrate what Miyazawa meant when he said landscapes are inherently yuri. The version of Io in The Very Pulse of the Machine is ethereal as hell - volcanic plumes and twisting magnetic fields illuminate its sky, while sulfur dioxide flowers bloom from its surface in between stygian lakes of molten sulfur and sulfur dioxide vent blizzards. There's this wonderful moment where Martha sees triboelectric discharges illuminating Juliet's body and tapping at her feet, and for a moment the text leaves you to wonder if it's an ancient, lonely machine yearning for contact reaching out to connect with them both.

Also just gotta say that until I go to the grave I will consider the end high-class yuri, no matter what anyone tells me.

[hekateras]

In Flanders Fields

Illustration for The Very Pulse of the Machine by Michael Swanwick.

(Plain image version)

[whats-in-a-sentence]

This is the world, more or less, of Michael Swanwick's novella "Griffin's Egg", in which one of the technologies being developed in such isolation changes the way humans think, allowing them a terrifying clarity

a beginning come quietly, or with the rushing of great winds?

in the perception of their own motivations. Greg Bear's "Heads" also features a sort of cognitive breakthrough as the result of an isolated lunar experiment gone awry and provides a chilling haunting of the Moon to boot.

"The Moon: A History for the Future" - Oliver Morton

[rastronomicals]

8:37 PM EDT May 18, 2024:

Blöödhag - "Michael Swanwick" From the album Hell Bent For Letters (May 23, 2006)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under:    Death Metal about Science Fiction Writers

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  <640x648>

[deepdarkspaceblog]

'In The Drift' Embraces The Bleak Struggle

'In The Drift' creates a world so grimly bleak readers may miss the beauty hidden underneath. #scifi #books #bookreview

In The Drift (1985) by Michael Swanwick portrays a world where a nuclear disaster has devastated the world. The people living in the ‘Drift’, exposed to radiation and contamination, lead short and brutal lives. Swanwick vividly reveals a world too horrible to dwell on, creating a melancholy story that lingers in the psyche. On 28 March, 1979 the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor melts down in a…

[ashbur]

i love short stories that don't make you sad but they do make you cry really hard for reasons that you don't necessarily understand

[number1goat]

Adding here that you should also definitely read:

John M. Ford start with Growing Up Weightless, which is Mrs Dalloway meets Heinlein on the moon. Perfectly fantastic, great LARPing, one perfect smooth pan. Here's a poem he wrote: I am the King now and I want a sandwich

Cameron Reed my favorite author of all time. Her first book is called The Fortunate Fall and it's a) the master and margarita meets b) Moby Dick and c) omfg the most deeply romantic lesbian disaster plot ever. Here's a bite sized piece of her work, Murk Manual. She's a Delany megafan and you can tell.

Ada Palmer hmm how do I say this. look, if you put a retelling of the iliad set 600 years in the future into a blender with the entirety of renaissance lit and also the whole anime canon, you would get Terra Ignota. Keep reading past the first book--it was sawn in half by the publisher. Genders that exist nowhere else appear here. Here's a blog post of hers

Oh hell and I forgot to add Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers. If you read it, you'll hate Jeff Vandermeer for being a shameless rip-off of something infinitely better.

And We Who Are About To by Joanna Russ. A group of six commercial spaceflight passengers crashland on an alien planet and the narrator goes "oh, we're dead." Events Occur. It's like 112 pages.

hello! i have a somewhat nebulous rec request, if you so desire. recently i’ve read and enjoyed a lot of samuel delany’s scifi, which i’ve also seen you talk about. do you have any recs for other books/authors that remind you of delany (in any way)? thank you!

This is a wonderful request and also a difficult one - there's no one out there quite like Delany! But I gave it some thought (and brainstormed with my partner) and have some suggestions, from different angles.

Going to be bold and start out saying that I think Delany is very much in dialogue with James Joyce, particularly Ulysses.

In a related vein, Herman Melville was my partner's suggestion, and though that didn't occur to me initially I think he's right

Going back to the world of SFF, C. J. Cherryh is pretty opposite to Delany stylistically, but shares his engagement with the question of the space proletariat. I think they are often approaching related material from opposite directions

Gene Wolfe is an author I have an ambivalent relationship with myself, but he's definitely in dialogue with Delany in a certain kind of density of narrating perception? Not sure how to better articulate this. He does not, however, share Delany's luminously clear ethical frame in his fiction

Michael Swanwick has a certain kind of whimsy which is not Delany, but there's something that feels related especially to Delany's earliest SFF novels

Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake bears some clear marks of Delany's influence as a teacher and is also delightful

some of Angela Carter's earlier work (Several Perceptions, Shadow Dance, Heroes and Villains) feels connected on a sort of a tangent

Marlon James is one of the few contemporary novelists working now who has much as stylistic control and audacity as Delany and I will stand by that statement

Indra Das' The Devourers is a novel which could only have been written in a world in which Delany's fiction already existed!

Seth Dickinson's Masquerade series (The Traitor Baru Cormorant and following) could in some ways be described as an exegesis of what happens when you pull on the thread of a certain economic question in Delany's Nevérÿon series, though in many ways the books are nothing like any of Delany's

Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series is even less like Delany's work in other ways but she also does the incredible thing which Delany does so well of just straight up stopping the plot to let a character think, and have a revelation about thought itself

people who like Delany should probably read Tiptree but that's not really because of the work being similar