#michael swanwick
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walterkov · 3 months ago
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LOVE + DEATH + ROBOTS S3EP3 "The Very Pulse of The Machine" @giftober 2024 | Day 19: Purple ►
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itsmelissadj · 11 months ago
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Love Death + Robots: The Very Pulse of the Machine
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triplicatesgirl · 20 days ago
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reread the very pulse of the machine again I am normal I am normal I am normal
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suppuration · 1 month ago
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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]
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yuriskies · 1 year ago
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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.
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tachyonpub · 1 year ago
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kammartinez · 1 month ago
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whats-in-a-sentence · 1 month ago
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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
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kamreadsandrecs · 1 month ago
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rastronomicals · 8 months ago
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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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deepdarkspaceblog · 1 year ago
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'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…
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mikimeiko · 2 years ago
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Books I read in 2023
The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick (1993)
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weed-cat · 11 months ago
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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
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kunosoura · 1 year ago
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jane, you were never powerful and you were always in danger but you still could choose and you always chose to turn your back on those you loved. do better.
will, from a very young age you were groomed into power, lied to and manipulated and forced. you don't have to continue the cycle and it doesn't have to define you. You can find love.
cat, gtfo, who cares. helen, release is yours if you want it but there are still newer, better stories to tell, and you don't have to accept the cruelty of the world around you.
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iamthetruenhaz · 2 months ago
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OG Sarah Kerrigan, or should I say Sara Keranič
Alef magazine (September 1987, Yugoslavia)
artist: Dobrosav Bob Zivkovic
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