Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures | ||||||||
Michael Swanwick | ||||||||
Tachyon Publications, 94 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Charlene Brusso
Although Michael Swanwick's novels have earned plenty of acclaim, they have never been as celebrated as his short
stories. Collections such as Tales of Old Earth, Gravity's Angels, and others offer the award-winners
and the better-known stories. But Swanwick has also produced plenty of little-known short-short
fiction. "The primary rule of writing is to use exactly as many words to say something as it takes, no more, no less,"
he tells us in his introduction. These stories offer his proof.
The title story is a cheeky five-minute version of the classic tale of the man who sold his soul to the Devil
for all the world's knowledge. The author encourages readers to perform the work themselves. (Anecdotally,
it first played atop a trash can outside the convention center during a long-ago Boskone). The
staging couldn't be simpler: a cigar box as stage, and the roles
played by readily available household implements: a cigar as Dr. Faustus; Helen of Troy, the mystical Light of Ontology,
an Angel of the Lord, and the fires of Hell all played by a box of matches; and Mephistopheles himself appearing as a
cigar cutter. Love, pride, betrayal, and death: you'll be hard-pressed to find a more memorable -- and pithy -- condensation
anywhere else.
An abecedary is a curious sort of meta-story: a set of twenty-six short stories, one for each letter of the
alphabet. Swanwick's "An Abecedary of the Imagination" contains entries such as "A is for Atlantis" (where the
lost continent is found to be not so distant and a bit less magical than we might have hoped), the
nightmarish "N is for Nixon", and the blackly comic "G is for Gondwanaland" with its memorable
opening:
A handful of short essays partake of Swanwick's wit and intellect in equal measure. Who
knew -- and who can help but cheer -- to learn that the mummified middle digit of Galileo, in the
Museum of the History of Science in Florence, is displayed in such a way as to direct a
certain rude gesture toward the Vatican?
The strangest part of the book is "Writing in My Sleep". "Occasionally I would dream I was
writing," Swanwick explains. "I would labor over the phrasing of a prose passage, revising it
again and again in my mind, until I was satisfied it was as well written as it was ever going
to be." Call it lucid dreaming, murky sanity, or just plain malarky, but these have
bite. Take, for example, "Critics", which examines the peculiar relationship between prominent
citizens of a distant planet and their... um... leeches. "Your leeches speak well of you," they
say in exalted circles. Or "Trolls": Trolls are... easy to spot once you know the
signs. They're always homely, usually a little short, often overweight....they are always
bald. In fact, every bald person is a troll.
There are no exceptions.
Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures closes with a pair of inside-the-genre meta-fictions which do more to clarify the
artistic differences between SF/fantasy and the literary mainstream than any oh-so-scholarly essay
by Harold Bloom. I doubt "Letters to the Editor" could have been created in any other genre; and
the frenzied zeal of "The Madness of Gordon Van Gelder" is bound to raise a laugh while
simultaneously drawing forth a quiet sigh of "if only" from many a writer.
Swanwick's latest collection is a cache of glimmering trinkets and treasures. The stories,
whether bleak or blackly comic, smart or just plain silly, celebrate the sense of wonder in ways
both child-like and wise, and as much fun as a cigar box full of sparklers and bottle rockets.
Charlene's sixth grade teacher told her she would burn her eyes out before she was 30 if she kept reading and writing so much. Fortunately he was wrong. Her work has also appeared in Aboriginal SF, Amazing Stories, Dark Regions, MZB's Fantasy Magazine, and other genre magazines. |
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