Michael Swanwick has won five Hugos for short fiction in six years. There aren't that many people with that many Hugos at all, and most of them are legends. That all of these awards were for short fiction should give some indication as to his abilities in that area, which I always think of as the writer's equivalent to a painter's drawings or a composer's piano pieces - they can be anything from sketches to polished, major works, but they reveal, I think, more often than not, what the writer's concerns are.
The stories in the collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow are, indeed, polished works, marked by inventive settings and a bent toward the weird. They display a particular richness of invention that seems to be one of the hallmarks - and blessings - of post-genre fiction, that brand of writing that goes variously by interfictions, slipstream, spec fic, and probably a few I haven't heard of yet. So we move from an encounter between a soldier and a talking stick in a war zone in what could be our future - maybe - (" 'Hello,' Said the Stick") to dinosaurs caught in a time warp ("Triceratops Summer") to a slightly different version of the Tower of Babel (("Urdumheim"). And, like so much of this kind of story, these are marked by a thread of irony, mostly at least mordant, sometimes very dark.
In spite of all the Hugos, however, they are not uniformly interesting. " 'Hello,' Said the Stick" is a brief masterpiece, while "Triceratops Summer" is a delight from its portrayal of the dinosaurs - like cattle who don't quite get it - to its sympathetic handling of the human tendency to go with the flow. "The Sailor's Tale" is a real tour de force, a memoir by a grandfather, broken by memory lapses and unexpected naps in a voice that captures the perfectly the diction of Defoe or Swift, without the black satire. The tales of Surplus and Darger, the first a modified dog, the second an Englishman of somewhat shady history, are included (at least, those that have been written so far, including the title story): they are stories of a pair of con men making their way nimbly across Europe in a "post-Utopian" world in which the electronic wonders of the past are illegal. Another con forms the crux of "A Small Room in Koboldtown", a tale of murder, a frame-up, and an old-style political boss (and as a Chicagoan, let me tell you how that rang true), in a universe of fairies, "haints," solid boys and just about every variation on the creatures of our legends that anyone has heard of.
Alas, some of these stories perhaps might have been better left untold, although those are mercifully few. For others, the fault comes under the heading of Too Much Information - not necessarily a case of "less is more", but certainly one of "less would have been enough". One or two are built around people who simply are not interesting.
Overall, though, I found myself enjoying the collection, in spite of the few bad apples. Swanwick's multitude of universes are strange, but fascinating.
Michael Swanwick is online at, strangely enough, Michael Swanwick Online. Tachyon Publications is still here.
