Michael Swanwick (1950 – )

His published novels are:
In the Drift (an Ace Special, 1985);
Vacuum Flowers (1987);
Stations of the Tide (1991);
The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), a fantasy with elves in Armani suits and dragons as jet fighters;
Jack Faust (1997), a retelling of the Faust legend with modern science and technology; and
Bones of the Earth (2002), a time-travel story involving dinosaurs.

His short fiction has been collected in
Gravity's Angels (1991),
Moon Dogs (2000) and
Tales of Old Earth (2000), along with several smaller collections. A novella,
Griffin's Egg, was published in book form in 1991 and is also collected in Moon Dogs. He has collaborated with other authors on several short works, including Gardner Dozois ("Ancestral Voices", "City of God", "Snow Job") and William Gibson ("Dogfight"). Additionally, he has written two series of short fiction available online - one on the theme of the Periodic Table, and one to complement the Los Caprichos engravings by Francisco Goya.


Stations of the Tide won the Nebula for best novel, and several of his shorter works have won awards as well: the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for "The Edge of the World" in 1989, the World Fantasy Award for "Radio Waves" in 1996, and Hugos for "The Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" in 1999 and 2000, respectively. His novelette "Slow Life" (2002) won the Hugo Award at Torcon 3 in August 2003.

Swanwick has written about the field as well. He published two long essays on the state of the science fiction ("The User's Guide to the Postmoderns", 1986) and fantasy ("In the Beginning...", 1994), the former of which was controversial for its categorization of new SF writers into "cyberpunk" and "literary humanist" camps. Both essays are included in Moon Dogs. A book-length interview with Gardner Dozois,