A Russian émigré poet living in Paris is visited by a mysterious bear with an agenda…
The Star-Bear
Fantasy || A Russian émigré poet living in Paris is visited by a mysterious bear with an agenda...
Michael Swanwick
Fiction and Excerpts [18]
Annie Without Crow
An act of indiscretion from her immortal trickster companion sends Annie and her league of ladies-in-waiting on a time-defying adventure that becomes the inspiration for William Shakespeare.
The Star-Bear
Annie Without Crow
An act of indiscretion from her immortal trickster companion sends Annie and her league of ladies-in-waiting on a time-defying adventure that becomes the inspiration for William Shakespeare.
The New Prometheus
A new story in the Mongolian Wizard universe.
Series: The Mongolian Wizard Stories
Read an Excerpt from Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Mother
Award-winning author Michael Swanwick returns to the gritty, post-industrial faerie world of The Iron Dragon’s Daughter with the standalone adventure fantasy The Iron Dragon’s Mother—available June 25th from Tor Books.
Caitlin of House Sans Merci is the young half-human pilot of a sentient mechanical dragon. Returning from her first soul-stealing raid, she discovers an unwanted hitchhiker.
When Caitlin is framed for the murder of her brother, to save herself she must disappear into Industrialized Faerie, looking for the one person who can clear her.
Unfortunately, the stakes are higher than she knows. Her deeds will change her world forever.
Murder in the Spook House
A brand new story in the Mongolian Wizard universe.
Series: The Mongolian Wizard Stories
Five Fantasy Books That Ignore Genre Boundaries!
Please enjoy this encore post about fantasy books that aren’t thought of as fantasy, originally published on August 2016.
One of my guilty pleasures is wandering through the “literature” section of bookstores, opening and closing books, in search of fantasy and science fiction. There’s more of it to be found than you’d expect. Some, like T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, are there because they predate the existence of commercial fantasy. Others, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, are shelved where she made her reputation in the first place. Most, however, are present simply because even the most earthbound writers occasionally like to expand their imaginations to the utmost, to the places on the map marked Here Be Dragons, and that’s where fantasy dwells.
The fantasy section of bookstores exists for our convenience, but it pays to wander outside of it every now and then.
Five Fantasy Books You Won’t Find in the Fantasy Section
One of my guilty pleasures is wandering through the “literature” section of bookstores, opening and closing books, in search of fantasy and science fiction. There’s more of it to be found than you’d expect. Some, like T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, are there because they predate the existence of commercial fantasy. Others, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, are shelved where she made her reputation in the first place. Most, however, are present simply because even the most earthbound writers occasionally like to expand their imaginations to the utmost, to the places on the map marked Here Be Dragons, and that’s where fantasy dwells.
The fantasy section of bookstores exists for our convenience, but it pays to wander outside of it every now and then.
Series: Five Books About…
The Dala Horse
This August, look for Not So Much, Said the Cat from Tachyon Publications. This new collection from Michael Swanwick takes a feline turn—prowling the pages with grace, precision, and utter impertinence. The master of short science fiction takes us on whirlwind journeys across planets, time, and space, where magic and science co-exist in endless possibilities. Swanwick’s spectacular offerings are intimate in their telling, galactic in their scope, and delightfully-sesquipedalian in their verbiage.
You’ll find time travelers from the Mesozoic partying ’til the end of time, and a calculus problem that rocks the ages. A supernatural horse-guardian journeys with a confused but semi-repentant troll. A savvy teenage girl wagers against the Devil, and is promptly set upon by the most unsuitable of suitors. And of course, you’ll meet Beelzebub the cat, whose subtle influence may not be entirely benign…
We’re pleased to encore “The Dala Horse,” a Tor.com Original story originally published in June 2011, now reprinted in the Not So Much, Said the Cat. Long after the wars, there are things abroad in the world—things more than human. And they have scores to settle with one another…
The Phantom in the Maze
We tamper with time at our peril. A new story in the Mongolian Wizard series.
Series: The Mongolian Wizard Stories
The Pyramid of Krakow
The Wizard has swallowed more and more of Europe–and inside his shuttered realm are magic and mass death. “The Pyramid of Krakow” is the sixth of Michael Swanwick’s “Mongolian Wizard” tales.
Series: The Mongolian Wizard Stories
Five Great Fantasy Books Most Fans Don’t Know Exist
One of my favorite self-indulgences is browsing the mainstream shelves of bookstores in search of science fiction and fantasy. There’s a lot of it: War-horses like 1984 or Brave New World or Zamyatin’s We. Recent classics like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Byatt’s Possession. New books that could have easily been published as genre but were not.
Here are five out-of-genre fantasies many fantasy readers have never encountered.
Series: Five Books About…
The Night of the Salamander
A locked room, a murder, and an unexpected kind of magic: the fifth of Michael Swanwick’s “Mongolian Wizard” tales.
Series: The Mongolian Wizard Stories
Chasing the Phoenix
In the distant future, Surplus arrives in China dressed as a Mongolian shaman, leading a yak which carries the corpse of his friend, Darger. The old high-tech world has long since collapsed, and the artificial intelligences that ran it are outlawed and destroyed. Or so it seems.
Darger and Surplus, a human and a genetically engineered dog with human intelligence who walks upright, are a pair of con men and the heroes of a series of prior Swanwick stories. They travel to what was once China and invent a scam to become rich and powerful. Pretending to have limited super-powers, they aid an ambitious local warlord who dreams of conquest and once again reuniting China under one ruler. And, against all odds, it begins to work, but it seems as if there are other forces at work behind the scenes.
Michael Swanwick’s Chasing the Phoenix is available August 11th from Tor Books.
House of Dreams
The fourth in Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Michael Swanwick’s “Mongolian Wizard” series of tales set in an alternate fin de siècle Europe shot through with magic, mystery, and intrigue.
This short story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
Series: The Mongolian Wizard Stories
Day of the Kraken
Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Michael Swanwick presents a new fiction series at Tor.com, consisting of stand-alone stories all set in the same world. “Day of the Kraken,” continues the epic tale of an alternate fin de siècle Europe shot through with sorcery and intrigue. (Intrigued yourself? Read the other stories, “The Mongolian Wizard” and “The Fire Gown.”)
This story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.