Tales of Old Earth cover
Tales of
Old Earth
 by Michael Swanwick
Available as a hardcover for $27.50 and as a limited leatherbound signed hardcover for $50.00
Find out how to get a copy on our order information page.

Jacket design and illustration by Michael Dashow

In an unprecedented occurrence, three out of the six short stories nominated for the prestigious Hugo Award in 1999 were written by one author, Michael Swanwick. All of those stories, "Radiant Doors," The Very Pulse of the Machine," and "Wild Minds," appear here along with sixteen other razor-sharp visions by this Nebula Award-winning author, including one story, The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O, written especially for this collection. Swanwick is among the most acclaimed of the science fiction writers of his generation. Now his best short fiction of the last decade are all collected here for the first time. The stories range across genres from the hardest of hard science fiction to the purest of fantasies, with stops in between and stories that defy categorization.

Michael Swanwick's acceptance speech for the 2001 Locus Award for Best Collection:

I have no idea how long I've been reading Locus. I was dirt poor when I first managed to scrape together the money for a subscription, and in the decades since, I've never let it lapse. So this honor is particularly pleasant to me. I thank everybody here, and all the readers of Locus as well. Which I guess puts me in the odd position of thanking myself. But what the heck.

"Michael Swanwick is darkly magnificent. Tales of Old Earth is just one brilliant ride after another, a midnight express with a master at the throttle. Sit back and enjoy." --Jack McDevitt, author of The Engines of God and Standard Candles

An unprecedented three out of the six short stories nominated for the prestigious Hugo Award in 1999 were written by one author, Michael Swanwick. All of those stories, "Radiant Doors," The Very Pulse of the Machine," and "Wild Minds," appear here in this collection, along with sixteen other razor-sharp visions by this Nebula Award-winning author. "The Very Pulse of the Machine" won the Hugo Award in 1999. One piece, "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O," was written especially for this collection. Swanwick is among the most acclaimed science fiction writers of his generation, Now, for the first time, his best short fiction of the last decade is collected. The stories here range across genres, from the hardest of hard science fiction to the purest of fantasies, with stops in between and stories that defy categorization.

Gravity's Angels

Michael Swanwick writes:

In 1973 I arrived in Philadelphia with $70, a friend who was willing to let me crash in his living room for a month, and an absolute determination to become a science fiction writer. I weighed 180 pounds. Six months later, when I finally found work, I weighed 130. I had lost fifty pounds over the winter. To keep alive, I sold my blood, typed term papers for a dollar a page, and composed them for not much more. I wrote very bad prose, and threw away every word of it, and had nightmares when I could sleep, and sat by my window listening to the whores down the street arguing with their pimps when I could not.

It did not seem to me then to high a price to pay.

It still does not.





Praise for "Gravity's Angels"

" . . . What makes Swanwick special is his ability to wring fresh, unexpected consequences from standard sf notions. . . . An impressive collection."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Swanwick's compact novelettes possess, at their best, the range and density of distilled novels."
--Washington Post Book World

"When one surveys the contents of Gravity's Angels, one can only wonder what is taking everyone so long to award Swanwick an appropriate level of recognition. . . . Gravity's Angels is an extremely impressive collection.It passes this reviewer's boredom test effortlessly. Each story is uniqueunto itself, and reading them closely together does not produce any sense that one has just read the same thing half an hour earlier. If there is any justice in the world, Gravity's Angels will bring Swanwick whatever recognition he has not had thus far."
--Locus

"I don't think I've come upon as finely crafted, as deft a collection of stories in quite some time . . . Buy this book. I mean it--it's one of the best science fiction collections I've ever read."
--The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

"There are a multitude of stories here, and, if you've read Swanwick long enough, know that he speaks to your heart and sensibilities about relationships, about spirituality, about despair, about real people in fantastic situations, about dreams, hope, and desire."
--True Review

"Michael Swanwick was one of the most stimulating and entertaining short story writers of the 198Os, collecting a very large number of award nominations in a very short period of time. A long overdue collection from a major force in the SF world."
--Science Fiction Chronicle

"Like the work of Gene Wolfe, Swanwick's stories are both precise and mysterious. Reading them in this collection reveals Swanwick as a games player, a Symbolist with a capital S, interested in altering our state of consciousness, performing a dance of veils for our edification and delight."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Gravity's Angels is a showcase for a decade's worth of Swanwick's shorter fictions, from his first published short story, "The Feast of Saint Janis," to a descent past the edge of a flat Earth otherwise very like our own in "The Edge of the World," which won the 1990 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. . . . The stories collected here are luminous with the promise of his ambition, smart and allusive, dense with ideas and images, sacred and profane."
--Interzone

"[Swanwick] is an amazingly assured writer, seemingly incapable of writing a sentence that isn't interesting in itself, in addition to the way it moves the sentence forward. . . . This is a book that merits a place on any serious science fiction reader's shelf."
--The New York Review of Science Fiction

"This volume chronicles the career of one of the most impressive science fiction writers of the '8Os. . . . Every story uses the traditional materials of the genre to explore deeper issues of character and conscience . . . Swanwick's work illustrates the power and potential of contemporary science fiction."
--Publisher's Weekly

"[Michael Swanwick] is a genuine wizard, able to overcome almost any limitation by sheer technical skill, by the deftness of his prose, the often startling beauty of his images. Here we have a collection of his finest shorter works.
--Aboriginal Science Fiction




Books by Michael Swanwick

In the Drift (1985)
Vacuum Flowers (1987)
Griffin's Egg (1990)
Gravity's Angels: 13 Stories (1991)
Stations of the Tide(1991)
The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993)
A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997)
Jack Faust(1997)
Moon Dogs(2000)
Tales of Old Earth (2000)
Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures (forthcoming)
Bones of the Earth (forthcoming)

Non-Fiction Books by Michael Swanwick

The Postmodern Archipelago (1997)
Being Gardner Dozois



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Last updated September 15, 2001.
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