Saturday, November 13, 2010

Ginungagap, by Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick is an inspired author, and has some brilliant work out there. He has a series of very short stories called The Sleep of Reason on Infinite Matrix that are really good and have not been collected elsewhere, so far as I can tell. Check them out soon if you are at all interested, the site is dormant and who knows how long it will still be around.

I've read several other stories, Ginungagap being the latest, and for some reason they never impress me quite as much. This one was a Nebula nominee in 1980. It sort of meanders at the start, then turns into a pretty decent story. It turns into an exploration of the problem of matter transmission--supposing we could transport ourselves by disassembling at our current location and assembling an exact copy at the other end. It's reasonably well done. But Star Trek explored this area pretty thoroughly in the series (see this Wikipedia article), and I can't see where Swanwick breaks any new ground. So it's just OK.

To be fair, The Sleep of Reason is the most recent writing of his that I have read, where he is matured as an author. So that's the stuff of his to read.

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