Units of Conviction: Being Michael Swanwick
Being Michael Swanwick (Fairwood Press, November 21, 2023)
Prolificity is in the DNA of science fiction. H. G. Wells, whose most famous works date back to the 1890s, wrote some fifty novels, seventy non-fiction books, and one hundred short stories. Pick almost any SFWA Grand Master and you’ll encounter a bibliography that will engulf your life for many months, if not years. How many shelves to house the hundreds of books published, for instance, by Andre Norton, or Poul Anderson, or Michael Moorcock, or Jane Yolen?
A great many of the field’s best-known writers were, and in some cases still are, not just highly productive, but visibly so. The running tally of Isaac Asimov’s books was widely publicized and known — David Letterman, for instance, said on national television in 1980, “My next guest’s most recent published work is his two hundred and twenty-first book” — and many notable genre names remained in the spotlight because they always seemed to have a new book in the offing, frequently writing across genres or penning long-running series.
Within the cadre of esteemed, award-winning authors, there’s a subset that I tend to think of as covertly prolific. Oftentimes, they publish somewhere between a handful and a dozen novels throughout their careers, which by the standards of mainstream literature would be commendable but within science fiction doesn’t quicken anyone’s pulse.