You could always begin here....
"A Midwinter's Tale"
by Michael Swanwick
by Michael Swanwick
This story was originally published as the cover story in the December 1988 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and is approximately 6,000 words in length. (For the curious, Terry Lee did the cover art for that particular issue.)
Besides the fact that "A Midwinter's Tale" is yet another very fine story by Michael Swanwick, I selected this story for the anthology because of its structure: the telling of a story within the telling of a story -- nested stories, I guess you could say. I asked Michael for some thoughts on his story, and he shares with us an impressive array of influences that helped him form this tale:
So many different things went into "A Midwinter's Tale" that I despair of listing them all. The chiefest of them, and the trigger for my writing the story, was a Marc Chagall retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Chagall's art is so fabulous—in both senses of the word—that I immediately saw there was a story to be found in it. I went through the show several times, taking notes, and many specific paintings appear in the story. If I hadn't misplaced the catalog, I could list them by name. One became the birth scene, another the narrator's vision of death, and a third, (this one I remember; it's called The Soldier Drinks1) showing a soldier and a samovar with himself in miniature sitting happily with a peasant woman on his knee, provided the story's frame. The narrative structure I borrowed from Jack Dann's autobiographical essay "A Few Sparks in the Dark," which described how, almost dying of an infection, he hallucinated wandering through wastelands of ice, how afterward the fever had left him with partial amnesia, and the strange forms that amnesia took.
The prose style was not an attempt to pastiche Gene Wolfe but I did use his work as a kind of model in order to emulate a kind of narrative richness which I felt would go well with Chagall's vision. Similarly, the Christmas section was written with Dylan Thomas's "A Child's Christmas in Wales" firmly in mind. The larls are distant ancestors of Coeurl in A. E. van Vogt's "Dark Destroyer," which later became part of The Voyage of the Space Beagle. Their means of serial immortality came from a now-discredited experiment in the Sixties, which I unsuccessfully attempted to replicate in high school, showing that planaria could acquire knowledge by eating other planaria. The harshness of the winter landscapes is rendered from life. Nobody who has ever gone hiking in the Green Mountains of Vermont when it is forty below will ever forget the experience.
The word "larl" I invented forty years ago when I was working in the loading docks of a furniture factory and, out of extreme boredom, took my first halting steps toward publication. Proof positive that a true writer never throws anything away.
