If You Live In The UK -

(and I know some of you do) then check out the newest issue (Vol 43 No 6) of the very excellent Forum UK magazine for an sex-ed article by myself called "Happiness Is A Warm Bottom" (about the theory and practice of submission).

Here's a taste:

Invariably it happens. Sure, the workplace, the volunteer center, the family gathering, the "straight" friends, may not be the perfect place for my predilections to come to light but often they do. In my case, which I admit is rather unique, it's usually because I'm a writer of explicit materials (AKA "smut") and as such instantly become the expert in all things sexual -- but I also know some friends who just get tired of the inane jokes, the goggle-eyed mocking, the "would-you-believes" around things like body piercing and the "Dominatrix Love Triangles" on the Jerry Springer Show and just have to say something.

Once out, that's it: every stubbed toe, every sore back, every social interaction becomes shaded by their giggling discomfort. "But you like that kind of thing ("stubbed toe"), "Oh, and how did you -- wink, wink -- hurt it?" (sore back), "We know what Chris is going to do -- laugh -- this weekend. Just don't come back bruised."

They just can't get a grip on anyone who, in their eyes, likes to get hurt ....

[MORE]

Keep Your Eyes -

- on Flickr. I'm shooting to have some fun with a long-neglected hobby: photography. Hope you like!

Masquerade: Page 2

As I mentioned before, here's a preview of a very special project: Masquerade was illustrated by my great pal, and a fantastic artist, Wynn Ryder, from a story by ... well, me ... for an upcoming graphic novel anthology called Legendary.

I'll be putting up more pages from the final over the next few months ... or you can read the entire thing on Wynn's Deviantart pages.

Thanks!

As some of you may know things have been kind of tough for me lately. That's why I'm very touched by the folks who've reached out with their kindness and support. I can't believe I can actually say this, but there are too many to thank.

But I have to toss out some special hugs of gratitude to my beloved Jill; my cherished friend, Pauline; the fantastic Jude Mason; my sweet pal AF Waddell; the wonderful Lisabet Sarai; my friend Mick Dementiuk; Jim Brown; Donna George Storey; Oatmeal Girl, Remittance Girl, The Dirty Blond ... and others I'm ashamed to say have slipped my mind for the moment.

And I want to give a warm hug to a new friend, Don, who not only sent me a fantastic note but also some great presents from my amazon wish list!

For Don - and for all my other wonderful friends - here's a little smut story that I tried to also make into a statement about the great people in my life:

Love
By
M. Christian

"You could have stayed with me," he'd said, the first time I went to Seattle to see him, but stayed in a motel. I hadn't even thought of it, and so the disappointment in his eyes.

I never went back. After he got promoted there wasn't any point.

You could have stayed with me evolves into a fantasy in which those four days play out differently: an invitation made earlier, my discomfort of staying in someone else's house miraculously absent. Fresh off the plane, strap digging into my shoulder (I always overpack), out of the cab and up a quick twist of marble steps to his front door. A knock, or a buzz, and it opens.

A quick dance of mutual embarrassment as I maneuver in with my luggage, both of us saying the stupid things we all say when we arrive somewhere we've never been before. Him: "How was your flight?" Me: "What a great place."

Son of a decorator, I always furnish and accessorize my fantasies: I imagine his to be a simple one bedroom. Messy, but a good mess. A mind's room, full of toppling books, squares of bright white paper. Over the fireplace (cold, never lit) a print, something classical like a Greek torso, the fine line topography of Michangelo's David. A few pieces of plaster, three-dimensional anatomical bric-a-brack on the mantel. A cheap wooden table in the window, bistro candle, and Don't Fuck With The Queen in ornate script on a chipped coffee cup.

Dinner? No, my flight arrived late. Coffee? More comfortable and gets to the point quicker. We chat. I ask him about his life: is everything okay? He replies that he's busy, but otherwise fine. We chat some more. I say that it's a pleasure to work with him. He replies with the same.

I compliment him, amplifying what I've already said, and he blushes. He returns it, and then some, making me smile. My eyes start to burn, my vision blurs, tears threatening. I sniffle and stand up.

He does as well, and we hug. Hold there. Hold there. Hold there. Then, break—but still close together. Lips close together. The kiss happens. Light, just a grazing of lips. I can tell he wants more, but I'm uncomfortable and break it but not so uncomfortable that I can't kiss his cheeks. Right, then left, then right again.

But his head turns and we're kissing, lips to lips again. Does he open his first or do I? Sometimes I imagine his, sometimes mine. But they are open and we are kissing, lips and tongue, together. Hot, wet, hard.

But not on my part. Wet, definitely—in my mind it's a good kiss. A generous and loving kiss. Hot, absolutely, but only in a matter of degrees as his temperature rises and mine does in basic body response.

Not hard on my part, but I am aware of his. Between us, like a finger shoved through a hole in his pocket, something solid and muscular below his waist.

Does he say something? "I want you," "Please touch me," "I'm sorry," are candidates. I've tried them all out, one time or another, to add different flavors, essences, spices to that evening. "I want you," for basic primal sex. "Please touch me," for polite request, respect and sympathy. "I'm sorry," for wanting something he knows I don't.

"It's okay," I say to all of them, and it is. Not just words. Understanding, sympathy, generosity. All of them, glowing in my mind. It really is okay.

I'm a pornographer, dammit. I should be able to go on with the next part of this story without feeling like … I'm laughing right now, not that you can tell. An ironic chuckle: a pornographer unable to write about sex. Not that I can't write about myself, that making who I am—really—the center of the action is uncomfortable, because I've certainly done that before. I've exposed myself on the page so many other times, what makes this one so different?

Just do it. Put the words down and debate them later. After all, that's what we're here for, aren't we? You want to hear what I dream he and I do together. You want to look over my mental shoulder at two men in that tiny apartment in Seattle.

I'm a writer; it's what I do, and more importantly, what I am. So we sit on the couch, he in the corner me in the middle. His hand is on my leg. My back is tight, my thighs are corded. Doubt shades his face so I put my own hand on his own, equally tight, thigh. I repeat what I said before, meaning it: "It's okay."

We kiss again. A friend's kiss, a two people who like each other kiss. His hands touch my chest, feeling me through the thin cloth of turtleneck. I pull the fabric out of my pants with a few quick tugs, allowing bare hands to touch bare chest. He likes it, grinning up at me. I send my own grin, trying to relax.

His hand strokes me though my jeans, and eventually I do get hard. His smile becomes deeper, more sincere, lit by his excitement. It's one thing to say it, quite another for your body to say it. Flesh doesn't lie, and I might have when I gave permission. My cock getting hard, though, is obvious tissue and blood sincerity.

"That's nice," "Can I take it out?" "I hope you're alright with this." Basic primal sex, a polite request including respect and sympathy, and the words for wanting something he knows I don't—any one of them, more added depth to this dream.

My cock is out and because he's excited or simply doesn't want the moment and my body to possibly get away, he is sucking me. Was that so hard to say? It's just sex. Just the mechanics of arousal, the engineering of erotica. Cock A in mouth B. I've written it hundreds of times. But there's that difference again, like by writing it, putting it down on paper (or a computer screen) has turned diamond into glass, mahogany into plywood.

Cheapened. That's the word. But to repeat: I am a writer. It’s what I do. All the time. Even about love—especially about this kind of love.

He sucks my cock. Not like that, not that, not the way you're thinking: not porno sucking, not erotica sucking. This is connection, he to I. The speech of sex, blowjob as vocabulary.

I stay hard. What does this mean? It puzzles me, even in the fantasy. I have no doubts about my sexuality. I am straight. I write everything else, but I am a straight boy. I like girls. Men do not turn me on.

Yet, in my mind and in that little apartment, I am hard. Not "like a rock," not "as steel," not as a "telephone pole," but hard enough as his mouth, lips, and tongue—an echoing hard, wet and hard—work on me.

The answer is clear and sharp, because if I couldn't get hard and stay hard then he'd be hurt and the scene would shadow, chill, and things would be weighted between us. That's not the point of this dream, why I think about it.

So, onto sex. Nothing great or grand, nothing from every section of the menu. A simple action between two men who care about each other: he sucks my cock. He enjoys it and I love him enough to let him. That's all we do, because it's enough.

He sucks me for long minutes, making sweet sounds and I feel like crying. He puts his hand down his own pants, puts a hand around his own cock. For a moment I think about asking him if he wants help, for me to put my hand around him, help him jerk off. But I don't. Not because I don't want to, or because I'm disgusted, but because he seems to be enjoying himself so much, so delighted in the act of sucking me, that I don't want to break the spell, turn that couch back into a pumpkin.

He comes, a deep groan around my cock, humming me into near-giggles. He stops sucking as his gasps and sighs with release, looking up at me with wet-painted lips, eyes out of focus. I bend down and kiss him, not tasting anything but warm water.

I love him. I wanted to thank him. I hope, within this dream, I have. The night that didn't happen but could have.

For me, writing is just about everything: the joy of right word following right word all the way to the end. The ecstasy of elegant plot, the pleasure of flowing dialogue, the loveliness of perfect description. Sex is good, sex is wonderful, but story is fireworks in my brain. The reason I live. The greatest pleasure in my life.

And he has given me that, with nearly flowing letters on an agreement between his company and I, between his faith in my ability and myself. He looked at me, exposed on the page of a book, in the chapter of a novel, in the lines of a short story, and didn't laugh, didn't dismiss or reject. He read, nodded, smiled, and agreed to publish.

Sex cannot measure up to that. Bodies are bodies, but he has given me a pleasure beyond anything I'd felt: applause, and a chance to do much, much more with words, with stories.

He doesn't have a name, this man in my fantasy. There have been a lot of them over the years, and a lot more in the future, no doubt. Gay men who have touched me in ways no one has ever touched me before, by making love with my soul through their support of my writing. Each time they have, this fantasy has emerged from the back of my mind, a need to give them the gift they have given me: passion and kindness, support and caring, and pure affection.

I worry about this. I worry that they won't understand, take this secret dream of mine as being patronizing, diminishing them to nothing but a being with a cock who craved more cock. I've confessed a few times, telling a select few how I feel about them, how I wish I could do for them what they have done for me, to be able to put aside my heterosexuality for just an evening, an afternoon, and share total affection together.

Luckily, or maybe there really isn’t anything to worry about, the ones I've told, they smile, hold my hand, kiss my cheek, say the right thing and to this day, even right now, make me cry: "I wish we could too, but I understand. I love you too."

Am I bi? I know I'm physically not—I simply don't get aroused by men—but that doesn't mean I don't adore men, or for the ones I care about, the men who have touched my soul through their support and affection for my stories and writing, I wish I couldn't change. More than anything I wish I could give them what they have given me.

With a cock or a pen, with a story or hours of wonderful sex, it all comes down to one thing: love.

Painted Doll, An Excerpt (redux)

This is also ultra cool: The very nice Elisa just posted as excerpt from Painted Doll on her site (in addition to an excerpt from Dirty Words). Thanks so much, Elisa!

The View From Here: Songball

(the following is part of an ongoing 'column' I did for Suspect Thoughts, and, no, it's not supposed to make sense: only be weird fun)

The neighborhood kids are playing songball again. I don’t mind - except when that poor hydrocephalic kid from down at the Corporate Dormitories plays. His voice just grates on me -- and three times now he’s hit just the right frequency, causing my precious candyglass trinkets from that wonderful Summer at Bronze Beach to explode like kitsch-shrapnel hand grenades.

Last time I thought I’d escaped unscathed, that his screeching rendition of Baldwin’s new hit “Peacocks on my Mind” had somehow bypassed those mnemonic souvenirs of firm breasts and multicolored pubic hairs against a backdrop of pure, blue sands and a crashing champagne sea -- but after one drop, then two of blood on the manuscript pages I was laboring over, I reached up to find a sliver of cheaply spun crystal at the end of a wicked slice of skin.

I have to admit that when I heard their tunes drift up from the alley, I jerked my head to my little shelf of erotic brick-a-brack, waiting for one to detonate -- mentally running my apartment full of crap for something suitably heavy, but not too weighty, to drop on the poor little spud’s head.

Luckily for him and for my criminal record -- the Magistrates being tightly wound that Summer as the League of Handsome Prostitutes had decided to attend their Convention of Postures in unusual droves -- my kitsch stayed intact on my little shelf, the swollen-headed fry obviously having something better to do that screech and therefore inflict minor flesh wounds on lowly writers.

A writer lives for distractions. Anything will do. Messages suddenly crying to be composed, a stubborn pillow under the ass that cries to be fluffed and then fluffed again, a speck of grit on a window, a cup that simply looks out of place, a candletip that needs trimming, a fingernail just a shade too long -- or, in my case that afternoon, the local spawn playing songball in the alley.

I’m not a fan. Oh, sure, I like swingtag like most good Franciscans, but frankly I just don’t have the pitch or pipes to do anything but get teammates and adversaries to gag on their laughter or fall over backwards. So a lot of nuances of the game are lost on me.

But ... writers and their distractions, so I took my favorite cup, full of deepest black and wondered over to sip and stare -- anything but face that damned blank page.

Songball? Really? I had no idea what I was looking at. Oh, sure, I saw the alley, a battered couple of charcoal bins, a few flutters of litter, and the half-dozen or so scruffy (and sometimes not) local kids standing there on the soiled pavement, marked the usual cubic patterns of places and HOME, cheering, jeering, and chanting. I thought I knew the basics of the game, but either somehow I lost what little knowledge I’d had or the game had evolved on the street into something totally unique. The pitch was the same, that’s what I’d first heard, but the delivery, the spin, was strange and new.

I kept looking, listening, trying to figure out the play but just when I thought I had a grip on the rules, the behavior, it slipped away. Songs seemed to change and evolve totally at random as one child skipped forward and another skipped back. An outstanding performance -- like when a copper-headed sprite in Naval Greens belted out what I thought to be a perfect rendition of Carol’s “Death of Summer” -- brought catcalls and squeals of disappointment, and then when one of the little urchins tore up the air with what seemed to be just random squawks and squeals they got applause, cheers and to progress up five, and even seven squares

Fear started to niggle at the back of my mind, as if the world has suddenly twisted out of whack. Had I set down to my work in one world, with one version of songball only to look up somewhere else where the rules were completely different?

I thought about yelling down at the insufferable brats, either to get then to stop playing their game with my mind -- or at least key me in with the damned rules. I also thought about grabbing my shawl and rollers and just getting out of there -- maybe to the library where the books would hopefully still be books and the clerks as rude as ever.

I felt a shiver of panic, imaging a trip out my door -- down suddenly unfamiliar roads, past unfamiliar buildings, neighborhood commonalties having shifted into not-quite right, and what-the-hell? Would menus be nothing but puzzling heliographics and impenetrable encryptions? Would signs become a dance of squiggles and stylish ciphers? Was the city outside the city I remembered?

Just then, right when I was really starting to worry, one of my trinkets blasted away into a rainbow cascade of cheap materials -- and I knew, much to my satisfaction -- that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

"In The Butt, Bob!"

I'm thrilled to be the author of one of the few stories in Tristan Taormino's new book, The Anal Sex Position Guide, from Quiver Books. You can, naturally, order it from amazon.

Dark Roasted M.Christian (flashback)

Head over to Dark Roasted Blend for a article on the weird phenomena of mass hysteria:

For a topic involving laughter, what you’re about to read is not amusing. Creepy and disturbing, yes. Funny, no.

Things supposedly started innocently enough. Kashasha, near Lake Victoria in Tanzania in 1962: One girl in a boarding school there told another girl a joke. Maybe, “Have you heard the one about?” or “A Jew, an Indian, and Herbert Hoover walk into a bar …” or “Take my wife, please … ” Whatever the setup, the delivery, or punch line, the result was laughter. Whether it was a giggle, a guffaw, a chortle, a snort is irrelevant. The listener found it funny.

But then things went dark, weird, and creepy: one girl laughed, but then so did another, and then another, and then another, and then another.

After exposure, the incubation period from nothing to hysteria was short, from a few hours to a couple of days. There was no fever, no physical symptoms, just laughter and occasional crying between short moments of exhausted recuperation. When victims were restrained they sometimes became violent.

No one knew what to do. The school administrators were puzzled, local doctors were confused. Trying to put a lid on the phenomena, the administrators shut the school down.

But that was too little, too late: Whatever it was began to spread. It infected other schools and worked its way into the village, seemingly carried by infected students. It traveled to another village 20 miles away, and another 55 miles from Kashasha.

Even weirder, it wasn’t a constant thing. Like little hysterical explosions, the laughter would pop up, disable small groups for days at a time, then vanish.

Want to know what it was like? Well, it wasn’t funny, I can tell you that: one victim in Tanganyik reported watching it spread around him, hitting one neighbor after another: giggles, guffaws, chortles, snorts – horrible, nightmarish laughter. Terrified, he retreated into his home. But then he began to feel it too, a compulsion to join in with the hideous joke. He shouted and cried and – naturally -- laughed throughout the night.

The phenomena is called Mass Psychogenic Illness, more commonly known as mass hysteria, and although the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic is an extreme version, it’s more common than you think. In fact what’s really scary about the giggling madness that sprung from one girl’s joke in Kashasha isn’t that it occurred but that many researchers believe it happens so often, and is so powerful, that we simply aren’t aware of it. Or rather we aren’t aware how much the phenomena controls us.

Ever hear the one about the Mad Gasser of Mattoon? In the 1930s -- all the way through to the mid 40s -- the residents of Botetourt County, Virginia, and Mattoon, Illinois, were terrorized by a surreal specter. Also called the “Anesthetic Prowler" or "The Phantom Anesthetist," he was supposedly a dark, mysterious figure responsible for dozens of victims falling ill from mysterious gasses flooding their homes. Whole families reported sudden attacks of choking, dizziness, headaches and various respiratory ailments.

The cops couldn’t catch him and doctors were baffled by the mysterious ailments of his victims. The FBI was called in but they couldn’t catch him either. Bulletins were circulated, newspapers warned residents to be on the lookout, vigilante groups roamed the streets trying to catch him -- in short, everyone went more than a little nuts trying to catch this gassy assailant.

But evidence suggests that he never existed. Sure, lots of people got sick, dozen and dozens and dozens more reported seeing dark and mysterious figures up to hideous no good stalking the night, and the authorities were run ragged with reports but there were no leads, nothing solid; nothing but suggestion, victims suffering from anxiety and fear, and the bizarre power of mass hysteria.

Ever hear the one about the Monkey Man of New Delhi? About four feet tall, sporting a metal cap and steel claws, he terrorized many a New Delhi night in 2001. Victims reported being savagely scratched and bitten by the odd ape. What’s worse is what happened to people scared of the ape: an unlucky short man was beaten by a mod who suspected him of being the ape, a pregnant woman fell down some stairs because neighbors had shouted that the ape had been seen, and others were said to have seriously injured themselves running away from what they thought was the ape.

The punch line for the Monkey Man is the same as for the laughing girls of Kashasha and the Mad Gasser of Mattoon: it was all in their minds.

You might guffaw and giggle about how silly those girls behaved, or how naive the folks of Mattoon were, or how ridiculous the Monkey Man sounds, but before you do too much laughing think about what some researches are hypothesizing: that much of what we believe about the world, about its horrors and mysteries -- including witch trials of every sort, communist conspiracies, UFOs, Satanic cults, white slavery, environmental illnesses, and so much more -- are nothing but signs of the tremendous power of the human mind, coupled with the drive to become one with the crowd.

Now ain’t that funny?

"And this is me waving back!"

Just wanted to toss a heartfelt thanks right back to the wonderful Nudemuse for her recent wave to me from her always-great blog:

... I also got another note from the ever lovely M.Christian (one of my serious favorite authors ever) and he is just wonderful. (HI! this is where you picture me waving madly at my monitor).

Dark Roasted M.Christian

Here we go again: another article for the always-great Dark Roasted Blend. This time it's about magnificent kinetic sculptures. Enjoy!



The word definitely gets tossed around way too much -- and too frivolously -- but even so, everyone pretty much agrees that Hemmingway was one, Einstein was one, Michelangelo was one, Frank Lloyd Wright was one, Freud was one ….

And then there’s Theo Jansen.

Without a doubt, with no hyperbole: Theo Jansen is an absolute genius.

You might not have heard of this particular Dutchman – unlike, say, others like Vermeer, Leeuwenhoek, or Huygens – but believe me, Theo Jansen deserves to be among their genius standing.

You see, Theo Jansen is an artist, but not just any artist. He doesn’t paint, doesn’t work in clay. Theo Jansen is a sculptor: he creates, from his own mind and imagination, intricate mechanisms. There have been other sculptors who've created work that moves – and there will be again – but what makes Theo’s work so amazing, so blindingly brilliant, is that his creations walk, stroll, stride, and amble. Yes, they walk.

Instead of being powered by primitive steam or modern electricity,
Theo’s creations are propelled by the air, by wind. They are strolling clipper ships, sauntering sailboats.

Just watch them -- they’re hypnotic, dreamy. Undulating beasts marching along the seaside, elaborate mechanisms walking through the surf spray ….

But Theo Jansen is not the only magnificently original artist out there doing things with gears and pulleys and wire and leverage. Many other artist/engineers are working on a wide range of ways to mix mechanical joints with organic precision to create devices that walk like living creatures -- though whether those creations are as whimsical as Jansen's is open to debate.

One truly spectacular group, lead by François Delarozière, is called La Machine. Uniting engineers – who know how to make things move –and artists – who have outrageous visions -- La Machine has created some truly awesome devices for some truly amazing events.



Recently, for instance, a 37-ton spider descended down the side of a building in Liverpool, in the United Kingdom. La Princesse, as she was called, proceeded through the city, her elegantly mechanical walk controlled by a team of skilled puppeteers. To say that the sight of this playfully nightmarish creature took the city by surprise is an understatement.

But the masterminds of La Machine have had other tricks up their wildly inventive sleeves, as well. In 2005, in public squares in cities all around the world, a massive Jules Verne inspired rocket ‘crashed’ to a landing. After a brief time a girl emerged from it. But this was not just any girl: she was a immense marionette controlled by dozens of skilled La Machine performers. Dreamlike, she walked – and even rode a scooter -- through city streets, taking in the adoration and amazement of the crowds.

But soon she was joined by an even greater kinetic marvel. Another elaborate puppet, the Sultan’s Elephant of La Machine, is an artistic and engineering marvel: a 50-ton imitation operated by more than 22 puppeteers. Watching the girl and the elephant … well, I’ve already called it ‘dreamlike.’ How about mesmerizing, incredible … or just unbelievably very cool?

Since we’re chatting about amazing mechanical/artistic creations, we have to mention the artist Frederick Roland Emett. Sure, you can point to Rube Goldberg, who certainly deserves praise, but Frederick Roland Emett has a leg up on Goldberg for his incredibly diverse work. Not only are his illustrations wild, fanciful, and outrageous but he also created many insanely elaborate sculptures and creations. Looking like Willy Wonka’s hallucinations, or Dr. Suess' nightmares, Emett’s sculptures have an entrancing craziness that’s dazzlingly hypnotic.



Creating something beautiful and wonderful takes one kind of skill, but to bring it to mechanical life – well, that takes genius.

Dirty Words, An Excerpt (redux)

This is ultra cool: The very nice Elisa just posted my excerpt from Dirty Words on her site. Thanks so much, Elisa!

Dark Roasted Science Fiction: Vacuum Flowers By Michael Swanwick and The Anubis Gates By Tim Powers

Here's another review of classic science fiction novels for Dark Roasted Blend:

There’s a lot of ways you could label Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick: cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, pre-transhuman, post-posthuman … and all those other silly labels pretentious science fiction reviewers and nit-picking analysts have been sticking on various books since the genre began to be taken -- or took itself -- too seriously.

But I have a better label for it. One I think says a lot more about this delightful book than any pre- or post- definition anyone could give it.

Sure, Vacuum Flowers does neatly fit into the cyberpunky domain (pre- or post- or whatever): set in an accessible where earth has been overrun by The Comprise, a voracious digital hive-mind, and the remaining free-will humans has escaped out into the solar system. The protagonist, Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, begins the story like all good protagonists, as the subject of shadowy forces out to get something she possesses – and, naturally, what she isn’t exactly what she possesses.

But what makes Swanwick’s novel so wonderfully unique is that Rebel isn’t really Rebel. Originally a restless personality tester, someone who tries on artificial identities, she did the unthinkable and found a perfect one for her – Rebel’s – and stole it. See, in the post/pre (whatever) world of Vacuum Flowers personalities, memories, abilities, are as changeable as putting on, or taking off, make-up. In fact, Swanwick is credited by many as being one of the first creators of wetware, the idea of ‘painting on’ software to do just that.

And a lot of painting goes in Vacuum Flowers, but to Swanwick’s credit he takes this esoteric and possibly-confusing concept and makes it deceptively easy to understand, the book completely readable and totally enjoyable.

Just like the best of Alfred Bester, Swanwick is also deliciously and dazzling inventive, each page sparkling with memorable details and dazzling inventiveness: a blindly-focused quasi-communistic society dedicated to terraforming Mars, a renegade ‘mob boss’ who entertains himself by twisting the minds of his prisoner/guests, a multiple-personality ‘hero’ who has just the right mind for pretty much any job … Swanwick coolly and seductively brings the reader into Rebel’s kaleidoscopically fantastic, yet completely real-feeling world.

Yep, there are a lot of labels that could be tossed at Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers: post-this, post-that, transhuman, posthuman, cyberpunk ... whatever. The best label, though, and one that fits the novel so very well is one that every writer wants to get: A Really Good Book.

There’s a scene in The Anubis Gates that’s stayed with me ever since I first read it, some twenty or so years ago: our hero, Brendan Doyle, a professor at California State University Fullerton (one of my old alma maters, by the way), has found himself magically transported back to London in 1810.

Doyle, fascinated by a time he’s only read about, but also devastated that he’s trapped forever in the past, is walking through a street market when he hears someone whistling a tune, a song he suddenly realizes he knows.

The tune? “Yesterday” by the Beatles.

For me, that’s a special moment of brilliance in a novel packed full of all kinds of brilliances: a shivering little touch of perfect story-telling. One of the things I think is particularly excellent about the book is the way that Powers sort of restrains himself in his writing. Put it this way, if someone else were to write The Anubis Gates, especially these days, they’d have a tendency to make the book’s language too closely mirror the style and language of the time. But what Tim Powers does in The Anubis Gates is, instead, get to the basic – and fantastic – nature of a book from that time without resorting to overly-elaborate tricks.

The story-telling language in The Anubs Gates is the best kind of writing, smooth and seamless – infinitely readable and totally enjoyable.

But back to what makes The Anubis Gates so special. Like I said, what Powers has done is create an marvelously enjoyable book filled with the characters and details that feel like they’ve come from every Penny Dreadful and broadsheet from the 1800s: Horrabin, the nightmare clown and king of the London beggars; Jacky, the beggar who is actually the daughter of nobility on a quest for revenge; Amenophis Fikee, magician and leader of a gypsy clan cursed to become the body-thief Dog-Faced Joe, and so much more.

But The Anubis Gates is not just a playground for the author’s vivid imagination, for many real literary and historical celebrities also walk across the stage: Byron, publisher John Murray and many others. The world Powers creates – or just the past of the real world he plays in -- feels vivid, real, and always enjoyable.

In the end, the Anubis Gates remains a classically stylish and brightly imaginative novel told in a delightfully elegant way – an enjoyable read that feels timeless, which is quite an accomplishment for a book about time and travel.