*A weirdly popular guy in Russia. I used to hang out in Russia rather a lot (by Yankee standards), and they're like, "Cyberpunk? Meh! But Michael Swanwick? HE'S A LIVING LITERARY GOD!"
*You wanna see what a contemporary Swanwick urban fantasist looks like, when he is (a) not Michael Swanwick and (b) a gifted Russian writer, then check out this guy.
I just saw Lukyanenko speak at Eurocon. Lukyanenko said that he has postponed the writing of his next fantasy novel for one year "because the main character isn't old enough yet." And he meant that sincerely – and I was properly impressed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Lukyanenko
http://www.locusmag.com/2009/Issue03_Swanwick.html
(...)
“My generation came in all at once with a lot of really good writers: Connie Willis, Stan Robinson, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, James Patrick Kelly... (I'm leaving out a half dozen people, but we all know who they are). But with the exception of William Gibson, nobody was talking about any of them in the early 1980s. People were writing articles about other writers who were not as good. So I basically wrote my essay 'A User's Guide to the Postmoderns' as a way of bringing attention to writers I felt were important, who knocked me out. In some ways, it was unfortunate there was the whole Cyberpunk thing. The Cyberpunks were one half of a generation that properly belonged together. I think Sterling and Kelly and Robinson all belong in the same camp. These differences were really intra-family differences, and they're very artificial. When I wrote the essay, I came up with the term 'Humanists' because (I think enough time has gone by that I can tell this story!) Gardner Dozois was going around talking about the Cyberpunks referring to 'you guys' (meaning us) as BOFFOS: Boring Old Farts. Jim Kelly found this amusing, and he made up BOFFO buttons and gave them to all of us. I still have mine – I keep it with my Hugos. And I said, 'Oh my god, I need to come up with a name, fast, before this catches on!' So I invented the whole Humanist thing.”
