“Swanwick’s wildly imaginative and beautifully written short stories have been, for several years, one of the primary joys of the field.” —Washington Post Book World
Discover the vast worlds and pocket universes of Michael Swanwick (Stations of the Tide), the only author to win science fiction’s most prestigious award five times in six years. With two stories original to this collection, Swanwick aptly demonstrates with poignant humor why he is widely respected as a master of imaginative storytelling.
Discover the vast worlds and pocket universes of Michael Swanwick (Stations of the Tide), the only author to win science fiction’s most prestigious award five times in six years. In his dazzling new collection, the master of speculative short stories returns with tales in which magic and science improbably coexist with myth and legend. With two stories original to this collection, Swanwick aptly demonstrates with poignant humor why he is widely respected as a master of imaginative storytelling.
[STARRED REVIEW] “Five-time Hugo Award winner Swanwick (Stations of the Tide) swirls together myth and science in this wildly inventive collection.
—Publishers Weekly
In engaging stories, Mischling the thief races through time to defeat three trolls before the sun rises for the first time and turns the inhabitants of her city into stone. A scientist is on the run from assassins, because her research in merging human intelligence with sentient AI is too dangerous. An aging veteran obtains a military weapon from his past: a VR robotic leopard in which he rediscovers the consequences of the hunt. In the biggest heist in the history of the universe, a loser Trickster (and the girlfriend who is better than he deserves), sets out to violate every trope and expectation of fiction possible.
Table of Contents
Introduction
“Starlight Express”
“The Last Days of Old Night”
“The Year of the Three Monarchs”
“Ghost Ships”
“The White Leopard”
“Dragon Slayer”
“The Warm Equations”
“Requiem for a White Rabbit”
“Dreadnaught”
“Grandmother Dimetrodon”
“The Star-Bear”
“Nirvana or Bust”
“Reservoir Ice”
“Artificial People”
“Huginn and Muninn—and What Came After”
“Cloud”
“Timothy: An Oral History”
“Annie Without Crow”
“Universe Box”
Advance Praise for The Universe Box
[STARRED REVIEW] “Five-time Hugo Award winner Swanwick (Stations of the Tide) swirls together myth and science in this wildly inventive collection. A frequent theme is the interaction of humanity and technology, which is probed poignantly in the bittersweet ‘Artificial People,’ narrated by a newly sentient robot who falls for one of the scientists on her team, and ‘The White Leopard,’ about a man who is able to see through the eyes of his leopard-shaped military drone. In ‘Requiem for a White Rabbit,’ animatronic escapees flee a life of misery in an amusement park. The epistolary ‘Timothy: An Oral History’ imagines the consequences of a scientist in an all-female society engineering a male child in a lab. Swanwick’s wry humor comes through in ‘The Warm Equations,’ a space exploration story helmed by the arrogant Dr. Osborne, and in ‘The Star-Bear,’ about a Russian émigré poet who meets a bizarre celestial being. All of Swanwick’s stories awaken insights into the mystery of being human in an increasingly mind-bending technological world. This is an author at the height of his powers.” —Publishers Weekly
“Swanwick is a great science fiction writer. His stories are brilliantly inventive, often hilarious, often profound, and always heartfelt.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future
“Short science fiction from an all-time great at the absolute pinnacle of his form. These stories are funny, terrifying, horny, disorienting and intoxicating, often all at once.”
—Cory Doctorow, author of Red Team Blues and Enshittification
“Swanwick’s natural storytelling ability and wonderful imagination made these tales of strange and fantastic sing, irrespective of their genre.”
—Advance the Plot
“Virtuoso Swanwick delivers a microcosm in every story of this immaculate collection.”
—Cat Rambo, Nebula Award winning author of the Tabat Quartet
“A frightening use of robot tech, the greatest heist in the universe, Alice in Wonderland you’ve never seen—it is impossible to predict where a Swanwick story will take you. Brilliant, multilayered, breathtakingly imaginative, these stories surprise, delight, sometimes shock, and always reward with their insightful humanity. Don’t miss this collection by one of our very best speculative writers.”
—Nancy Kress, the multiple award-winning coauthor of Observer
“At this advanced stage of the game, I’m in no way surprised to find that Swanwick has produced a story collection that rivals his classic, Tales of Old Earth. A true Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy, he offers up new stories in The Universe Box, stylistically fresh with his trademark wild imagination. SF short fiction lovers and beyond will relish this new collection.”
—Jeffrey Ford, author of A Natural History of Hell and The Shadow Year
“If Michael Swanwick had never been born, it would have been necessary to cobble him together in Victor Frankenstein’s workshop, so that the SF and fantasy fields might be enriched by his barbed whimsicality, offbeat eroticism, swanwicked sense of humor, epiphanic final sentences, and ironclad commitment to making strangeness feel even stranger—a quintet of virtues gloriously on display in The Universe Box.”
—James Morrow, author of The Last Witchfinder and Shambling Towards Hiroshima
“Every Swanwick collection is a reminder of how much he has taught me, and how much I have yet to learn. He is truly one of the all-time great writers of short sf.”
—Andy Duncan, author of An Agent of Utopia
“Whether writing about a mouse-turned-thief, a murderer ranching dimetrodons in the Permian, a Russian émigré poet in Paris visited by a star-marked bear, or a scientist fused with her sentient exoskeleton, Swanwick’s wondrous tales climb every imaginable rung of the cosmic distance ladder leading to our innermost constellations.”
—Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, author of Being Michael Swanwick
Photo by Beth Gwinn
Michael Swanwick is one of the most acclaimed science fiction and fantasy short-story writers of his generation, having received an unprecedented five Hugo Awards in a six year period. He is also the winner of the British Science Fiction and World Fantasy Awards. Swanwick’s stories published in such collections as Gravity’s Angels, Tales of Old Earth, and Not So Much, Said the Cat, have also appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including OMNI, Penthouse, Amazing, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Dimensions. Swanwick’s novels include The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, a New York Times Notable Book, the Nebula Award–winner Stations of the Tide, the Darger & Surplus series, Dragons of Babel, and City in the Stars. His work has also been translated into more than ten languages. Swanwick lives in Pennsylvania.
“Swanwick’s wildly imaginative and beautifully written short stories have been, for several years, one of the primary joys of the field.”
—Washington Post Book World
“One of contemporary sf’s greatest short-story writers.”
—Interzone
“One of the most powerful and consistently inventive short story writers of his generation.”
—Gardner Dozois, editor of the Year’s Best Science Fiction series
“An amazingly assured writer, seemingly incapable of writing a sentence that isn’t interesting in itself, in addition to the way it moves the sentence forward.”
—New York Review of Science Fiction
“Michael Swanwick is darkly magnificent.”
—Jack McDevitt, author of The Engines of God
“Swanwick’s prose takes no prisoners.”
—Time Out Chicago
Excerpt from "Starlight Express"
Flaminio the water carrier lived in the oldest part of the ancient city of Roma among the popolo minuto, the clerks and artisans and laborers and such who could afford no better. His apartment overlooked the piazza dell’Astrovia, which daytimes was choked with tourists from four planets who came to admire the ruins and revenants of empire. They coursed through the ancient transmission station, its stone floor thrumming gently underfoot, the magma tap still powering the energy road, even though the stars had shifted in their positions centuries ago and anyone stepping into the projector would be translated into a complex wave front of neutrinos and shot away from the Earth to fall between the stars forever.
Human beings had built such things once. Now they didn’t even know how to turn it off.
On hot nights, Flaminio slept on a pallet on the roof. Sometimes, staring up at the sparkling line of ionization that the energy road sketched through the atmosphere, he followed it in his imagination past Earth’s three moons and out to the stars. He could feel its pull at such times, the sweet yearning tug that led suicides to converge upon it in darkness, furtive shadows slipping silently up the faintly glowing steps like lovers to a tryst.
Flaminio wished then that he had been born long ago when it was possible to ride the starlight express away from the weary old Republic to impossibly distant worlds nestled deep in the galaxy. But in the millennia since civilization had fallen, countless people had ridden the Astrovia off the planet, and not one had ever returned.
Except, maybe, the woman in white.
Flaminio was coming home from the baths when he saw her emerge from the Astrovia. It was election week and a ward heeler had treated him to a sauna and a blood scrub in exchange for his vote. When he stepped out into the night, every glint of light seemed bright and every surface slick and shiny, as if his flesh had been turned to glass and offered not the least resistance to the world’s sensations. He felt genuinely happy.
Then there was a pause in the constant throb underfoot, as if the great heart of the world had skipped a beat. Something made Flaminio look up, and he thought he saw the woman step down from the constant light of the landing stage.
An instant only, and then he realized he had to be wrong.
The woman wore a white gown of a cloth unlike any Flaminio had ever seen before. It was luminously cool, and with every move she made it slid across her body with simple grace. Transfixed, he watched her step hesitantly out of the Astrovia and seize the railing with both hands.
She stared out across the plaza with a confused and troubled look, as if gazing into an unfamiliar new world.
The Universe Box
Michael Swanwick
“Swanwick’s wildly imaginative and beautifully written short stories have been, for several years, one of the primary joys of the field.”
—Washington Post Book World
Discover the vast worlds and pocket universes of Michael Swanwick (Stations of the Tide), the only author to win science fiction’s most prestigious award five times in six years. With two stories original to this collection, Swanwick aptly demonstrates with poignant humor why he is widely respected as a master of imaginative storytelling.
The Universe Box
by Michael Swanwick
ISBN: 978-1-61696-450-4 (print); 978-1-61696-451-1 (digital)
Published: 3 February 2026
Available Format(s): trade paperback; digital
Discover the vast worlds and pocket universes of Michael Swanwick (Stations of the Tide), the only author to win science fiction’s most prestigious award five times in six years. In his dazzling new collection, the master of speculative short stories returns with tales in which magic and science improbably coexist with myth and legend. With two stories original to this collection, Swanwick aptly demonstrates with poignant humor why he is widely respected as a master of imaginative storytelling.
[STARRED REVIEW] “Five-time Hugo Award winner Swanwick (Stations of the Tide) swirls together myth and science in this wildly inventive collection.
—Publishers Weekly
In engaging stories, Mischling the thief races through time to defeat three trolls before the sun rises for the first time and turns the inhabitants of her city into stone. A scientist is on the run from assassins, because her research in merging human intelligence with sentient AI is too dangerous. An aging veteran obtains a military weapon from his past: a VR robotic leopard in which he rediscovers the consequences of the hunt. In the biggest heist in the history of the universe, a loser Trickster (and the girlfriend who is better than he deserves), sets out to violate every trope and expectation of fiction possible.
Table of Contents
Introduction
“Starlight Express”
“The Last Days of Old Night”
“The Year of the Three Monarchs”
“Ghost Ships”
“The White Leopard”
“Dragon Slayer”
“The Warm Equations”
“Requiem for a White Rabbit”
“Dreadnaught”
“Grandmother Dimetrodon”
“The Star-Bear”
“Nirvana or Bust”
“Reservoir Ice”
“Artificial People”
“Huginn and Muninn—and What Came After”
“Cloud”
“Timothy: An Oral History”
“Annie Without Crow”
“Universe Box”
Advance Praise for The Universe Box
[STARRED REVIEW] “Five-time Hugo Award winner Swanwick (Stations of the Tide) swirls together myth and science in this wildly inventive collection. A frequent theme is the interaction of humanity and technology, which is probed poignantly in the bittersweet ‘Artificial People,’ narrated by a newly sentient robot who falls for one of the scientists on her team, and ‘The White Leopard,’ about a man who is able to see through the eyes of his leopard-shaped military drone. In ‘Requiem for a White Rabbit,’ animatronic escapees flee a life of misery in an amusement park. The epistolary ‘Timothy: An Oral History’ imagines the consequences of a scientist in an all-female society engineering a male child in a lab. Swanwick’s wry humor comes through in ‘The Warm Equations,’ a space exploration story helmed by the arrogant Dr. Osborne, and in ‘The Star-Bear,’ about a Russian émigré poet who meets a bizarre celestial being. All of Swanwick’s stories awaken insights into the mystery of being human in an increasingly mind-bending technological world. This is an author at the height of his powers.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Swanwick is a great science fiction writer. His stories are brilliantly inventive, often hilarious, often profound, and always heartfelt.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future
“Short science fiction from an all-time great at the absolute pinnacle of his form. These stories are funny, terrifying, horny, disorienting and intoxicating, often all at once.”
—Cory Doctorow, author of Red Team Blues and Enshittification
“Swanwick’s natural storytelling ability and wonderful imagination made these tales of strange and fantastic sing, irrespective of their genre.”
—Advance the Plot
“Virtuoso Swanwick delivers a microcosm in every story of this immaculate collection.”
—Cat Rambo, Nebula Award winning author of the Tabat Quartet
“A frightening use of robot tech, the greatest heist in the universe, Alice in Wonderland you’ve never seen—it is impossible to predict where a Swanwick story will take you. Brilliant, multilayered, breathtakingly imaginative, these stories surprise, delight, sometimes shock, and always reward with their insightful humanity. Don’t miss this collection by one of our very best speculative writers.”
—Nancy Kress, the multiple award-winning coauthor of Observer
“At this advanced stage of the game, I’m in no way surprised to find that Swanwick has produced a story collection that rivals his classic, Tales of Old Earth. A true Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy, he offers up new stories in The Universe Box, stylistically fresh with his trademark wild imagination. SF short fiction lovers and beyond will relish this new collection.”
—Jeffrey Ford, author of A Natural History of Hell and The Shadow Year
“If Michael Swanwick had never been born, it would have been necessary to cobble him together in Victor Frankenstein’s workshop, so that the SF and fantasy fields might be enriched by his barbed whimsicality, offbeat eroticism, swanwicked sense of humor, epiphanic final sentences, and ironclad commitment to making strangeness feel even stranger—a quintet of virtues gloriously on display in The Universe Box.”
—James Morrow, author of The Last Witchfinder and Shambling Towards Hiroshima
“Every Swanwick collection is a reminder of how much he has taught me, and how much I have yet to learn. He is truly one of the all-time great writers of short sf.”
—Andy Duncan, author of An Agent of Utopia
“Whether writing about a mouse-turned-thief, a murderer ranching dimetrodons in the Permian, a Russian émigré poet in Paris visited by a star-marked bear, or a scientist fused with her sentient exoskeleton, Swanwick’s wondrous tales climb every imaginable rung of the cosmic distance ladder leading to our innermost constellations.”
—Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, author of Being Michael Swanwick
Michael Swanwick is one of the most acclaimed science fiction and fantasy short-story writers of his generation, having received an unprecedented five Hugo Awards in a six year period. He is also the winner of the British Science Fiction and World Fantasy Awards. Swanwick’s stories published in such collections as Gravity’s Angels, Tales of Old Earth, and Not So Much, Said the Cat, have also appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including OMNI, Penthouse, Amazing, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Dimensions. Swanwick’s novels include The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, a New York Times Notable Book, the Nebula Award–winner Stations of the Tide, the Darger & Surplus series, Dragons of Babel, and City in the Stars. His work has also been translated into more than ten languages. Swanwick lives in Pennsylvania.
“Swanwick’s wildly imaginative and beautifully written short stories have been, for several years, one of the primary joys of the field.”
—Washington Post Book World
“One of contemporary sf’s greatest short-story writers.”
—Interzone
“One of the most powerful and consistently inventive short story writers of his generation.”
—Gardner Dozois, editor of the Year’s Best Science Fiction series
“An amazingly assured writer, seemingly incapable of writing a sentence that isn’t interesting in itself, in addition to the way it moves the sentence forward.”
—New York Review of Science Fiction
“Michael Swanwick is darkly magnificent.”
—Jack McDevitt, author of The Engines of God
“Swanwick’s prose takes no prisoners.”
—Time Out Chicago
Excerpt from "Starlight Express"
Flaminio the water carrier lived in the oldest part of the ancient city of Roma among the popolo minuto, the clerks and artisans and laborers and such who could afford no better. His apartment overlooked the piazza dell’Astrovia, which daytimes was choked with tourists from four planets who came to admire the ruins and revenants of empire. They coursed through the ancient transmission station, its stone floor thrumming gently underfoot, the magma tap still powering the energy road, even though the stars had shifted in their positions centuries ago and anyone stepping into the projector would be translated into a complex wave front of neutrinos and shot away from the Earth to fall between the stars forever.
Human beings had built such things once. Now they didn’t even know how to turn it off.
On hot nights, Flaminio slept on a pallet on the roof. Sometimes, staring up at the sparkling line of ionization that the energy road sketched through the atmosphere, he followed it in his imagination past Earth’s three moons and out to the stars. He could feel its pull at such times, the sweet yearning tug that led suicides to converge upon it in darkness, furtive shadows slipping silently up the faintly glowing steps like lovers to a tryst.
Flaminio wished then that he had been born long ago when it was possible to ride the starlight express away from the weary old Republic to impossibly distant worlds nestled deep in the galaxy. But in the millennia since civilization had fallen, countless people had ridden the Astrovia off the planet, and not one had ever returned.
Except, maybe, the woman in white.
Flaminio was coming home from the baths when he saw her emerge from the Astrovia. It was election week and a ward heeler had treated him to a sauna and a blood scrub in exchange for his vote. When he stepped out into the night, every glint of light seemed bright and every surface slick and shiny, as if his flesh had been turned to glass and offered not the least resistance to the world’s sensations. He felt genuinely happy.
Then there was a pause in the constant throb underfoot, as if the great heart of the world had skipped a beat. Something made Flaminio look up, and he thought he saw the woman step down from the constant light of the landing stage.
An instant only, and then he realized he had to be wrong.
The woman wore a white gown of a cloth unlike any Flaminio had ever seen before. It was luminously cool, and with every move she made it slid across her body with simple grace. Transfixed, he watched her step hesitantly out of the Astrovia and seize the railing with both hands.
She stared out across the plaza with a confused and troubled look, as if gazing into an unfamiliar new world.
Other books by this author…
Gravity’s Angels
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