Pluralistic: Michael Swanwick's "The Universe Box" (03 Feb 2026)


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The Tachyon Books cover for Michael Swanwick's 'The Universe Box.'

Michael Swanwick's "The Universe Box" (permalink)

No one writes short stories like Michael Swanwick, the five-time Hugo-winning master of science fiction. To prove it, you need only pick up The Universe Box, Swanwick's just-published short story collection, a book representing one of the field's greatest writers at the absolute pinnacle of his game:

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/the-universe-box/

Science fiction has a long and honorable history with the short story. Sf is a pulp literature that was born in the pages of magazines specializing in short fiction and serials, and long after other genres had given up the ghost, sf remained steadfastly rooted in short form fiction. There are still, to this day, multiple sf magazines that publish short stories every month, on paper, and pay for it. I started my career as a short story writer, and continue to dabble in the form, but I have mostly moved onto novels.

That's a pretty common trajectory in sf, where – notwithstanding the field's status as a haven for the short story – the reach (and money) come from novels. But sf has always had a cohort of short fiction writers who are staunchly committed to the form: Harlan Ellison, Martha Soukup, Martha Wells, Ray Bradbury, Ted Chiang, James Tiptree Jr, Theodore Sturgeon, and, of course, Michael Swanwick.

It's a little weird, how sf serves as a powerful redoubt for short fiction. After all, sf is a genre in which everything is up for grabs: the reader can't assume anything about the story's setting, its era, the species of its characters. Time can run forwards, backwards, or in a loop. There can be gods and teleporters, faster-than-light drives and superintelligent machines. There can be aliens and space colonies.

All of that has to be established in the story. The most straightforward way to do this is, of course, through exposition. There's a commonplace (and wrong) notion that exposition is bad ("show, don't tell"). It's fairer to say that exposition is hard – dramatization is, well, dramatic, which makes it easier to engage the reader's attention. But great exposition is great and sf is a genre that celebrates exposition, done well:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

The opposite of exposition is what Jo Walton calls "incluing," "the process of scattering information seamlessly through the text, as opposed to stopping the story to impart the information":

https://web.archive.org/web/20111119145140/http:/papersky.livejournal.com/324603.html

Incluing is a beautiful prose technique, but it makes the reader work. You have to pay close attention to all these subtle clues and build a web of inferences about the kind of world you've been plunged into. Incluing turns a story into a (wonderful and engaging) puzzle. It makes the aesthetic affect of short sf into something that's not so much a reverie as a high-engagement activity, a mystery whose solution is totally unbounded.

This is a terrific experience, but it is also work. Doing that kind of work as part of the process of consuming a 300-page novel is one thing, but trying to get the reader up to speed in a 7,000 word story and still have room left over for the story part is a big lift, and even the best writers end up asking a lot of the reader in their short stories. Sf shorts can be the "difficult jazz" of literature, a form and genre that requires – and rewards – very active attention.

(Incidentally, my favorite incluing example is Mark Twain's classic comedic short, "The Petrified Man":)

https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story/the-petrified-man/

But here's the thing. None of this applies to Swanwick. His stories use a mix of (impeccable) exposition and (subtle) incluing, and yet, there's never a moment in reading a Swanwick story where it feels like work. It's not merely that he's a gorgeous prose-smith whose sentences are each more surpassingly lovely than the last (though he is). Nor does he lack ambition: each of these stories has a more embroidered and outlandish premise than the last.

Somehow, though, he just slides these stories into your brain.

And what stories they are! They are, by turns, individually and in combination, slapstick, grave, horny, hilarious, surreal, disturbing and heartwarming. They have surprise endings and surprise middles and sometimes surprise beginnings (Swanwick does an opening paragraph like no one else).

This is what it means to read a short story collection from an absolute master at the absolute peak of his powers. He can slide you frictionlessly between Icelandic troll tragedies to lethal drone-leopard romantic agonies to battles of the gods and the cigar box that has the universe inside of it. All with the lyricism of Bradbury, the madcap wit of Sturgeon, the unrelenting weirdness of Dick, the heart of Tiptree and the precision of Chiang.

This is a book of worlds that each exist for just a handful of pages but occupy more space than those pages could possibly contain. It's a series of cigar boxes, each with the universe inside of it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony CD spyware vendor caves to EFF demands https://web.archive.org/web/20060208033113/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_02.php#004378

#20yrsago British Library: DRM lobotomizes “human memory” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4675280.stm

#15yrsago Hex values for Crayola colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Crayola_crayon_colors

#15yrsago Michael Lewis explains the Irish econopocalypse https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/03/michael-lewis-ireland-201103?currentPage=all

#15yrsago Canada’s Internet rescued from weak and pathetic regulator https://web.archive.org/web/20110203054651/http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/932571–ottawa-threatens-to-reverse-crtc-decision-on-internet-billing

#10yrsago Tattoo artist asserts copyright over customers’ bodies https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/nba-2k-videogame-maker-sued-861131/

#10yrsago EU plans to class volunteers who rescue drowning Syrian refugees as “traffickers” https://www.statewatch.org/news/2016/january/refugee-crisis-council-proposals-on-migrant-smuggling-would-criminalise-humanitarian-assistance-by-civil-society-local-people-and-volunteers-greece-ngos-and-volunteers-have-to-register-with-the-police-and-be-vetted/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1053 words today, 20644 total)

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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