Review: 'The Universe Box' by Michael Swanwick

I absolutely adored Swanwick's Stations of the Tide when I read it a year or two age, so I was very excited to get the chance to read some of his short stories in this collection. The Universe Box is full of inventive tricks from an author clearly in command of his craft. While not all of it worked for me, it was a very fun read. Thanks to Tachyon Publications and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 3/2/2026
Publisher: Tachyon Publications

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.

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.

Michael Swanwick has been writing since the 1980s, but the stories in this collection are gathered from the past few years. They really show Swanwick's control of the craft of writing. It's not the kind of writing where you can race through a story easily. Pretty much every sentence holds a different kind of surprise or twist and plays with language. There is not just the control of language, however, but also Swanwick's knowledge of the genres he's operating in. There is a confidence in how he moves away from the expected tropes and how he establishes his characters. In his preface to the collection, Swanwick talks about how the ending is crucial to a story and that some stories have had to wait on the shelf for years before he found an ending worthy of it. It is true that the stories in this collection don't usually end how you might expect them to and usually that twist is well-earned and set up properly in retrospect. For readers who are experienced in reading speculative fiction, sci-fi and fantasy, this makes his stories incredibly fun to read. I can imagine that perhaps, for readers less familiar with these waters, however, this can make some of the stories a bit more challenging. I think the work you might have to put in will be rewarded though!

As with every story collection, there are some stories that align more with a reader than others. The collection begins with 'Starlight Express', where a woman arrives in old Roma by an energy road and it is unclear where she is from. There were aspects to this story I really enjoyed. 'The Last Days of Old Night' was one of my faovurites, in part because of its main character and in part because it was inspired by Iceland. Mischling is made human from her previous mouse-existence by three brothers with awesome powers. What comes next is an exploration of abuses of power, of creation, and the end of an endless night. 'The Year of the Three Monarchs' is brief but fun and reads more like a mini-history for an imagined empire than a full story. 'Ghost Ships' is, according to Swanwick's preface, a very personal story that is also a ghost story and although it didn't work entirely for me, I did think it was veyr well-written. 'The White Leopard' is a very intriguing story about a drone leopard, friendship, and marital betrayal. 'Dragon Slayer' was another favourite, I loved Swanwick's take on time travel in a magical storyworld. 'The Warm Equations' is also very short, almost like a one-shot, of a pilot who has crashed and is sure he won't be saved. 'Requiem for a White Rabbit' is a stunning story about robots, intelligence, violence, and the question of what is real and whether that really matters. 'Dreadnought' is very intriguing, combining a kind of dark social commentary about addiction, poverty, and being unhoused with a seemingly apocalyptic battle for the soul of the world. 'Grandmother Dimetrodon' is really intriguing, as a protagonist travels back in time and begins raising dimetrodons in order not to be found guilty for a crime. But a strange visitor throws his life off balance. It is a story about violence and evolution but it didn't fully pull those strings together in a decisive manner for me. 'The Star-Bear' is something of a double-edged love letter to Russian emigrees in Paris. 'Nirvana and Bust' was a delightful story about human and artificial intelligence that I really liked despite my general disdain for current AI. 'Reservoir Ice' is a really interesting take on time-travel, but also on consent and how the linearity of time matters. 'Artificial People' is about a robot learning about life and gaining consciousness in a strangely gentle way. I had some difficulty with 'Huginn and Muninn - and What Came After', which I will address below. 'Cloud' was a little unfocused for me, but this somehow added to its vibe. 'Timothy: An Oral History' is about a female world in which a man is once again created. Here it is the form that is interesting, which is made up of various testimonies, but the politics of it are also intriguing. 'Annie Without Crow' is a delightful medievalist tale of gods and powers and little baby Elizabeth I. Finally, 'The Universe Box' is a fun heist story that moves at an intense pace and is full of fun images and figures.

Like I said above, Swanwick is an excellent writer and there are images and ideas in this collection that will definitely stick with me. I did have, as said, a weird feeling about the story 'Huginn and Muninn'. In and of itself it is a stunning story about identity, gender, and depression. There are Alice in Wonderland-vibes, there are vultures, there is mild body horror suggested, and I think that the way mental health issues are addressed is really interesting. It is, however, also a story about Alice Sheldon, whose penname was James Tiptree, and her suicide, which includes the potential murder of her husband. Swanwick addresses some of his intent behind writing this story in the Preface and this had me intrigued about reading the story itself. I think that there is something beautiful about working through the violent loss of a respected colleague through art, but after reading the story I also just wonder where the line is between an author's public persona and their own personal struggles, and how much oft hat should (posthumously) be explored by others. I don't necessarily have a clear answer to this, I just know that it stuck with me, after the story was done. However, I still had a great time with this collection. While some stories are a bit briefer and more like one-shots than full stories, the ones that felt more worked out were stunning. I will definitely keep reading Swanwick's work and hope to get into more of his novels soon.

I give this collection...

4 Universes!

Not every story worked quite as well for me, but there are some very inventive approaches here and some very stark imagery, which will stay with me for quite some time!