The Universe Box by Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick writes more short fiction than most genre writers at his level - the average is roughly "none," for those who can get novel contracts, since short fiction is ill-paid and acceptances are quirky and contingent and short fiction is proverbially harder to write than long fiction. But Swanwick tends to have a couple of stories a year, most years, which pile up and become a new collection roughly once a decade.

The last couple were "Not So Much," Said the Cat and, before that, The Dog Said Bow-Wow. Unfortunately for the animal-lovers out there, he doesn't have a similarly-themed title to complete a "trilogy," so this year's collection is The Universe Box.

It collects nineteen stories, originally published between 2012 and 2023, in various anthologies, Clarkesworld, Asimov's, F&SF, Tor.com and some odder places. Two are new to this book; the title story was published in an ultra-limited edition (thirteen copies) by Dragonstairs Press, the imprint run out of Swanwick's house.

I've long-since given up on reading books of short stories with a notebook on my lap, taking notes of character names and plot points and whatnot. (It was my job for a long time, and the thing about habits that used to be your job is: you need to stop doing them when it's no longer your job.) So let me just say that, like a lot of Swanwick, this book mixes fantasy, usually somewhat mythic but with a modern tone, with SF, usually far enough forward in the future to feature major transformations. And that his insights and sentences are as pointed as ever.

I generally don't think a reviewer should talk in great depth about individual stories in a collection, anyway. Either a reader is going to read the book anyway, in which case she is better off going in clean. Or she's never going to read it, in which case why clutter up her memory with irrelevant things?

Swanwick is one of the genre's most elegant and thoughtful writers, and, as always, short fiction is where skill and thought and craft play out most strongly: it's possible to power through a novel (as a writer) with all sorts of flaws, and still have a thing that basically succeeds. Short fiction is much less forgiving; every word needs to work at least pretty well. Swanwick has some real gems here - though I do think the title story is too long, too self-indulgent, and too much of a shaggy-dog story, so I'm not saying everything in here is perfect. But most of it is strong: that's what I'd say about Swanwick in general, too. He's smart; he's sneaky; he's worth reading.