Welcome friend! Few writers in speculative fiction have shaped the short story form as boldly as Michael Swanwick. Across decades of work and a career that includes multiple wins of the genre’s most prestigious awards, his stories have moved effortlessly between science fiction and fantasy, myth and technology, humor and heartbreak.
Upon the release of The Universe Box, a collection stories in which magic and science coexist, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Michael Swanwick about his career, the art of shaping short fiction into a collection, and the ideas that continue to pull him toward speculative storytelling. What follows is a conversation about curiosity, craft, and the joy of building universes. It is such a fun interview! I hope you enjoy!
The Universe Box
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 new tales in which magic and science improbably coexist with myth and legend.
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.
With two stories original to this collection, Michael Swanwick aptly demonstrates with poignant humor why he is widely respected as a master of imaginative storytelling.
Get to know the author: Michael Swanwick
Hi Michael! Welcome to Armed with A Book. It is an absolute pleasure to chat with you. Please tell me and my readers a bit about yourself.
I was the kind of kid who had with vacuum tubes in his pocket and dismantled his toys to see how they worked. I was going to be a scientist or inventor or maybe both. Then two things happened when I was sixteen: I read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and my father, who was an engineer for General Electric and easily the most admirable man I’ve ever known, came down with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The ecstasy of the first event and the trauma of the second conspired to make me a writer. I dedicated my life to becoming one―and fourteen years later, after endless scribbling, finished my first story. It didn’t sell, but the second one did, and every one since.
For readers encountering your work for the first time, how would you describe your storytelling style in a sentence or two?
My stories are like snowflakes―no two alike. Their author doesn’t matter, only what serves each one best.
The title The Universe Box feels like something to open carefully, knowing anything might be inside. What does it mean to you, and how does it reflect the kinds of stories gathered in this collection?
My generation was the last to come into the field having read every important work of science fiction and fantasy ever written. That’s not possible anymore―there have been too many significant writers since for anyone to have read them all. But back then I knew all of the great writers and aspired to write like all of them. So, metaphorically, a universe box is all of genre fiction. And the mind of a writer, here specifically me but it applies to all of us. And the universe itself, or rather, that fraction of it that we can comprehend or imagine. Also, by implication, the book so titled. And, after the book has been shut, the reader. If I’ve made you aware of how large you are inside, then I’ve done my job.
How does curating a short story collection differ from writing individual stories?
Mostly in that there’s an editor to argue with. In a friendly way, I mean. You want to open and close the book “long and strong”―with the two stories you think most likely to wow the readers. So it was a shock when Jacob Weisman proposed opening with something I thought was not my absolute best. He in turn was appalled by my suggestion. We managed to agree on “Starlight Express.” And we were both convinced that “Universe Box,” the story the collection is almost named after, belonged in pride of place at the end.
Ordering the collection, I worked hard to alternate fantasy with science fiction, upbeat with grim, pulp with literary, and make sure that no two adjacent stories had any strong similarities. The result is a graceful, shapely whole, if read from beginning to end. But of course that’s not how people read collections! Their path is dictated by what titles look most intriguing, whether the first page suits their current mood, and a hundred factors more. So all that work may be for nothing.
Still, that first-and-last story rule is useful. They’re the first two things I read in someone else’s collection.
Many of the stories in The Universe Box play with time, identity, and consequence. What draws you again and again to speculative frameworks as a way of asking human questions?
If I could toss off a story in an afternoon, it would be worth writing fiction that was simply entertaining. I enjoy that kind of thing myself, in the same way that I enjoy ice cream or ginger snaps. But I’m a slow writer, and when a story takes months to write, you want it to be consequential. To be about something.
I look at my library sometimes and see so many writers who were extraordinary people and are gone. But then I consider their books and think: At least they left something behind so that people as yet unborn will have some glimmer of what Gardner or Terry or Johanna were like. How marvelous it would have been to know Howard and Octavia and Tom.
What they had in common was that they didn’t settle for being publishable. They wrote fiction that mattered.
But specifically, my obsession with identity clearly derives from my father’s loss of it. Time is simply an artifact of SF literature’s looking beyond or before the present moment. As to consequence, all my life reeks of it.
You’ve often been described as a master of short fiction. What do you love about the short story form that keeps you returning to it?
The novel is a wonderful, shambling, shaggy, and digressive beast that eats what it wants and sleeps where it will. The short story is a predator. It zeroes in on its prey, stalks it, and attacks. The novel is about many things. The short story, only one. But that one is worth every word spent on it.
Somebody once defined the novel as “a work of prose fiction at least sixty thousand words long that has something wrong with it.” Nobody has ever written a perfect novel. Many of us have written perfect short stories. You’ll find a few of them in this collection.
How has your relationship to writing changed over the years?
Experience has taught me that if the story is good enough, eventually I’ll finish it, and this is calming. Other than that, nothing. I still give it everything I’ve got. It still can be difficult as hell. Anybody starting out with the delusion that it will get easier should quit now. When it gets easier, you aim higher.
That splendid exhilaration at finishing a story and knowing that it’s good never pales.
Are science fiction and fantasy separate genres for you, or simply different flavors of the same imaginative impulse?
Yes, and yes. I’m a firm believer in the separation of genres and could lecture you for hours on why this should be. Which makes it ironic that I’ve spent most of my career tromping back and forth over those lines and obscuring the distinction. Stations of the Tide, in which everything from people to land masses is changing its nature is fantasy-flavored science fiction, and the Iron Dragon trilogy with its jet-powered dragons and Armani-clad elves is SF-flavored fantasy. Both disprove all my theoretics. So… Do I contradict myself? Very well then, put it down on my permanent record.
Having won the field’s most prestigious awards multiple times, how do accolades shape―or not shape―the way you think about your work today?
Winning a Hugo or a Nebula or a World Fantasy Award is wonderful. I’d recommend it to anybody. It’s a great way to flood yourself with endorphins. And everybody’s so happy for you! It makes you feel good about all of existence.
Then next morning, you sit down at the machine and stare at that blank screen. It’s not impressed by your awards and neither are you.
Is there an idea, question, or speculative “what if” that you haven’t yet explored but would like to?
Yes, pretty much all of them.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
For short fiction, this is the best of times and the worst of times. There are more genre magazines worth reading than at any time since the 1950s. But the traditional “big three,” Analog, Asimov’s and F&SF, are looking shaky and most of the online zines are held together with love and a shoestring. This would be a great time to identify the one publication you’d most like to see endure and give it your financial support.
Only if you can afford it, of course. Fiction should make you richer, not poorer.
Thank you, reader, for joining us! Add this book on Goodreads.The Universe Box is now available wherever books are sold! Be sure to check your local library too.
Many thanks to Kasey L. at Tachyon Publications for the review copy and interview opportunity! Stay tuned for my review! 🙂
Be First to Comment