Excerpt: THE UNIVERSE BOX by Michael Swanwick (Tachyon)

Next year, Tachyon Publications are due to publish The Universe Box, a new collection of 21 superb short stories by Michael Swanwick. To whet readers’ appetites for the collection, the publisher has provided CR with an excerpt from the title story. First, here’s the synopsis:

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.

In a low grey river port city, a former industrial center fallen on hard times, a dovecote of stenches and miasmas, a huddling-place of heartbreaks and miseries, a habitat of bad memories and unthinkable futures, indeed in the exact geographic center of that city, a young man who thought that he was happy checked his wristwatch for the seventh time that evening. Howard had on a new suit with front row tickets to a Valentine’s Day concert at the Academy of Music tucked into one pocket and a tidy little box containing a rather expensive ring in another. A magnum of champagne was chilling in the fridge and a dozen red roses lurked in the shadows of the bedroom. There, the sheets had been changed and the bed freshly made, to create an attractive theater for the passionate sex he anticipated would fill half the night.

Mimi had promised to drop by after work. She suspected nothing.

There was a knock at the door—Mimi had a key but never used it—and Howard hurried to fling it open.

And froze.

Black fog filled the doorway, billowed, condensed, solidified, and then sprouted a striped scarf and the world’s largest, roundest head. As Howard gaped, a crack appeared in that tremendous cheese wheel of a face and split it from ear to ear. “Aren’t you going to say hello to your Uncle Paulie?” the apparition exclaimed, flinging its arms wide.

“Uncle . . . Paulie. Oh. Oh, yes, of course. Uncle Paulie? Come in, come in,” Howard said, all in a fluster because an instant ago he would have sworn that he had never seen or heard of this man before yet now a lifetime’s worth of memories of this dear and beloved relative coursed through his brain.

“What a lovely little place you have!” Uncle Paulie tossed his sable greatcoat onto the George Nakashima coffee table, dumped a cigar box atop it, and threw loop after loop of red-and-white scarf after them. “Charmingly Spartan. Is that a Picasso? So modest to have a print rather than an oil. But that’s typical of you. I came as soon as I heard the good news.”

“Good news?”

“Your engagement, dear boy, your engagement. Have you asked Mimi yet? No, of course not. Look at that bulge in your coat! Is that a ring in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? Hah! Don’t answer that.”

“You haven’t changed one bit,” Howard said with an embarrassed, perfectly pointless grin. “But I don’t understand. I haven’t told anybody yet, not even Mimi. So how . . . ?”

“That hardly matters, dearest of all nephews. Not one iota. Not one scintilla. Not one single charming quark. And do you know why? Because I am here.” Uncle Paulie slapped his chest. “To help.” He patted Howard on the head, two light taps. “You.”

At which awkward moment, there came another knock at the door. This time it turned out to be Mimi.

Big scared eyes, waifish body, short-cropped hair. Mimi crept into the apartment, raised a startled paw to her nose, twitched her whiskers, and froze motionless at the sight of Uncle Paulie. “Oh!”

“This can only be little Mimikins!” Uncle Paulie lifted her up, whirled her around, set her down, and bussed her on the lips. Then he mock-scolded, “Nephew, she’s exquisite! Why did you only say she was gorgeous?”

“I—”

“Never mind, if we don’t get a hurry on, we’ll be late!” Uncle Paulie snatched up hat, coat, and scarf, tossed all into the air, and was holding open the door, dressed to go. “Chop-chop, kiddies!” Exuberant, irresistible, he swept Howard and a rather dazed Mimi along before him, down the elevator, out of the Drake, several blocks down the street, through glass doors and up an elevator to the Top of the Tooz. Which was a rooftop revolving night club, and one that Howard had never been to because it had closed years ago.

“Have they reopened this?” Howard said. Surely, he would have heard.

“Nothing is ever closed,” Uncle Paulie said, handing his things to a sullen hatcheck girl who tossed them over her shoulder onto the floor. “Not really.”

“Glasses! Caviar! A jazz band! Not overly advanced! Nor too loud! You’ll waive corkage, of course.” As his impromptu retinue scattered like pigeons to obey, Uncle Paulie turned to Howard and Mimi and said, “I have something special to show you both.” He reached into an inner jacket pocket and pulled out an object which he solemnly placed on the table before him and patted with both hands. “There. What do you think?”

It was a cigar box.

Mimi clearly wasn’t about to say anything. So Howard cleared his throat. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Uncle Paulie, but I’m afraid I don’t smoke.”

Uncle Paulie looked shocked. “This isn’t for you, child. No, no, no, I’m just going to let you see it.”

“Oh. Okay, I guess.”

Holding up a finger, Uncle Paulie made an owlish face and said, “Let me posit a question: What one thing does the world currently need most? Eh?”

“Um . . . love?” Howard ventured.

“World peace,” Mimi said firmly.

“Pah! I’m disappointed in you both. A good bottle of wine, of course!” Uncle Paulie flipped open the lid of the cigar box and reached within. “As you doubtless know, the very finest collection ever assembled was the legendary Wine Cellar of Alexandria. Destroyed in that dreadful fire, such a pity. But no matter. I’ll just have to dig deeper.” A puzzled look came over Uncle Paulie’s face as he reached within and further within and yet further indeed, until his arm had disappeared up to the shoulder. Then his expression cleared and, leaning back, he reeled in his arm, at the end of which was an unlabeled black glass bottle upon which were scratched archaic runes. “Ahh, Amarone della Lemuria! A ‘sea-dark wine, half as old as time,’ as that drunken sot Homer put it. There’s never been a plonk like it.”

Laughing, Mimi clapped her hands. Howard scowled and grumbled, “That’s quite a trick.”

“It is the single best trick ever performed, nephew—and I say that with no hyperbole whatsoever. May I burst into flames if I lie.” A waiter cut away the lead, dug out the cork with a knife, poured the contents into glasses, faded to nothingness.

“A toast!” Uncle Paulie cried. “To the criminals, cads, con men, and perverts within us all!”

This struck Howard as being in very poor taste. But Mimi was already drinking so there was nothing to do but follow suit.

He took a sip. His eyes went wide.

A clarity that surpassed all understanding suffused his brain. The sun rose within the midnight of Howard’s soul. A blindfold was ripped from his mind and flung to the wind. Everything that existed was right and holy, he could see that now—no, better than seeing, he knew it for a true thing down to the root of his being. The world was good, the universe better, and as for life—peanut butter and chocolate combined were tasteless by comparison.

“What’s in there?” he gasped.

Howard meant in the wine. But misunderstanding him (whether intentionally or not, who could say?), Uncle Paulie held up the cigar box as if it were a window and opened the lid. “Everything you could desire: castles in the air, mountains on a plate, treasury bills, wisdom . . . you name it. Voluptuous goddesses, glass moons, methane seas. Dinosaurs, if that’s to your taste.

“Look.”

Howard looked. And beheld:

Endless clouds of diamond dust glittering on the deep, black velvet of infinity. Stars exploding above the frozen husks of sunless worlds. A herd of Parasaurolophus trumpeting and feeding in a grove of dawn redwoods. Wise machines drifting between galaxies, carrying in their bellies clusters of civilizations, each written on a silver disk smaller than a dime. A drunken Elizabethan poet singing and urinating from a third-story window. Nanowars being fought endlessly on the surface of a single mote of dust. A stray dog in Milwaukee gulping down a hamburger foraged from a dumpster. Trillions of integers, deep in the heart of an irrational number, pledging their love and obeisance to . . .

Uncle Paulie snapped the cigar box lid shut and said, “Enough of that! Mimi and I are going to dance.”

Howard blinked, gaped, and was back in real time. He wondered how many years had passed in stunned contemplation of the glory of . . . whatever it was in the box. Then he saw that his wine glass was still half full. He seized it and gulped down every drop. It made him feel better, so he refilled the glass and drank that down as well. The clarity this gave him intensified to such a degree as to be indistinguishable from a dizzy sense of genius.

When Howard returned to the table, Mimi looked flushed and happy while Uncle Paulie appeared uncharacteristically solemn. He handed Howard the cigar box, saying, “Take this, dear boy. Take it! Hide it! Don’t tell me where. Don’t tell anybody where. Don’t even tell yourself.”

“How do I do that?”

“Put the box on the table before you. Close your eyes. Open the lid with one hand. Then take the box in your other hand and place it inside the opening you just created. All of space and time will be accessible to you. Hide it wherever. Just be careful not to put it somewhere obvious. Excuse me. I have to change.”

Michael Swanwick’s The Universe Box is due to be published by Tachyon Publications in North America and in the UK, on February 3rd, 2026.

Here’s the full Table of Contents: