The Poppies of Terra #75 - Opening The Universe Box

Last week saw the publication of the new short story collection The Universe Box by one of my favorite writers, Michael Swanwick. 

Pre-publication, I was asked by the publisher to provide a blurb. Here’s what I had to say:

As someone who has spent years reading, studying and admiring Swanwick’s brilliant fiction, I can happily report that his talent has never blazed more brightly than with this new collection. Whether writing about a mouse-turned-thief, a murderer ranching dimetrodons in the Permian, a Russian émigré poet in Paris visited by a star-marked bear, or a scientist fused with her sentient exoskeleton, Swanwick’s wondrous tales climb every imaginable rung of the cosmic distance ladder leading to our innermost constellations. As befits a true literary spellcaster, Swanwick’s universe box proves infinitely larger on the inside.

The collection contains nineteen stories, two of them never before published, and four of which we didn’t get to cover in our full-length book of conversations, Being Michael Swanwick, because they came out after our project was done. 

I recently had the chance to talk to Michael once again, an interview you can find here.

What follows are discussions we had in Being Michael Swanwick about four of my favorite stories in The Universe Box, in the order in which the stories appear in the new collection.

I hope this will give you a sense of the tone and approach of Being Michael Swanwick, which was a passion project for me. 

More importantly, I’d love for these conversations to get you interested in Swanwick’s short fiction, if you’re not already familiar with it.

“Starlight Express”

Zinos-Amaro: “Starlight Express” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September-October 2017) has a melancholy feel from start to finish.

Swanwick: The first couple of pages of this story were done in about a day, really fast for me. I spent a lot of time imagining this world. I knew from the beginning that what happened was that the woman who emerged from the transmitter was a blip, a copy, a remnant of an earlier age. I worked out a lot of where the plot had to go, but I couldn’t figure out an ending for it literally for years. Gardner told me that Flaminio had to fall in love with Szette and be heartbroken at the end. The problem I had with that ending was that it was the same ending that everybody uses. I enjoyed the world creation for this story so much that I didn’t want to throw it away. I kept waiting until I found that ending where he gets to travel all over the Solar System, in ways we can’t even begin to imagine right now, and has to admit to himself that he’s never gone anywhere or done anything. He becomes emblematic of the whole culture he’s in. That worked, I think, but it took me forever to find it.

Zinos-Amaro: Yet in a way the ending is consistent with Gardner’s vision too, because his inability to move past the events of the story, as it were, despite his literal displacement by vast distances, can be read as heartbreak. At first Flaminio is an unwitting prisoner of her bracelet, but his life ends up with deeply unrequited love.

Swanwick: Yes. Also that.

Zinos-Amaro: The Great Albino is a memorable secondary character.

Swanwick: He came from Hieronymus Bosch. At the center of his painting Garden of Earthly Delights you have the giant and people climbing up into him with ladders. Despite the monstrous quality, he has a very human face.

Zinos-Amaro: I was wondering if your phrase “the woman in white” was a reference to Wilkie Collins’ famous novel, which has a similar setup involving the appearance of a disoriented woman.

Swanwick: I’m afraid not. That novel is on my list of books to be read one of these days. Marianne speaks well of it.

I should say that Maurizio Manzieri, the artist who did the cover for this issue of F&SF, really did a wonderful job. He makes Szette beautiful in a cosmic, science fictional way, with her Milky Way galaxy earring and so on. If you read the story and go back to the cover again, though, you realize she looks a little vapid. I think this is one of his best covers, but then I would think that!

Zinos-Amaro: Part of this story’s power comes from its fine juxtaposition of a very far future with an ancient Roman setting, which made me think of your earlier story “The Mask.”

Swanwick: I’ve been to Rome, of course, and the contrast between these very ancient things and cars going by hits you strongly. But I’m also indebted to Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings, set in a future Rome with a profound misunderstanding of its own past. Their reading of ancient history is off, which makes you stop and think that our view of the past is probably just as bad a misreading. So kudos to you, Bob.

Zinos-Amaro: He achieves a similar effect in the far-future recreations of the masterful “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Swanwick: Yes. And of course he did a lot of traveling and visited ancient sites, because he’s a history and archaeology buff. The contrast of epochs must have probably struck him everywhere he went.

Zinos-Amaro: Gardner and Rich Horton both selected this story for their yearly best-of collections, and for the reasons mentioned above I agree that it’s a remarkable piece

Swanwick: Overall, it’s a sorrowful situation. This civilization had access to the whole universe and managed to lose it. The weight of history keeps them from rebuilding.

“Huginn and Muninn—and What Came After”

Zinos-Amaro: Much is implied in “Huginn and Muninnand What Came After” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, July-August 2021), which strikes me as a very strong piece of work.

Swanwick: This was my James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon story. In retrospect, I think it was too subtle to call my protagonist Alyssa rather than Alice, and I’ll probably change this if the story is reprinted. Anyway, Tiptree once told Gardner that for years she had lived with two vultures perched on her shoulders. That was her depression. Eventually one of them stirred, flapped its wings and flew away. The other one did the same some time later. Unfortunately, apparently they came back, which is an enormous pity.

I wrote this story because Tiptree had published a story called “In Midst of Life,” in which she was obviously picturing her own afterlife. It’s one of her weaker stories. It really doesn’t come to grips with her own obsession. I thought that her obsession lent itself to more exploration.

Zinos-Amaro: The magazine publication of this story includes a warning that uses the word “despair.” For me, this is rather a story about deep, simmering rage and other unexpressed emotions than it is about despair per se.

In the second paragraph, you write: “As a young woman she [Alyssa] had sometimes dropped clues leading like a trail of breadcrumbs into the dark forest of her being. But nobody had ever followed them all the way in.” To me, this suggests the behavior of someone very hesitant to let others inside. When this person does make an attempt, however feeble, to invite someone in, it’s unsuccessful, which could plausibly lead to feelings of rejection and frustration. Hence, the anger angle. Later, in a telling moment, she flings a crowbar as hard as she can. That action seems to come from a deep place.

Swanwick: That sounds like a fair reading. She is angry. Truthfully, it’s not really about despair. We don’t know what’s in her mind. As she says, she’s the only one who knows. And she chooses not to share it. Deep unhappiness I can see in there, and rage as you say, but not despair. But the warning you’re referencing is really about suicide, so it makes sense that it’s linked up to despair, because suicide is something that’s very difficult to discuss frankly when what we want to do is convince people not to commit that act. A friend of mine tried to kill herself and almost succeeded but failed—she did not take enough pills. She woke up in the hospital. Later, she told me that that had been the bravest thing she had ever done in her life. But you don’t want to say that in print, necessarily, in a magazine where a teenager going through a bad stretch may run across it. The ethics can get tricky sometimes. I myself have never been suicidal. It’s a horrifying, scary thought to me.

I think that Julie Phillips’ biography of Tiptree is the best biography of a science fiction writer ever written. David Hartwell said it was the best biography of any writer. He may be right.

She was such a complicated and private woman at the same time. I based the characterization, and much of the plot of this story, on an observation that Farah Mendlesohn made, which got a lot of people angry with her. Mendlesohn suggested that Tiptree was not really a lesbian, but rather an un-transitioned man. I thought that was a rather deep observation, and “Huginn and Muninn—and What Came After” was a way of grappling with it. I was aware of the fact that I was stepping in dangerous waters here because of my age. But it was an interesting idea to put into practice, and I hope I learned something from it.

Zinos-Amaro: One of the few glimpses we get into Alyssa’s history pre-story is her relationship with her mother, now deceased, and later resuscitated in the pocket universe. Alyssa’s mother took her to war-torn countries, where she witnessed an execution, saw a horse-cart full of corpses, and so on. Those things could easily be trauma-inducing.

Swanwick: Oh, yes. You see that in Tiptree’s life. The circumstances were different, but the trauma was equally there. The restaurant in the story being called Mueller’s, I should mention, is a nod to the name Sylvester Mule, which Tiptree had toyed with as a pseudonym.

Zinos-Amaro: Structurally, I think this story has some similarity with “The Man in Grey.” In both pieces we begin with a character in a dark place, who through the course of the narrative is shown a new reality beneath our own, can’t unsee it—as the character of Mistral explicitly states—and once back in our ordinary reality, chooses to kill herself.

Swanwick: I can see that. I wanted to give Alyssa a hard choice, and how she responds to it is, I think, the only thing that gives us a clue as to what and who she is.

Zinos-Amaro: This is how she reacts when she’s given the choice: “A shadow play? False friends, imaginary enemies, elaborate scripts to keep me dancing for your amusement? The opportunity to sit in the dark talking to myself for all eternity? Better to die in reality than live forever here.” Those alternatives—immortality within fiction vs. mortality in reality—strongly recall “Goblin Lake.”

Swanwick: Yeah. What can I say, I’m very fond of reality! It has its problems, but on the whole I enjoy it enormously. I think Alyssa makes the choice that Tiptree would make. Oh, and “the glorious, rapacious, loving, destructive, yearning human race!” is the line right before what you quoted, and I threw that in to make it clear what was at stake with her decision.

Zinos-Amaro: I’d like to offer up one more view of “Huginn and Muninn—and What Came After.” Alyssa is shown a pocket universe, but really that universe is about her. It’s not truly engaging, and can never be, because it ultimately derives from her own desires, memories and experiences. In a sense, to me this literalizes the idea that depression equals solipsism. If she had escaped into an alien universe, say, this might have offered the genuine possibility of relief from her loneliness and unknowability, but this is just her falling back into herself.

Swanwick: I like that quite a lot. You know, I can’t claim to understand Tiptree, and therefore I can’t claim to understand Alyssa, but it seems to me that we tend to make Alice Sheldon into the person we need her to be. Really, at the very core of her murder-suicide, is mystery. It’s the unknowable. That unknowable quality had to remain. It can’t be budged, it can’t be understood, it can’t be moved off-center, it can’t be manipulated into something useful. If we’re going to think at all about Alice Sheldon, we have to come to grips with that fact.

“Cloud”

Zinos-Amaro: Nobody can escape in “Cloud” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, November-December 2019), one of the most quiet and despairing end-of-the-world-stories I’ve ever read.

Swanwick: It is quiet. I wrote it as mainstream. You can probably tell. My only attempt to market it as mainstream was to send it to The New Yorker, but they didn’t take it, so I sent it to Sheila. I knew Asimov’s would be a good place for it. Incidentally, “The Man Who Met Picasso” was the only other story I submitted to The New Yorker.

The origin of this story lies in real life. When I was twenty-two, my girlfriend took me to a family gathering at her aunt’s house. This was outside Richmond, and she was FFV—one of the First Families of Virginia. If you’re in Virginia, they’re very aristocratic, and at least a bit moneyed. For me the party was an interesting and alienating experience. My girlfriend told me going in that there was a good chance that her aunt would hit on me, just like in the story. Apparently her aunt hit on all of her better boyfriends! She did get a little drunk through the course of the party, and at the end she suggested I come back and visit her sometime without my girlfriend, who was standing right there with me. My girlfriend was quite pleased with me, because I’d passed this test.

Zinos-Amaro: This is one of your stories that’s highly aware of, and critically interrogative, of class. We’ve talked about that angle of your fiction going all the way back to “Griffin’s Egg.” What brought up the one percenter element here?

Swanwick: As you say, I’m hyper-aware of class. I always am. I put in everything I could in “Cloud” from my tiny, fleeting, sparse encounters with these people. The Issey Miyake gown, incidentally, was contributed by Jack Womack, who knows enormous amounts about fashion. There was a SFWA editors/publishers get-together where Buzz Aldrin showed up once. I got to meet him, which I’m sure made a much bigger impression on me than it did on him. I threw aspects of that event in as well. I just felt I wanted to include the wealthy elite in the discussion. My characters are the worst examples of the one percent of the one percent, but at least, unlike a lot of other American science fiction writers, I haven’t pretended that they don’t exist.

One thing that inspired “Cloud” was years of staring at clouds from airplane windows and trying to figure out how to use them as a setting. The basic idea, though, came from John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” which recapitulates a man’s life through one long and pointless stunt. It’s a fantastic story, which I love up and down. That’s what I was doing when Wolfgang gets to the dinner party. In a sort of little Möbius strip, he gets to see the rest of his own life, as expressed by the older, successful real estate magnate, Radford Anderson, who’s older and older and older every time he meets him, until he finally realizes he’s looking at himself.

Zinos-Amaro: That was a wonderful name for the character, too.

Swanwick: I was trying to make him sound as gilt-edged as possible.

Zinos-Amaro: The Cheever influence shows up in the mainstream aesthetic.

Swanwick: If I had written it as science fiction, I think it would play out as allegory, and it’s not meant to be allegory, it’s meant to be metaphor. The story hasn’t gotten a lot of attention from science fiction.

Zinos-Amaro: I’m glad at least it made it into Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2020 anthology. I found this story very well done in a variety of ways, and it’s one of my favorites by you, but as soon as I got into it I suspected many might find it too oblique and downbeat. It doesn’t have much of a plot, which I don’t think is generally favored in genre, and none of the characters are sympathetic, though I do think they’re interesting.

Swanwick: It was not an easy story. Marianne had that same response you’re talking about. There’s nobody to root for in “Cloud” and there’s nothing obviously at stake on a literal level.

Zinos-Amaro: You’re flirting with nihilism here. You’re right on the cusp of it. As the end of the world approaches and Judith seeks succor in Wolfgang, you have him fail. He can’t accomplish the one positive thing he might conceivably do, which is to help another human being in need: “He wanted to be more comforting but for the life of him he couldn’t remember how.” Beautiful.

Swanwick: Judith has had her own dark night of the soul, and he hasn’t even noticed. He has the opportunity here to actually confront himself, and to realize that he needs to change, and to try to do so. He fails the test.

Part of the reason that I named her Judith, by the way, was that I was trying to hint that part of the family is Jewish. I had a line in the story that Sheila had me take out. When Radford, who isn’t Jewish, shows Wolfgang his watch, the Breitling—a watch suggested by Bill Gibson—, he tells Wolfgang that it was once owned by Joseph Goebbels. Originally I had him saying, “I never met a Jew who wouldn’t swap his grandmother for it.” I wanted to make clear what a horrible, horrible person he is, but the line was too strong for a science fiction audience, who in context tend to believe what you say literally. As Gardner Dozois said, “Irony is a really dangerous tool to use in SF.”

A little ironic touch occurs near the end of the story, when the old Radford has lost the use of an eye, and the page before I’ve compared him to Odin. Unlike Odin, he hasn’t gained any wisdom.

Zinos-Amaro: The story’s underlying sense of failure brings to mind “The Edge of the World.”

Swanwick: I can see that. Like that story, this one was very difficult to write. I’m not a nihilist, but you write about things that are important, and things that scare you. I think that that nihilistic bleakness is one of the things I’m afraid of. 

Zinos-Amaro: Part of the reason I think “Clouds” is so powerful is that it records your own disquieting response to that bleakness. At one point Anderson tells Wolfgang, “Now the game is over and it seems I won,” but rather than being able to derive any satisfaction from his material success, he wonders how long it would take to hit the ground from the skyscraper they’re on.

Swanwick: Right. These characters are at a stage where they don’t need anything. They have enough money to take off the afternoon for the rest of their lives. Everything has become a game; it’s all about winning. Trying to win is probably the single worst possible way to approach life. This is an evening in which Wolfgang comes to understand that he’s not a good person.

Zinos-Amaro: “We’re good people, aren’t we?” Judith asks. I think you perform a wonderfully savage reversal of expectations early on in the story. You’ve set up the fact that Judith’s aunt, according to her, is going to hit on Wolfgang, so we as readers are waiting for that to either happen or not happen. But instead, almost immediately upon arriving, it’s Wolfgang who begins fantasizing about Judith’s aunt and her breasts, going as far as thinking to himself that “it was easy to see why her late husband had been moved to acquire her.”

Swanwick: I wanted to let the reader know early on that you can’t possibly empathize with Wolfgang. He thinks that his thoughts are rational thoughts to be having. He’s everything that I dislike.

Zinos-Amaro: From a technical perspective, another element I appreciate is how several of your physical descriptions suggest a confusion of up and down. This adds to the sense of disorientation, but more importantly externalizes the characters’ lack of ethical compass.

Swanwick: That’s right. There’s no moral compass. The outer world reflects their inner world. Things are relative and immaterial. The world is about to change, and nothing they do is going to matter. There’s a line in the story about the glory and misery of Manhattan. As talked about when we covered “Microcosmic Dog,” I really love Manhattan. When I was eleven or twelve I remember visiting my grandmother. It was evening and I was standing out on the sidewalk, looking at all these tall buildings with bright lights. I remember thinking if you could lift them up, turn them and shake them, all the misery within would come pouring out, all the different kinds of unhappiness.

“Universe Box”

Zinos-Amaro: In my notes I summarized the madcap “Universe Box” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, September-October 2017) as a romantic screwball comedy reimagined by Dali.

Swanwick: That’s close, that’s close.

Zinos-Amaro: I picked up some Lafferty in there, and Sheckley too. One of your characters comes from the epic of Gilgamesh.

Swanwick: It does. This one has a lot of everybody in there. It had a very strange origin. At a pop-up remaindered bookstore Marianne and I found a stack of coffee-table books of artwork by one of the great dinosaur artists, Charles R. Knight. We grabbed one. I have a thing about cigar boxes, and Marianne, who got another copy of the book, harvested the illustrations and lined the inside of thirteen cigar boxes with these Knight illustrations and star-maps. She started gathering things to put in there, like pieces of coral, antique German glass taxidermy eyes, all manner of things. Then she asked me to write something for a chapbook to go inside.

“Universe Box,” began with a trickster stealing the universe and hiding it in a cigar box. Then I proceeded to see how entertaining I could make it. I like the idea of a protagonist who doesn’t realize he’s the most boring man in the Universe. That’s essentially comic.

Zinos-Amaro: The story combines many modes: a be-careful-what-you-wish-for yarn, a cosmic romp, a con heist thriller. Besides this fusion, you also drew on some real-life experiences, is that right?

Swanwick: There’s an early scene where a car crashes into a wall, barely missing the protagonists. I was with Gardner and Susan one evening, and we were walking back to their place on 13th Street. There was no traffic on the street so I jaywalked to the other side, thinking they would be right behind me. But when I looked back they were still on the other side. At that moment a car came roaring down the street and sped on to the sidewalk and tried to hit them. They flattened against the wall, so the driver missed them, and then drove away.

I think the screwball element is the most important in this story. The high goofiness. At the end Mimi goes off to become a giraffe wrangler! It’s a romantic comedy where the girl doesn’t have to marry the dull guy, she can escape him. I’ve done that a couple of times—just thought, “The woman deserves better than him.” In Stations of the Tide, for example, the Bureaucrat falls in love with a witch. Near the end she tells him that if he follows his duty and goes off to capture the escaped wizard she won’t wait for him. He has to choose one or the other, and he chooses duty. As a result, he never gets to see her again. I did that as a reaction to all these stories where the man chooses duty and then he gets the girl anyway. This one had enough self-respect to walk. 

Zinos-Amaro: Speaking of realism, the most memorable part of this story for me is the stunning last paragraph. You give us this beautiful closing image of Howard walking around the city at 3 am, soberly reflecting on the smallness of human beings and the great cosmic flow of which they’re a minuscule part. It transforms the whole experience into something far more serious and existential, not only thematically, but also stylistically. You dial back the hyperbole and render the scene in a mainstream literary way.

Swanwick: He has a glimpse of reality. For a brief moment, Howard comprehends the universe. He achieves an instant of transcendence. He’s touched by grace. I didn’t originally know it would end like this. I was just making it up as I went along, following the logic of the story. Luckily the story was fast-paced enough that it kept throwing itself headlong into something new.