Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Five-time Hugo Award winner Swanwick (Stations of the Tide) swirls together myth and science in this wildly inventive collection. A frequent theme is the interaction of humanity and technology, which is probed poignantly in the bittersweet "Artificial People," narrated by a newly sentient robot who falls for one of the scientists on her team, and "The White Leopard," about a man who is able to see through the eyes of his leopard-shaped military drone. In "Requiem for a White Rabbit," animatronic escapees flee a life of misery in an amusement park. The epistolary "Timothy: An Oral History" imagines the consequences of a scientist in an all-female society engineering a male child in a lab. Swanwick's wry humor comes through in "The Warm Equations," a space exploration story helmed by the arrogant Dr. Osborne, and in "The Star-Bear," about a Russian émigré poet who meets a bizarre celestial being. All of Swanwick's stories awaken insights into the mystery of being human in an increasingly mind-bending technological world. This is an author at the height of his powers. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This collection of Swanwick's (Not So Much, Said the Cat) short stories brings the most recent decade of the multi-award-winning author's work into a single, easily accessible and fascinatingly diverse volume, which includes two stories original to this book ("Requiem for a White Rabbit" and "Grandmother Dimetrodon") as well as the titular story, "Universe Box," which was originally published only as a handmade, limited-edition chapbook and is otherwise unavailable. The stories collected here explore the intersection of time travel, sci-fi, and fantasy, particularly in reference to all the ways that situations go wrong when the protagonist discovers that many of their assumptions are false. Both previously unpublished stories slip from sci-fi to horror as what seem like fantastic caper stories intersect with unexpected tragedy and horror, while "Universe Box" is about being fooled by a trickster trying to cheat the world--and succeeding. Rounding things out, the story "The Last Days of Old Night" imbues a fantasy inside a myth about a real phenomenon that is even better than any truth might be. VERDICT A marvelously varied collection of work by one of the genre's experts of short fiction.--Marlene Harris
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