Michael Swanwick Books in Order

After a catastrophic nuclear accident reshapes Pennsylvania, a battered community struggles under violence, mutation, and local tyranny. This post-disaster novel follows people trying to make a life in a world that has broken badly.

Ex-shoplifter Deke drifts into a small Virginia town and becomes obsessed with Spads & Fokkers, a neural-linked holographic dogfighting game dominated by crippled veteran Tiny Montgomery. To unseat him, Deke exploits a gifted student and a dangerous combat drug, discovering how ugly winning can be.

Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark wakes in a future where personalities can be altered and Earth is controlled by a vast cybernetic mind. Her escape carries her across the Solar System and into a fight over identity itself.

A collection of very short fiction, poems, essays, and playful literary pieces. Swanwick uses the miniature form for strange jokes, compact fantasies, invented documents, and quick flashes of science-fictional possibility.

This early collection gathers science fiction and fantasy stories that range from strange futures to unsettling magical encounters. It offers a wide view of Swanwick's short work, including sharp ideas, dark humor, and human-scale consequences.

Lunar worker Gunther Weil survives a solar flare and becomes a reluctant public figure. When a psychological virus sweeps his moonbase during a crisis on Earth, he and other survivors must confront madness and exploitation.

An unnamed bureaucrat travels to the planet Miranda to investigate a suspected rogue magician before a devastating cyclical flood. His search for Gregorian becomes a tense mystery where advanced technology and magic look much alike.

This wide-ranging collection brings together stories of space travel, artificial minds, dinosaurs, ghosts, and altered futures. It includes several of Swanwick's best-known short works, all linked by bold ideas and sharply drawn people.

Jane, a human changeling enslaved in a Faerie dragon factory, escapes with a battered mechanical dragon. To survive beyond the factory walls, she must learn the cruel rules of a magical society built on power and sacrifice.

A short science fiction story that follows a character pushed beyond familiar safety into a world where survival and change cannot be separated. Swanwick uses the journey to explore fear, adaptation, and what people leave behind.

In a future where corporations can revive the dead as cheap labor, Donald is offered a job in the business. What begins as a career opportunity becomes a grim look at exploitation, consent, and disposable workers.

A collection of stories that maps unfamiliar territory in both fantasy and science fiction. Swanwick's characters confront strange landscapes, shifting identities, old myths, and the unsettling possibility that home may not be what it seemed.

In this dark reworking of the Faust legend, a dissatisfied scholar receives scientific knowledge centuries ahead of his time. His hunger to remake the world launches an early industrial revolution with terrible human consequences.

A nonfiction collection of Michael Swanwick's essays and criticism, this volume explores science fiction, fantasy, and the ideas that shape the genre. It is a compact look at his sharp, playful voice away from fiction.

A compact science fiction tale about people encountering traces of powerful old technology and the dangerous assumptions that come with it. Swanwick turns an intriguing discovery into a story of ambition, mystery, and unintended consequences.

A time-travel expedition into the age of dinosaurs becomes a tense encounter with both prehistoric danger and the limits of human control. The story later helped inspire the larger novel *Bones of the Earth*.

This collection gathers stories, essays, and playful pieces from across Swanwick's career. It moves from far-future speculation to literary games and magical tales, showing his interest in memory, invention, and unstable reality.

Michael Swanwick talks with editor and writer Gardner Dozois about a life spent making and shaping science fiction. The book offers a candid, detailed portrait of Dozois's work, friendships, tastes, and influence on the field.

A strange, concise fantasy story in which an ordinary object becomes the start of an extraordinary problem. Swanwick plays the premise straight, letting humor and menace grow from a conversation nobody expected to have.

Paleontologist Richard Leyster is recruited for a time-travel project that sends scientists to the age of dinosaurs. When sabotage strands the team in the Cretaceous, survival depends on confronting paradox, politics, and deep time.

Darger and Surplus return for another con in their postutopian future, where clever lies can become dangerous commitments. The human trickster and dog-man rogue find that a seemingly manageable scheme has sharp claws.

A time-travel story that turns a small personal predicament into a clever puzzle about history, identity, and consequences. Swanwick keeps the scale intimate even as the possibilities of time begin to multiply.

A compact collection built around dinosaurs and deep time, mixing imaginative fiction with Swanwick's love of odd ideas. These pieces use prehistoric life as a doorway into humor, danger, science, and speculative possibility.

A playful linked collection of tiny science fiction pieces, each built around an element from the periodic table. Swanwick turns chemistry into a structure for jokes, thought experiments, odd futures, and miniature worlds.

Tranh, once wealthy, is now a traumatized refugee in future Bangkok, scraping by on a yellow work card. When he runs into a man from his old life, the story cuts deep into memory, shame, and survival.

This collection mixes science fiction, fantasy, and sly modern fables, including the first Darger and Surplus stories. Expect genetically altered creatures, old technologies, tricky bargains, and characters trying to outsmart worlds stranger than they expected.

A story set in the brutal Faerie world of *The Iron Dragon's Daughter*, where the aftermath of Babel's grandeur leaves ordinary people to face danger, loss, and the hard work of getting away alive.

A career-spanning collection of Michael Swanwick's science fiction and fantasy, from early work through award-winning stories. It is an ideal sampler of his range, including strange futures, dark fables, sharp comedy, and emotional surprises.

After a war-dragon destroys his village, Will Le Fey is driven into the sprawling city of Babel. With an immortal child and a gifted trickster beside him, he faces war, ambition, and a Faerie world that rewards ruthless survivors.

This nonfiction book traces the remarkable, partly obscured life of writer Hope Mirrlees. Swanwick follows her work, friendships, travels, and literary legacy while piecing together a career that long remained overlooked.

Con artists Darger and Surplus escort genetically enhanced brides toward Muscovy in a post-collapse future. Their supposedly simple job becomes tangled in court intrigue, revolution, and old technologies that refuse to stay buried.

Written with Eileen Gunn, this short fantastical tale follows a journey into a wintry world where trains do the impossible. It blends playful invention with a sense that travel can lead somewhere stranger than planned.

Written with Eileen Gunn, this imaginative story visits a city shaped by airships, spectacle, and shifting realities. Its characters find that travel, memory, and the stories people tell about a place can be hard to separate.

When kraken eggs are recovered from the Thames, Ritter and Sir Tobias uncover a threat aimed at London itself. The investigation soon demands quick thinking, grim choices, and a willingness to confront wartime magic.

Franz-Karl Ritter and his wolf familiar Freki are drawn into another case on the magical front lines of an alternate European war. A dangerous mystery tests Ritter's nerve, judgment, and trust in the people around him.

In an alternate Europe at war with a magical empire, Prussian officer Franz-Karl Ritter takes on a mission shaped by sorcery, espionage, and hidden loyalties. His wolf familiar, Freki, is never far from the danger.

Young Ellie is visited by a tiny voice from far away and spends one strange day carrying an alien companion with her. The story is small, tender, and quietly cosmic all at once.

Captured behind enemy lines, Ritter is subjected to dream-based interrogation by two hostile alienists. To keep his mission secret and escape alive, he must navigate a shifting maze of false memories and magical manipulation.

After bringing Darger back from death, Surplus joins him in fractured future China. Serving a paranoid king searching for an ancient war machine, the two tricksters turn a con into a dangerous campaign for power.

On the eve of a major battle, Ritter is called to investigate a disturbing incident involving a field marshal. The case pulls him into military secrets, strange magic, and the uneasy costs of keeping an alliance together.

Franz-Karl Ritter faces another unsettling case in a Europe transformed by magic and war. A seemingly contained mystery becomes a test of what he knows, whom he can trust, and how much the past can be changed.

Ritter travels undercover to wartime Poland, where a mission in Krakow leads toward a mystery with magical and political consequences. Freki's instincts and Ritter's cool judgment are both needed to find the way through.

This collection gathers imaginative stories about magical horses, trolls, time travelers, devils, and posthuman futures. The pieces are varied in tone, but each finds a human problem inside an idea that is funny, dark, or deeply strange.

Young Linnea is sent alone through a dangerous postwar landscape toward her grandmother's home, guided by a wooden horse, a map, and a walking knapsack. The fairy-tale journey hides threats far worse than trolls.

Ritter arrives at a tank depot to investigate a murder that appears tied to a troubling time anomaly. With Freki at his side, he must sort through ghosts, doubles, and evidence that refuses to stay fixed.

Caitlin, a half-human pilot bonded to a sentient mechanical dragon, is framed for her brother's murder. Hunted through Industrialized Faerie, she must find the truth before old powers and new wars decide her fate.

In the Arctic, Ritter tracks a strange being created through the Mongolian Wizard's vast magical power. Their meeting turns into a dark, compassionate variation on a familiar story of creation and responsibility.

This collection gathers Darger and Surplus tales from their strange post-collapse future. The human con man and his dog-man partner bluff their way through old technology, royal schemes, engineered creatures, and trouble they helped create.

A short speculative tale about Annie, whose life is shaped by an unusual absence and a world that does not behave as expected. Swanwick pairs a simple premise with questions about memory, connection, and change.

A fantastical short story that brings mythic imagery into a strange speculative setting. Swanwick follows an encounter with the star-bear toward questions of wonder, danger, and the uneasy bargains people make with the unknown.

Franz-Karl Ritter and Freki return to a war-torn alternate Europe, where Paris and its dragons become part of another dangerous assignment. Magic, military pressure, and hidden motives collide in a compact adventure.

During the magical war in alternate Europe, a woman seeking a break from grief and conflict is drawn into a series of dream worlds by a succubus. The brief escape carries its own unsettling price.

A collection of recent stories where myth, science, artificial intelligence, time travel, and folklore overlap. Swanwick moves from high-stakes heists to intimate encounters, always finding surprising consequences in his most improbable premises.