Let’s celebrate The Universe Box‘s February 3rd release by Tachyon Press! I have opened the universe box that is my life, and will be sharing a piece of it every Monday.

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By Michael Swanwick: I began collecting driftglass—or, as it is less poetically known on the Jersey Shore, “beach glass”—inspired by a passage from the story that gave Samuel R. Delany’s first short fiction collection, Driftglass, its name:

“Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”

“I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”

“They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”

Which is not, technically, entirely true. But at the time, Chip had never seen beach glass and anyway it’s a lovely piece of writing.        

Every time I visited the ocean thereafter, I came home with driftglass—sometimes a small handful, often only one or two, depending on the whims of the tides. Over the decades, they added up. I kept my collection in a couple of cylindrical jars.

One day, I copied the above passage onto one of the jars. The next time that Chip came to visit, he was kind enough to autograph it.

And thus little shards of industrial detritus became a literary keepsake.