[3] His first novel was In the Drift (an Ace Special, 1985), a look at the results of a more catastrophic Three Mile Island incident, which expands on his earlier short story "Mummer's Kiss".

The main character, a changeling stolen from the real world, struggles to survive a factory, a high school, and a university, all the while being manipulated by a dragon.

In the 2000s, Swanwick wrote several series of flash fictions, beginning with Puck Aleshire's Abecedary, a collection of 26 stories, each titled for a different letter of the alphabet.

He has written two novels featuring the posthuman rogues Darger and Surplus, who had already appeared in short stories: Dancing with Bears (2011) concerns their adventures in post-Utopian Russia, and in “Chasing the Phoenix” (2015) they travel to China.

He has collaborated with other authors on several short works, including Gardner Dozois ("Ancestral Voices", "City of God", "Snow Job") and William Gibson ("Dogfight").

He published two long essays on the state of the science fiction ("The User's Guide to the Postmoderns", 1986) and fantasy ("In the Tradition...", 1994), the former of which was controversial for its categorization of new SF writers into "cyberpunk" and "literary humanist" camps.

Swanwick's short stories "Ice Age" and "The Very Pulse of the Machine" from Tales of Old Earth were adapted for the Netflix series Love, Death + Robots (2019) for its first and third seasons respectively.