Lately there have been a lot more options if I wanted to talk about what’s in the news. There’s all kinds of Jimmy Kimmel talk. He’s off the air, he’s back on, he’s gonna apologize, his show won’t be carried in a quarter of the country, blah, blah, blah. And Donald Trump just got through trashing Joe Biden and the UN in front of the General Assembly. There are psychopaths shooting up innocent victims everywhere you look and Democrats are desperately kowtowing to Mamdani hoping he can provide the magic bullet needed to bring back the millions of voters who are jumping ship. Yep, there’s all kinds of madness everywhere you look.
But I can use a break from it from time to time. I just get fed up with the awfulness of the world and the awful people doing awful things.
So, let’s talk about something less depressing and maybe more interesting. A while ago I mentioned I bought a copy of a book I owned back in the stone age. It’s an anthology of science fiction stories published in the 1950s, edited by Robert Heinlein, called, “Tomorrow, The Stars.” There are fourteen short stories in the book’s two hundred and forty-nine pages. They’re all between ten and twenty pages long and were written by authors “famous and less well known” at the time. Interestingly, one of the less well-known authors was a certain, “Kurt Vonnegut Jr.”
So, I’ve been rereading these stories, some for the first time in over fifty years. I won’t pretend that they’re all equally good or that any of them are timeless prose. They’re not. They’re pulp fiction or maybe slightly better than pulp fiction. But they’re also entertaining. They amuse. They keep the reader’s interest. They tell a story. All that good stuff. But what’s my point? I’ve read lately that science fiction short stories are an unsellable product. All the magazines and the anthologies are going bankrupt. No one will buy them.
Back in the dark ages magazines like Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction made plenty of money selling monthly editions filled with mostly just short stories. Sure, they would also serialize some novels but mostly we were reading short stories by authors, “famous and less well known.” Now I am well aware we are living in a new age. Theft of intellectual property has been the downfall of all the formerly lucrative entertainment forms. CDs, DVDs and books have been pirated out of existence. Young people have been conditioned not to pay for anything. Everything is a streaming service. Amazon sells books by the penny/a page method.
Yes, yes. I get all that. But these are just the technical details of our age. Piracy has always been around. What it takes to sell a product in the face of these kinds of obstacles is the same thing that is needed in any other place and time; creativity and psychology. And in fact, a short story would seem to me to be the easier sell. You can read (or hear) a short story in a car ride or a subway commute or a high school class that you don’t want to listen to.
Sometimes you don’t want a four-hundred-page epic fantasy. Sometimes you don’t even want a novella. Sometimes you want a ten-to-twenty-page story to take you out of your life for a half hour.
Just something that came to mind.
I have always enjoyed the short story format. For a while, in the 60s & 70s, some of the big name authors were competing with each other to write a complete story on the back of a picture postcard. Some of these were amazingly good! As for Analog, I gave up on it a long time ago (30 years?). Their Science Fact articles were all doom and gloom: “We are all going to die and thee is nothing you can do about it!” Or: “Here is why FTL travel, Nuclear fusion, laser defenses, etc. won’t work and cannot work.” And,… Read more »
Thanks for the heads up on the publisher. I’ll look into it.
I agree wholeheartedly that short stories are ripe for a comeback. I often prefer a collection of short stories to a novel. I just don’t have the time to read novels at the pace I once did, and while I could never read a book on a screen (I’m going to print out your book so I can beta read it), I can read a short story on a computer or phone screen.
I hope so. A good short story or even a novella has its own excellences that a long book sometimes lacks.
I’ve dipped my toe back into short story writing in the pulp vein. I’ll have to send you one of the stories I wrote over the summer, “Tap, Tap, Tap.” It’s about a guy who has a three-foot tall beetle living in his kitchen, lol.
I assume this beetle has other interesting characteristics in addition to his extreme size.
Yes. It feeds on human emotions and is telepathic. It also has the ability to manipulate events around it in some subtle manner.
Well, that’s better.