Lately there have been a lot more options if I wanted to talk about what\u2019s in the news.\u00a0 There\u2019s all kinds of Jimmy Kimmel talk.\u00a0 He\u2019s off the air, he\u2019s back on, he\u2019s gonna apologize, his show won\u2019t be carried in a quarter of the country, blah, blah, blah.\u00a0 And Donald Trump just got through trashing Joe Biden and the UN in front of the General Assembly.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Yep, there\u2019s all kinds of madness everywhere you look.<\/p>\n
But I can use a break from it from time to time.\u00a0 I just get fed up with the awfulness of the world and the awful people doing awful things.<\/p>\n
So, let\u2019s talk about something less depressing and maybe more interesting. \u00a0A while ago I mentioned I bought a copy of a book I owned back in the stone age.\u00a0 It\u2019s an anthology of science fiction stories published in the 1950s, edited by Robert Heinlein, called, \u201cTomorrow, The Stars.\u201d\u00a0 There are fourteen short stories in the book\u2019s two hundred and forty-nine pages.\u00a0 They\u2019re all between ten and twenty pages long and were written by authors \u201cfamous and less well known\u201d at the time.\u00a0 Interestingly, one of the less well-known authors was a certain, \u201cKurt Vonnegut Jr.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, I\u2019ve been rereading these stories, some for the first time in over fifty years.\u00a0 I won\u2019t pretend that they\u2019re all equally good or that any of them are timeless prose.\u00a0 They\u2019re not.\u00a0 They\u2019re pulp fiction or maybe slightly better than pulp fiction.\u00a0 But they\u2019re also entertaining.\u00a0 They amuse.\u00a0 They keep the reader\u2019s interest.\u00a0 They tell a story.\u00a0 All that good stuff.\u00a0 But what\u2019s my point?\u00a0 I\u2019ve read lately that science fiction short stories are an unsellable product.\u00a0 All the magazines and the anthologies are going bankrupt.\u00a0 No one will buy them.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Sure, they would also serialize some novels but mostly we were reading short stories by authors, \u201cfamous and less well known.\u201d\u00a0 Now I am well aware we are living in a new age.\u00a0 Theft of intellectual property has been the downfall of all the formerly lucrative entertainment forms.\u00a0 CDs, DVDs and books have been pirated out of existence.\u00a0 Young people have been conditioned not to pay for anything.\u00a0 Everything is a streaming service.\u00a0 Amazon sells books by the penny\/a page method.<\/p>\n
Yes, yes.\u00a0 I get all that.\u00a0 But these are just the technical details of our age.\u00a0 Piracy has always been around.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And in fact, a short story would seem to me to be the easier sell.\u00a0 You can read (or hear) a short story in a car ride or a subway commute or a high school class that you don\u2019t want to listen to.<\/p>\n
Sometimes you don\u2019t want a four-hundred-page epic fantasy.\u00a0 Sometimes you don\u2019t even want a novella.\u00a0 Sometimes you want a ten-to-twenty-page story to take you out of your life for a half hour.<\/p>\n
Just something that came to mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lately there have been a lot more options if I wanted to talk about what\u2019s in the news.\u00a0 There\u2019s all kinds of Jimmy Kimmel talk.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,237,4,242],"tags":[76,96,265],"class_list":["post-34670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-fiction-writing","tag-literature","tag-science-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n