Inseparables by Florence Fuller. From Wikipedia, used under a Creative Commons License.
There’s been lots of conversation about short stories in the genre the past few weeks. Charles Payseur amazed me when he caught up with everything put out by the big players, and had to think about where to look for reading material! Lela Buis mentioned Greg Hullender’s new short story review site, Rocket Stack Rank, questioning its choice to focus on the big players only, and Greg posted an analysis of where the recent Hugo winners for short story had been published, ending with what I see as a self-fulfilling prophesy about which magazines you would read to be sure of seeing the winning stories. Finally, Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke wrote about the elephant we all know is in the room – that hardly anybody reads short stories except authors, and hardly anybody cares about short story magazines except the people who hope to sell to them. Update and corection: I must have been thinking about some other article! He wrote about the business model and its problems, but this wasn’t one he mentioned. My apologies.
This isn’t new. Interest in short stories seems to have been declining ever since I started writing them. What’s happened? It’s hard for me to say because quite honestly, I am not a big fan of short stories, particularly in the genre. I keep making resolutions to keep up with and review current short stories, but this is entirely because I wish other people would keep up with and review the ones I write.
I wonder how many writers even enjoy creating short stories, and how many of us do it because it’s the established way to keep one’s name out there between novels – and because one really needs the boost of an occasional sale. No matter how much I realize that being a mid-list author looks like a miserable scrabbling life, being a no-list author can feel like failure unless an acceptance or two shows up in the email every now and then.
But the thing is – even I have been an avid short story reader in my day, checking obsessively to see if something new had appeared, saving my favorites on floppy disks and re-reading them at night. When was this golden period? Between the Harry Potter books. And what was I reading so happily? Harry Potter fan fiction. I will read Harry Potter stories until the cows come home, especially if they’re set before the war and involve Hagrid being nice to somebody.
The short fiction I choose to re-read is the equivalent of cuddling up in front of a fire with a comforter, a cup of something warm, and a cat on my lap. But when I think of notable short stories in the genre, what do I remember? The Cold Equations. All Summer in a Day. Ponies. The closest I’ve come to a heartwarming feel-good short story in the genre is The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees.
In my experience, memorable SFF short stories tend to be unpleasant. That’s not because I remember unpleasant things better than pleasant ones. My brain is full of memorable pleasant bits of fiction, many of which have woven themselves into my worldview. But they did not come from genre short stories.
Now, I’m not saying that all or even most genre short stories are dismal or depressing – but that the people who recommend them, give them awards, and collect them into ‘Best of’ anthologies are often looking for other things than whether the story leaves you with a good feeling. And after a certain point, the reader becomes skittish. The reader looks at the glossy-covered magazines or the row of fat anthologies on the shelf and thinks ‘last time I did that, it hurt,’ and walks on by. Or surfs over to a fan-fiction site, where you can sort your stories and specify Hagrid schmoop.
If I were going to start an SFF short story outlet I’d name it The Happy Ending. Its masthead motto would be No Cutting Edges. The nonfiction articles would be about crafting, carpentry, home brewing and raising goats; the stories would be full of house porn and snuggly fantasy pets, and would all leave you with that feeling of they’ll be all right. The ads would be for gourmet hot chocolate, beekeeping supplies, vacation cottages.
It wouldn’t accept very many of my stories. But maybe that needs to change.
