Review: Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 · 8:52pm Jul 25th, 2017
This book was compiled in a two step process: Series editor John Joseph Adams selected 40 science fiction and 40 fantasy stories published in 2015 (not 2016 as the title would suggest). 2016 editor Karen Joy Fowler read all 80 stories blind (without knowing the names of the authors), then chose 20 of them.
Sofia Samatar, "Meet me in Iram" begins with a reference to Hume in the first sentence and to Borges and Calvino in the second. It's probably supposed to recall Italo Calvino's stories from Invisible Cities , but also to express vague philosophical feelings about time, and also to be personal (it's in first and second person).
You can help me. You can tell me if these feelings are universal. What is normal? I've felt for a long time that normal is something suspect, that embedded in the idea of the normal is something dangerous, and erasure of everything abnormal, a death or a series of deaths. But isn't it actually normal to want to be normal? I would like to build an entire philosophy out of Iram, the absent city. This philosophy would serve all the children of immigrants, many of the immigrants, and many others who found themselves at a loss. Eventually people would come to say: This philosophy is available to all. Anybody can go to Iram.
This paragraph expresses some basic sentiments of postmodern progressivism. You might think I searched through the entire nine page story for it, but actually I just opened the story at random and typed out the first paragraph that my eyes fell on. Samatar clinches the "most pretentious" award for this volume with her author's note about this fantasy, which says, "Every word of it is true."
Grade: Actively annoying. Read Cold in Gardez' Lost Cities instead.
Kelly Link, "The game of smash and recovery." This story is okay. It's about two artificial intelligences who have strong feelings for each other, which come into conflict with their programmed purposes. I respect that Kelly Link tried to tell both a scientific story and an emotional story. But, as often happens in SF short stories, neither one has much depth nor anything new, so you get two mediocre stories, and would probably have been better off reading either a non-genre story, or a hard SF story.
Grade: Almost worth reading
Adam Johnson, "Interesting facts." This is one of the better stories in the bunch, a ghost story about a ghost who doesn't know that she is a ghost. I think this story does well by barely touching on the fantasy aspects and really drilling down into the emotional ones, about romantic relationships and mortality.
Grade: Worth reading
Catherynne Valente, "Planet Lion". This story is very well-written, but another of the "two mediocre stories" variety. The memories and personalities of soldiers are accidentally imprinted on thousands of lions who live in a highly-implausible lion-based ecosystem, fighting and arguing with each other for all eternity (it is implied) over the angry fights they had when they were human. This is a vision of hell, and also a torment to read, as it is a one-paragraph idea spread over 17 pages. The conflicts and back-stories of the human soldiers are entirely generic. Or maybe they would not have been, if I'd had the patience to go back and correlate lion names with human names and figure out who was whom and who said and did what to who else. I really don't think it would matter, since all I remember them arguing about was who had sex or refused to have sex with whom. The final take-home seems to be that if you choose a small crew of men and women for a long-term space mission, you should make sure they're sexually compatible first before you send them off into space together. Also, sex, family, pregnancy, and other sex-related things are all that matters to humans.
Grade: Not worth reading
Kij Johnson, "The apartment dweller's bestiary." I don't know what to make of this one. It is a series of cute, mildly entertaining entries from a field guide to imaginary pets or gremlin-like apartment creatures. Perhaps it is allegorical.
Grade: Not worth reading
S.L. Huang, "By degrees and dilatory time." This is pretty good. It's about someone who gets cancer and doesn't die from it, and recovers from it. Along the way, his cancer causes him to see certain things differently, but it is not a dramatic, life-changing experience. Many people would find it boring. It is post-modernist in being a deconstruction or subversion of cancer narratives-- it is not the dramatic story of a cancer survivor, but the ordinary story of someone whose cancer is not very dramatic, and that is the point--that an event we expect to be dramatic and life-changing might not be. I say so with confidence because the author's note said so.
Grade: Worth reading
Liz Ziemska, "The mushroom queen". This is a fantasy about a woman who trades places with a fungus. It's also distinctly literary, focusing not on the exotic or adventurous aspect of suddenly turning into a network of underground rhizomes (which, incidentally, is a major postmodernist symbol both for life and for meaning, from Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia), but on what this helps the woman realize about her relationship with her husband, and a change in her attitude as a result. Again, most fantasy fans will probably find it boring, but I liked it.
Grade: Worth reading
Dexter Palmer, "The daydreamer by proxy". This is a mercifully short story about a corporation that exploits its workers by exorcising them of their dreams.
Grade: Marxist propaganda
Rachel Swirsky, "Tea time." Another beautifully-crafted piece of pretentious twaddle, also about the philosophy of time. Unfortunately Swirsky has nothing to say about the philosophy of time, nor, really, about the characters. Her two goals of making the characters interesting, and making some philosophical point, keep stomping over each other; they are fundamentally incompatible here, as the constant philosophical language prevents the characters from doing or thinking anything comprehensible enough to engage my sympathy, while keeping the action focused on tea-time, sex, and stasis in Wonderland hinders any philosophical development.
Grade: Actively annoying
Julian Mortimer Smith, "Headshot". I think this is the strongest piece in the book, and also the shortest. It's a dark comedy about future war in a direct democracy, in which each soldier in theater needs approval from random citizens back home watching their camera feeds before pulling the trigger. It sounds like farce, and yet it is handled so straight-facedly that you may find yourself thinking maybe it isn't any crazier than the representative democracy we have now.
Grade: Great!
Salman Rushdie, "The Duniazat." Perhaps in some cultures this would be considered a story, but it felt to me like the background to a story, possibly because the actions of characters are not explained, and rather than having a plot directed by the choices people make in response to the inciting incident, a random event intervenes, and things just peter out, without even a clear termination point to the action. Not worth reading by itself, but it could serve as a part of a larger story.
Grade: Not worth reading
Nick Wolven, "No placeholder for you, my love." This is about men and women trapped in a virtual reality in which they are supposed to fall in love with each other, but can never have sex, and can never do anything except attend endless parties, at which they cannot taste the food. It is obviously some kind of allegory for "modern life", although I doubt there really is such a thing. It has a dismal, depressing ending, because of course modern life must be dismal and depressing.
Grade: Not worth reading
Maria Headley, "The 13 mercies." Huh, I didn't read this one.
Dale Bailey, "Lightning Jack's last ride." This is about a Mad Max-style oil-tanker hijacker in a post-apocalyptic war who becomes a kind of folk hero for killing and robbing people. It does a good job of juggling three tasks: telling an exciting action story, world building, and exploring the psychology of its weirdo hero-villains.
Grade: Worth reading
Will Kaufman, "Things you can buy for a penny." A very competently written folk ghost story, with an Appalachian feel to it, but nothing new.
Grade: Almost worth reading
Charlie Jane Anders, "Rat catcher's yellows." The story title is a confusing mishmash of ambiguous semantic categories which still disturbs me every time I see it, but the story is excellent. It's about a woman whose wife has a neurodegenerative disease which, for reasons which remain mysterious, makes her very good at playing a computer strategy game made by mysterious entities who also remain mysterious. You do have to disengage your science-fiction brain from this science fiction story, and stop asking questions about how this disease is possible, where it came from, or who made the videogame. It is, I think, about the nature of love, and an allegory for Alzheimer's. The videogame, like Alzheimer's, slowly reveals the nastier aspects of its victims' character as they gradually lose their social restraints; and a caretaker often ends up wondering whether this is the disease talking, or their beloved mate really was that much of an asshole all along--and may find themselves still hopelessly in love with someone who shows little evidence of loving them back.
Grade: Good! And I usually hate allegories. This one doesn't suffer the usual flaws of allegories because mapping from one neurodegenerative disease to another isn't much of a stretch.
Sam Miller, "The heat of us: Notes toward an oral history." This is a fictional, fantasy retelling of the Stonewall raid of 1969. In this version, the gay club-goers suddenly acquire supernatural powers and burn the cops to death. Interviews tell the unimaginative responses of various people, including the obligatory closeted cop. It is an allegory for how, if an oppressed people are united in their anger, the justice of their cause will give them the power to kill everybody in their way. So, like ISIS.
Grade: Not worth reading
Seth Dickinson, "Three bodies at Mitanni." This is about 3 people charged with traveling through the galaxy, looking for worlds that were seeded with human life that has now grown up unsupervised, and exterminating it if it poses an existential threat to the rest of humanity. They are very hesitant to do this, but run across a planet which they think has done the very thing they fear most: they have stripped themselves of consciousness in order to be more efficient.
I'm bummed that someone else used this idea before me. I proposed it at the speakers' meetings after the 2009 Singularity Summit as an important existential threat to look into, but no one else except Michael Vassar was interested in the idea at the time. But given my history of writing shitty short idea-based SF stories, I probably would not have dealt with it as well. Dickinson gives us an idea story, about whether consciousness is efficient or inefficient, and whether this means it will eventually be eradicated and the universe populated entirely by unfeeling robots, organic or not; and a much-less-compelling emotional story, about three lovers who argue bitterly with each other and have to tear their relationship apart because, unlike in an ordinary relationship, the things they are arguing over really are more important than their relationship.
Grade: Worth reading
Vandana Singh, "Ambiguity machines". This was a moderately pretentious set of three stories presenting some vague philosophy of time. I don't know what it is about vague postmodernist philosophies of time. Are they hot now, or is this just a thing Karen Joy Fowler likes? Anyway, the three stories ask three different question about human relationships, so that's cool, but they're not long enough to be deep enough to be interesting.
Grade: Not worth reading
Ted Chiang, "The great silence."
The humans use Aricebo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they've created in year capable of hearing across the universe.
But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren't they interested in listening to our voices?
We are a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren't we exactly what humans are looking for?
That tells you pretty much what the story is about. I like this story, and I happen to think that parrots are much, much smarter than people generally give them credit for-- smart enough that humans don't want to think about it. I quite like the ending, also. It is presented, though, as "here is another oppressed class," which I think is an unhelpful way of thinking about human-nonhuman relations. Humans are still mostly incapable of thinking about human-nonhuman relations because they dichotomize too much, and any attempt to deal with this issue would have to deal with that before it could do more good than harm.
Grade: Worth reading
Overall
I'm underwhelmed. I gave 8 of the 19 stories I read a "worth reading" or better--which isn't great, but isn't terrible for an anthology these days. But that 8/19 score is too high for the anthology as a whole.
My problem with it is that it is too homogeneous. It's full of postmodernist themes, literary as opposed to entertainment value, and detached, emotionless, far-mode narrative that is supposed to sound deep. There were only 2 stories with traditional plot structures, "Smash and Recovery" and "No Placeholder for You".
Most importantly, there is not a single happy or uplifting story in the entire anthology. As I've noted before, this is par for the course in all anthologies of English fiction produced since about 1990. Happy endings, or uplifting stories, are considered trite. (The one exception you're likely to find from recent decades is Raymond Carver's story "Cathedral" (1981), which is an excellent story, but difficult to emulate.)
All these things characterize contemporary literary fiction. Karen Joy Fowler is known more as a literary author than as a fantasy author--I think--so this is not really surprising, and may not represent science fiction and fantasy well.
Contrasting it with "Year's Best Science Fiction 15 (1998)" ed. Gardner Dozois, which I read last month, I think that Dozois was (at that time, anyway) less interested in post-modern themes or pretentious literary fiction, and more fond of traditional plot structures. I found him falling on the opposite site of the theme/action divide, preferring action stories with no thematic component. The Dozois was easier to read, but nearly all its stories were ultimately forgettable and insignificant, and left me feeling even less-inclined to want to leave fan-fiction. And I noticed the same lack of happy, uplifting, or even humorous stories in Dozois' anthology. There was not a single romantic plot-line that I can recall in the combined set of over 50 stories.
So both anthologies reinforced my impression that contemporary fiction, even contemporary SF&F, is tone-deaf to much of human emotions and human experience.
Or is it? I bet there are stories of all kinds out there, even being published in the many different small magazines. But we need gatekeepers to find them, and gatekeepers don't work. This anthology did very well to have a two-step, two-editor selection process, and blind review by the second editor. Those are both great ideas. But every editor has his or her own peculiar interests, which every anthology or magazine over-represents and over-emphasizes.
To end on a brighter note, Frances Hardinge's A Face Like Glass has just recently been published in America. Of course you could have bought it thru Amazon from England for 5 years now, but you'd hardly be likely to have heard of it. It's a wonderful fantasy novel--a bit confusing re. who it was written for: is it a children's novel? Maybe. I don't care.
It seems to come from a separate tradition--doesn't resemble the sort of fantasy I usually find in the bookstore. It merits a separate review, which I cannot do today, but you can read NPR's review of it.
I will mention one nice aspect of it: Its heroine is one of those storybook heroines who's special because she's fallen into another world, and as the only human in that world, she has a special ability no one else has. Ultimately, though, that super-power that seems to make her special is a handicap, and she survives by instead drawing on her more mundane, but still valuable, acquired skills and interests.
At least there are no "Dinosaur, My Love" stories in there. I think I'd stack that book up against any of the "Year's best Sci-Fi" compilations I have from the fifties and sixties cluttering up my basement, but some of those sound interesting.
I'm curious why you didn't read the one story. Was it an oversight or a choice? If the latter, why?
I agree, but is that solvable? Let me talk out my ass for a second.
I don't think adding more magazines with different outlooks would be sufficient to change what you'd be likely to see in a collection like this. To be honest, the very fact that the editors dare use the word 'Best' in the title of the collection is a rather clear indication that the salon doesn't give a flying rainbow fuck about thematic diversity. They're showcasing a narrow set of ideas and styles they personally like, and are somehow cocky enough to claim that this extremely tiny subset of a tremendous swath of literature is "the best" because it bears the mark of their opaque selection process. Maybe I'm fussing too much about what anypony else would see as acceptable hyperbole, but it still doesn't sit well with me.
This has always been a problem with the salon, but today it feels (to me) worse than ever. Consider the Hugo awards. Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies might fairly be characterized as misogynistic trolls, but they didn't appear out of nowhere. They formed as a response to a system which consistently favored fiction the conspirators didn't like, which did not tolerate viewpoints outside of a narrowly approved target range (in the name of diversity, ironically enough), and which featured no other means by which a sizeable minority of individuals could gain the slightest bit of representation toward their interests. If you're 25% of a population and there are 20 awards, then ideally around 5 of them would something you could agree with. Blockbusters aren't usually Oscars, but the Oscars always include some films that everypony agrees were worth watching.
I've heard this concept of the majority quashing the interests of the minority called a Marxist 'dictatorship of the proletariat' before (I doubt that's an accurate label and you're undoubtedly more versed in the theory, but you get the idea). True fairness requires a focus on civil rights and respect for minority viewpoints as well as minority groups, and vanishingly few people in the salon at large are interested in allowing that. That's not always a bad thing, because the people who spend all of their time with art (here, literature in particular) are more likely to understand and recommend interesting works than the general public would... but it always ends up back in stagnation like this. People need to challenge the status quo to advance art, and I don't see that happening much anymore.
4612565 Oversight.
A statement that can go just about anywhere, really. Also you have a ) all by its lonesome.
"I am Dust. Three moves apiece."
"And I am Blood. Three moves. Acknowledged."
--Zelazny, "The Game of Dust and Blood"
I remember reading these anthologies as a teenager back in the 70's. They haven't changed much.
Back then two out of every three stories were either pretentious, unintelligible, ended like the typesetter had forgot the last page, or all three. Every so often you'd reach the oasis of a halfway-decent piece, then it was back out into the lifeless desert.
I read these books because they were in the library and the library didn't have much F&SF. Half of it was crap donated by people who didn't want it anymore. The other half was selected by librarians who in those days knew nothing about F&SF but dutifully picked up anything reputed to have literary value. It was sometimes hard to tell which was which, but I'm fairly sure these fell into the latter group.
At any rate it's heartening (I guess) to know that the genre hasn't yet run out of earnest young authors one doesn't know, won't remember and will never hear from again.
Yet such as these are chosen for their virtue to enter into literary Paradise, where they sit in righteous judgement of the Heinleins and the Cherryhs and E. E. Smiths. Surely it is better to go with the Elect?...
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I disagree, though not by much. Narrowly, I think the fact of the matter is that gatekeeping is obsolete. If you want other people to read your words you are spoiled to choice in ways you can have them available. Hell, print-on-demand is already here and is only going to get cheaper. The publishing industry and the distinction between published and non-published authors is obsolete. Even if you count the stuff that goes into a book like editing, copy-editing, and illustration and such doesn't need a publisher. It's already done out-of-house a lot by third parties, for heaven's sake.
Quality isn't obsolete, naturally, but there's not a single reason it needs to be centralized, or rather why its assaying needs to be centralized. Hell, I can make a blogpost tomorrow that contains "The Best Science Fiction of 2015" by my lights. And if Bad Horse likes my list better than the one in this anthology then there you go.
So what's the problem? Why, petty status games, of course. What people are best at.
Due to massive cultural inertia the idea that what's self-published is crap and that the publishers have moral and intellectual legitimacy to declare what's good and what isn't is pretty much universal. Even me writing this sounds like heresy, doesn't it? But what the hell makes the authors of this competent at judging what you'd like to read? What the average reader wants to read? Do they even try? Therefore, the current publishing establishment has inherited a spectacular solution to a coordination problem that, ab ovo, would be quite a tough cookie in today's world. Consider video games.
There was a concerted effort from a bunch of, essentially, random people to declare themselves Officially Sanctioned Sages of What Makes A Good Game. A proper game. Something that explores deep themes, man. They set up outfits like DIGRA and so on. And they failed because nobody would listen to them. Couldn't solve the coordination problem of getting everyone pointed the same way.
So, really the problem isn't that you can make a collection of the world's best that's (for a lot of readers) profoundly underwhelming. Who cares? I'm sure there's someone out there who's heavily into vaguely philosophical incredibly pretentious postmodern stories about time[1] and for them this is perfect. The problem is that this choice is overvalued. It has legitimizing power that's criminally outsized compared to its utility. This makes the whole business of SF&F fiction less efficient for most people involved and, at worst, drives people away.
It happens! People used to adore poetry. In Redactedstan, at a minimum, my parent's generation-or-so habitually sat together of an evening and listened to poetry accompanied by some light guitar strumming and, likely, drugs. (It was the sixties). But once gatekeepers entirely colonized the concept of poetry they convinced everyone that they and only they knew what poetry was. Once they were convinced of this, people quickly decided that they must loathe poetry since they were fobbed off by "So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens" as a poem. Or that random warbling and screaming was a poetry performance.
[1]
Mostmodern—A City of the Present Day
"I don't think of myself as an architect so much as a midwife, " he says, serene as a Buddha sat under a towering portrait of St. Augustine caught eternally blessing the both of us with an outstretched hand, "someone to see to the superfetation of το ἕν, a thousand times or so," he finishes with a wink.
"But you built a city, yes," I ask, tapping the tablet with a pen.
"No."
"Excuse me?"
"You are trapped in time like an insect in amber, but I am not. And neither is Mostmodern. Asking me if I 'built' it is like asking me which part of the amber I am in. None of them."
"So how did the city come to be?"
"Didn't."
"Excuse me?"
"You are asking about the amber again. It's entirely the wrong sort of question," he says and smiles, a big gap-toothed smile that you long to punch but know you mustn't. It's an imperfect universe, though of course, he'd disagree.
"Why did you.... Why the city?"
"Ah! The right sort of question," he's thoughtful for a moment or—amber again!—I vividly remember him thoughtful and my mind distends this understanding and places it between other memories. I can also remember remembering. And remember remembering that I remember. But I should stop. He doesn't stand for infinite regresses.
"Be not like me," he says, "I am alone."
"That's the reason?"
"Do I need a better one?
(Okay, okay, I'll stop now... Sheesh. Some people can't take a joke)
Oh, and I don't know what reminded you of Calvino, Bad Horse, but Calvino is an excellent writer. Yeah, he's self-referential as hell but his prose is actually non-pretentious and really remarkably transparent given the convoluted narratives he liked to play with. If On a Winter's Night a Traveler... is an amazing book.
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The first story is a Calvino-ish story about a mysterious city, which are the stories Lost Cities is modeled on.
4612578
(
DEMON: So they're basically furries for the rest of eternity?
SATAN: Basically.
DEMON: Cool.
SATAN: And you know what's weird?
DEMON: What?
SATAN I hear they've got a room Upstairs that's just like this.
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This, by the way, is how you get a Trump. You anathamize, abominate, deplore a group for its nature and existence and they will find ways to hit back
People wonder whether Trump's attitude towards Islam will radicalize American Moslems. It will, I've seen the exact same thing happen before. Recently. Only with white males. It got Trump elected.
The past year has been instructive. I now know, in a small way, something of what it is like to be an ordinary law-abiding Moslem after a Jihadi shoots up the town.
4612730
Rabbi Haim's lesser-known Parable of the Furries never quite caught on like the business with the long spoons did.
4612639
You sound like you really, really need to read Wave Without a Shore, by C.J. Cherryh.
4612722
Huh. Reminded me of Wilde's A House of Pomegranates.
4612730
Heaven and Hell, like so many things, are all a matter of context.
4612752
That does sound amazing, but why did my post make you think I needed to read the book?
(Also, let me counter-suggest China Miéville's The City & the City which I suspect you might enjoy or have enjoyed)
4612724
)
Goddamn it, man. That's worse than a footnote leading nowhere.
4612752
Because the dialog you wrote sounds like a fond pastiche of Cherryh's novel.
4612803
Somehow, you've managed to quote me and reply to yourself. That's odd.
Either way, thanks! I didn't mean to make a fond pastiche of Cherryh, but since I apparently do so on my own, clearly I should read some of her stuff. I've been meaning to for ages, but getting classic SF here is like pulling teeth.
I really meant it to be a whole pile of increasingly brazen philosophical references & thefts.
4612793
Dammit, man! I was restoring the balance. Now your rash action may have doomed us all!
There used to be two main year's best SF anthologies: Dozois' and Hartwell's. Hartwell took up Wollheim's torch in 1996. (Wollheim did the anthology from '72 until his death in '90; Wollheim and Carr had run it from '65 to '71 until Carr split off and did his own thing from '72 to '87.) Dozois' anthology has been running since '84.
Hartwell's last "normal" anthology was in '12. It was bought out by Tor (*spits*) in '13, who printed that year's (presumably already finished) edition and promptly killed off the anthology. Hartwell died in '16.
Immediately after Hartwell's anthology disappeared, Dozois' anthology (IMO) took a precipitous dive in quality. Now, you could certainly argue that the overall quality of SF short stories dropped off a cliff in the same timeframe, but I personally suspect that Hartwell had been "keeping him honest". There was a fair bit of overlap between the two's lists, and those stories were generally good. I tended to prefer Hartwell's picks over Dozois', but sometimes he came up with some good ones of his own.
Once Dozois was the only game in town, however, there was nothing comparable to cross-check his picks against, and there was a significant uptick in "Marxist propaganda" and "Actively annoying" selections. I stopped buying them after the 32nd edition ('15). I browsed the 33rd ('16) in a bookstore, noted that he declined to even mention the Hugo kerfuffle in his annual Summation (supposedly a summary of all relevant SF events in the previous year), looked at the list of stories, said "this is a load of shit" and put it back. The 34th ('17) looks to be no better.
Nothing new to me, or to you?
Oh? I like shitty stories. Care to share? :D
Well that's a shame, but not super surprising I guess. Look on the bright side, at least: a dying tree is more easily uprooted and replaced.
Based on what? Especially as regards the Sad Puppies, which have frequently been led by women?
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Swirsky, you know, was the author of "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love ..."
4612961 Heh, I didn't know that. Karen's selections were blind, though, so you can't easily accuse her of favoritism--she must have really liked the story.
Actually that brings up another point: there's been a kind of secret obsession with unacknowledged fan-fiction in SF lately. I mean there are a lot of acclaimed stories that are actually fan-fiction, like this Alice in Wonderland piece, only they're respectable, because they're not written within fandoms and the author gets paid. This one is not like the others, but most of these fan-fictions are lousy fan-fictions--stories where the main point of the story is, "Look! I had Captain Hook fight Long John SIlver!" or "I put the Trojans in space!" Howard Waldrop alone has done 2 stories like that.
Something that seems worth noting is that the short story (as well as the serialized story and the novella) have been dying by inches for the last half-century or so. They're... not as relevant as they'd like to be as art forms. Like painting, or ballet, they're kind of running on inertia.
From about the 1920s to the 50s, the short story and the serialized story were how you read science fiction and fantasy. The pulps were the undisputed kings here, all the old hoary names most people who take the history of the genre seriously are familiar with, Amazing and Astounding and a ton of others, monthly newsmagazines. If you wanted to get your novel published as a novel, that is, a genuine for-real book, it basically needed to succeed here first. (There are some exceptions, including most notably Tolkien, but this was the model.)
These platforms provided a ready-made venue for the short story simply because of their nature and the economics involved. If you want your newsmagazine to be financially viable, people need a reason to pick it up every month. Many of these readers wanted a longer story, a serialized novel, popular commercially as an art form since the mid-nineteenth century at that point. Plus, a successful serialized novel can then be re-published as an actual book. Everyone gets paid!
But these readers always want the content to be something they, you know, liked. If they pick up your monthly and there are five serialized novels in it they don't like and nothing else, and they know those novels are going to be ongoing for eight to twelve months each... well, they'll see you next year. You can (and they did) stagger things out so that something new is starting as often as possible, but people get frustrated at knowing they'll get at best one-fifth of something they'll maybe like.
So, you pad it out with a bunch of short stories. That'll get you over a bunch of psychological thresholds.
You also severely limit the length of your serialized novels so you can cycle them. Your average Golden Age sci-fi novel is like fifty thousand words. That's unpublishable by modern standards, where you'd damn well better clear a hundred thousand words.
The newsstand fiction market for all genres imploded in the 50s for a whole bunch of reasons that are hotly debated and not really germane. It left a few survivors in SF&F, and you even got a few new ones popping up; Asimov's, for example, was only founded in the late seventies.
But every seven to ten years or so you hear about one more of them finally losing their grip and tumbling into the abyss, or changing to an all-online format, or going bimonthly, something. New ones that start tend to die fast. I would say the newsmagazines stopped being directly relevant to a mass audience (please note my very careful and deliberate use of qualifiers there) sometime in the 80s and 90s. They continued to be indirectly relevant; getting published there meant you got paid, and if you were published and well-received by the increasingly smaller but increasingly hard-core readership, you could shop yourself to a publishers as someone who had demonstrated appeals to tastemakers and thus might be worth fronting the money to for a for-real book.
It was, and is, a stepping stone, though. Very, very few people could make a living shopping short stories every month to increasingly fewer outlets for them. If you look at the cover of Asimov's for any given issue, it's going to be "a ton of guys you've never heard of, and maybe a single big name who decided they had a short story in them and went back to their roots." But most readers of SF&F don't buy and read them. Most of them don't buy and read short stories. They buy... novels. Novels are good value! You get a big brick of words!
A similar dynamic has been at play with comic books. Trade paperbacks sell like gangbusters. The monthly pamphlet format struggles for a ton of reasons, but one of those reasons is people don't really want to buy a serialized story, or at least, they don't want to do it twenty-two pages at a time. They want to buy a nice big bundle of story.
Now, under ordinary circumstances the short story would simply be allowed to become a highly specialized medium for enthusiasts of the form, with a small number of extremely low-circulation magazines and websites devoted to them, plus the occasional anthology. It's like this in the other genres, romance, horror, mystery, etc. Short stories there are respected for their history and for their potential in identifying up-and-comers but not really fetishized.
But literary fiction and SF&F take their short stories and the anthologies that come out of them wicked seriously.
Is this an age thing? All the people in the industry who are really hardcore into pushing the things grew up and fell in love with SF&F back when the short story was more relevant. (Hartwell, as noted above, is dead. Dozois is in his late sixties.) Is it because they were short story writers themselves and are making a grim effort to promote the relevancy of a form they love? (Again, Dozois.)
The big names in SF&F... well, do they write short stories? Sometimes, but for the most part they do not, and they're not really known for the ones they do write. They're known for... their novels!
Now, there's nothing wrong with being a small, niche art form. And there's nothing wrong with being a small, niche art form without mass appeal that nonetheless is important to other artists. (There's a famously apocryphal quote from Brian Eno about the Velvet Underground; "The Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records, but everyone who bought one went out and started a band.")
But I do think if that's the case, you should try and come to grips with it. You should have the self-awareness to go "hey, what we're primarily doing here is talking to other people in a small circle that takes this unusually seriously." That doesn't mean you maybe aren't doing valuable work, but context is always important.
Does this even belong in an SF/F compilation? If so, what did you leave out of the description that would justify its presence here rather than a straight lit-fic collection?
4613013 He gets eye cancer, and they cut his eyes out, but it's okay, because he gets cyborg eyes. Hence science fiction. Also because this causes him to think about transhumanism. I'd say it's technically SF, but not in spirit--I didn't need to mention any of the SF parts to describe the story, and it could have been written with slight modifications to make it not be SF.
4613021
Huh. No kidding. One might hope that science fiction and/or fantasy elements would need to be key to this sort of thing, but there you go.
4612990
On that subject, I was just hoping that somehow "The Litany of Earth" (Lovecraft fanfic Tor published) might have made it to the 2015 equivalent, but was unsurprised to see that it did not.
4612990 What is and isn't fanfiction is an interesting question as applied to public-domain works and works-for-hire, is it not?
Is every Superman story not written by Siegel and Shuster fanfiction? How about Cthulhu Mythos works not written by Lovecraft? Was T.H White writing Arthurian fanfiction? Was Thomas Malory? Is any story with Dracula Bram Stoker fanfiction? Are Star Trek pocket books fanfiction? What about Star Wars Extended Universe books? For that matter, what about non-Lucas helmed Star Wars movies? Do the dividing lines have to do with who is producing them or do they depend on a canon/not canon dividing line? If the latter, what happens in cases where there is no arbiter of canonicity, as in many pubic domain works? What about works that aren't public domain but are explicitly marketed as non-canonical What-If stories?
Things get blurry at the edge, and edge cases make for frustrating taxonomy.
4612746
It's nice to think that it was just White males. More than 51% of American White women voted for Donald Trump. Yeah.
That said, I agree in part. There are similar factors in play, but the situation with the election of Donald Trump is much more complex than perceived marginalization. The hyperpolitical environment we live in largely grew from the media becoming increasingly skewed in an era when anypony (thanks to the internet) can get their 'news' from an isolated hugbox that has no obligation to the truth.
So it's R.L. Stine's The Ghost Next Door?
4612746
4613102
I'd agree - in part. But trends like globalization and economic anxiety seem far, far stronger. The Cheeto, after all, had no popular vote win; he won due to quirks of the election system, and what tipped it was all the formerly blue-voting states in the Rust Belt going red. That - that was much more about 'The Democrats havent done shit for us, they're all corporate stooges' than identity politics.
But it contributed, and given the narrow margin of victory you could say that any one of a number of stories put the Cheeto in the White House. And hey, now, well, he's busy enacting the very discrimination one of my gay friends was so sure he wouldn't when they voted for him.
4613217
Or M. Night Shamalamadingdong's masterpiece.
I think it was titled Avatar: the Last Airbender or something
4613036
Fun fact: the original novel actually DID say that Captain Hook had been a rival of Long John Silver, referred to by his nickname "Barbecue".
4615245 I didn't know this. I learned something today!
Well, I mean, I generally learn something in Bad Horse threads. But still. Thanks!
That's too bad. I was hoping it was a true best of and a good smorgasbord to get into modern sf to move beyond just the 90s-00s backlog. I wonder if a rolling best of 5 year book would be any better. It would allow ideas to ferment in the brain and see which were truly impactful. Putting myself in the shoes of an editor, I can see how the fear of missing out could force my hand to choose the most experimental, radical stories, to show that SF, and my taste, is modern and responsive.
Basically, it would read like the active pool of Magic cards, or bs top 10 lists that are weighted way too heavily towards the present.
4615447
You're welcome.
4612639
This is why I've been very interested in the idea of Knighty doing Genfiction.
Like, I mean, imagine you have, say, 100 talented writers. Even if one of them put out only one story every three months, that'd be a new story literally every day from a good writer for people to read.
It wouldn't be hard for a site like that to, potentially, produce more fiction than anyone is ever practically likely to read. Heck, FIMFiction already gets into that territory, and we write about colorful horses.
At that point, though, what's the point of every paying for stories?
And then the gatekeepers become random guys on the Internet who write blog posts about what stories are worth reading, plus the whims of popularity in the Featured Story Box (which will be 50% erotica at any given time).
4619925
This is why I'm not excited about Knighty doing genfiction. Because he'd do it in a way so that the writer earned nothing.
4622482
Clearly the solution is to beat him to the punch so you can make all the money off the suckers instead!
I'm not sure what the solution is, though. YouTube does its content thing by having advertisers and splitting the money with people who make YouTube videos, which could maybe work, but a lot of people put up stuff on YouTube for free anyway.
4622631 I think the solution is obviously to have money credited from the reader's account to the writer's account on those stories for which the writer chooses to charge whatever the writer wants to charge.