Today’s Mind Meld feature on SF Signal is “If you could publish a short fiction anthology containing up to 25 previously-published sf/f/h stories, which stories would it include and why?”.
You can see my answer to the question here. I could have gone for a themed table of contents for my dream anthology, but I chose to simply pick twenty-five of my favourite genre short stories (and a couple of novellas). Quite what my choices say about me I wouldn’t like to speculate…
M-Brane SF #21 is now out, containing, among others, ‘Human Resources’, my near-future story about brain-hacking and indentured labour. See here. Only $2. You know you want it.
M-Brane SF has posted the table of contents of its August issue, #19 here. Included in it is my story, ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’, which, despite its description as a “dystopia”, I actually consider to be optimistic sf… No, really. The other stories sound pretty damn interesting, too.
I managed to sneak in a review of a short story for Short Story Month on Gav’s NextRead blog. I picked ‘A Woman Naked’ by Christopher Priest, from his 1974 collection Real-Time World. I hadn’t actually intended to contribute a guest review to Short Story Month, but when I read the story I felt it was worth writing about. The review is here.
I did this last year, so why not again this year? Once again, I’m not a member of the Worldcon, so I didn’t nominate any of the works which appear on the various shortlists, nor will I be able to vote on them. But the shortlists are public, many of the novellas, novelettes and short stories are available online to read, and I have opinions which I am happy to share.
First up, the short stories. These are stories of less than 7,500 words, previously published in the US or online in the preceding year. The 2010 shortlist looks like this (click on the titles to read each story):
‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ (PDF), Mike Resnick (Asimov’s December 2009)
Nope. I don’t get it. After John Kessel’s clever Austen / Frankenstein pastiche, ‘Pride and Prometheus’, appeared on last year’s Hugo novelette shortlist, this year we have another entry riffing on Frankenstein. But this time it’s a simplistic short story by Mike Resnick. The narrator is married to Victor Frankenstein, but it is not a loving marriage. But, with the help of the monster, Frankenstein’s wife undergoes a change of heart. It’s hard to know when the story’s set – the narrator is married to Victor Frankenstein, but complains the castle has no electricity. So not the early 1800s, then. It’s implied that Gone with the Wind has just been published, so the story could be set in the late 1930s. Except the narrator uses the term “family unit”. ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ works as a lightweight throwaway piece – and it’s a little better than last year’s dreadfully old-fashioned ‘Article of Faith’ – but are we seriously supposed to believe it’s one of the two best stories published in Asimov’s during 2009, and one of the five best stories published anywhere in 2009? I refuse to believe that science fiction is so moribund.
‘Bridesicle’ (PDF), Will McIntosh (Asimov’s January 2009)
In the future of this story, those who have died and been frozen are revived by lonely people looking for love. Which could be considered a neat commentary on immigrant brides. But McIntosh adds more. He makes his eponymous Mira gay, so even if a man does fall in love with her and pay for her to be brought back to life, she’s never going to return his sentiments. And, in this future, the personalities of dead people can be uploaded into living people’s minds – these are known as “hitchers”. Mira is woken at intervals over a couple of centuries, makes friends with a man who later admits he could never afford to revive her, and also learns that her lover is a corpsicle in the same facility. I wanted to like this story more than I did. It’s well-written – although one or two phrases were a tad too much: “her jaw squealed like a sea bird’s cry”, for example – and Mira is a well-drawn protagonist. But it feels too busy. Either the “bridesicle” idea or “hitchers” alone would be enough. Having both seems to me to weaken the story, and so it turns into a future romance. ‘Bridesicle’ is not an embarrassing choice for the shortlist, but it doesn’t feel strong enough to win a Hugo.
‘The Moment’, Lawrence M Schoen (Footprints, Hadley Rille Books)
I’ll admit to being surprised at seeing this on the shortlist. But only because it appeared in a themed anthology from a small press. I wouldn’t have thought such a book would have received a wide enough readership to generate enough nominations for one of its stories to be shortlisted. But it did. And the story is… Well, it’s not bad. It’s a series of linked vignettes, showing the history of the galaxy through visitors to a human footprint on the Moon. Given the last line of the story, I don’t think the footprint is meant to be Neil Armstrong’s (and, of course, the famous photograph was taken by Aldrin of his own bootprint), or indeed made by any of the Apollo astronauts. The story is a bit of smeerp overdose, full of silly made-up words. It’s also somewhat over-written. Having now read it, I’m still surprised to see it on the shortlist. I don’t actually think it’s good enough for an award.
‘Non-Zero Probabilities’, NK Jemisin (Clarkesworld September 2009)
This story is so much better than the preceding three that it feels like a much better story than I initially thought it was. In fact, prior to the Hugo nominations being announced last month, this and the Johnson story from Clarkesworld were the only two of the shortlist I’d actually read. Adele lives in a New York in which wildly improbably events – disasters, mostly – happen regularly. It’s a slice-of-life sort of story, with some lovely writing and a clever central conceit. It’s not the sort of genre fiction I normally choose to read, or enjoy all that much, so I wouldn’t have nominated it myself. But yes, it’s good enough to be on the shortlist.
‘Spar’, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld October 2009)
And you’d think this story would be the sort of genre fiction I would read since it has aliens and spaceships in it. But. It’s a mood piece. It has no rigour. It feels like a writing exercise, not a story. I didn’t like it when I first read it, I don’t like it on rereading it. And I can’t understand why it was nominated, never mind received enough nominations to make it onto the shortlist. Johnson, of course, was on the Hugo short story shortlist last year – for ’26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’ – so she clearly has her fans. I’m not one of them. Nor am I fan of the type of genre fiction she writes.
I thought last year’s Hugo shortlist for short stories was poor, and I’d hoped this year’s would be better. It isn’t. Two authors are back again – Resnick and Johnson – which only shows how incestuous the Hugo Awards are. I mean, there are a huge number of people writing genre short fiction, so I find it really sad that the same old names keep on appearing. This year, I think the Jemisin should win, with the McIntosh as runner-up. I expect the Johnson will win.
My take on the novelette shortlist will follow soon. It at least looks better than the above shortlist. Um, the same was true last year. Perhaps the best sf now being written is at novelette-length…
This year, a number of people in the sf blogosphere have vowed to read more short fiction, or are blogging their way through issues of sf magazines. I’ve decided to do something similar. But I’m not going to blog about every short story I read, I’m just going to try and keep up to date with the magazines I subscribe to/follow. And if I come across any stories I think are particularly good, then I’ll mention them on my blog.
The magazines I read include Interzone, Jupiter, Postscripts, The Hub, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Futurismic, Daybreak… plus any others I might stumble across.
I’m now up to date with my short fiction reading. Three stories from the magazines named above have especially impressed me. They are – and this wasn’t planned – of three different genres: science fiction, fantasy and steampunk. All three are also from online magazines.
The stories are:
I’ll probably post something like this again in another couple of months. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to suggest sf/fantasy magazines I should try – online or print – or has a recommendation for a short story published in the last two months that I should read…
Shameful confession time. I write short fiction, but I don’t read as much of it as I should. It’s not like I have an excuse. I subscribe to a number of print magazines, and I regularly visit the sites of several online magazines. But between my own writing, and reading novels and non-fiction, I never seem to find the time to read the short stuff they publish.
This doesn’t mean I never read short stories. Just that I think I should read more. I suspect that most of the stories I read these days are in single-author collections. I do read the occasional anthology – I reviewed The New Space Opera 2
Obviously, I have a very good reason for wanting to increase my intake of short fiction – to help improve my own. But I’d also like to be in a position to make informed choices when it comes to nominating stories for awards.
So, for 2010, I plan to make more of an effort. I will read every issue of Interzone as it arrives. I will read every issue of Postscripts as it arrives. And Jupiter too. I will read the stories published in the online magazines I visit – Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Subterranean Online, Futurismic, DayBreak, and any others I might have neglected to mention.
And when I find any that especially impress me, I think I shall mention them here.
It occurred to me some people might find it interesting to learn how I came up with the ideas for my stories, how I approached those ideas, and what I was trying to achieve with the stories which resulted.
First up is ‘The Amber Room’, which was published in Pantechnicon #9 in March 2009. If I were to write a blurb for the story, it would go something like this:
Tina lives in a museum, but this museum contains all the lost art treasures of the world. They were found by her boyfriend Chris, who has an amazing ability: he can visit alternate universes. That’s where he “found” the lost art treasures.
Here’s a PDF of the ‘The Amber Room’; so you can read it before reading the rest of this post.
The idea for the story came to me sometime in March 2007. As far as I recall, it was inspired by the real-life Amber Room itself, mention of which I’d stumbled across somewhere on the Web. I wanted to use it in a story, but, of course, it was lost. So why not write a story about it being found? And since I write science fiction, why not have it found in an alternate universe? In fact, why not have an entire museum filled with “lost” works of art which had been found in alternate universes?
But that’s not actually a story. It needs a plot, characters… a beginning, middle and end…
I remember banging out a first draft in pretty much a single sitting. In that original version, the story focused on Chris, the universe-hopping “art thief”, and was structured as a series of vignettes from his life in no particular chronological order. But it had the same sting in the tail: the identity of Chris’ girlfriend, that she was him from an alternate universe in which his “parents” had had a daughter.
I emailed the draft to a group of friends to see what they thought to it. We’ve been emailing each other stories and novel excerpts for several years now; I value their comments. They liked the central premise, but not the way I’d chosen to tell the story. I rewrote it, making Tina the central character and giving the narrative a linear structure. I sent this second draft to my friends. They liked it a great deal better. However, they still weren’t keen on the ending – initially, the story explained that Tina and Chris were alternate versions of each other. I changed that, made it, well, subtle – i.e., having Tina look at a pair of photographs which reveal the truth… And that too nicely linked in with the Amber Room and the whole concept of “lost” art, turning it into a metaphor of the central relationship. Sometimes, you get to a point in a story where all the choices you made earlier, without really knowing why you made them, suddenly slot together and it all works.
After that, it was simply a matter of refining and polishing the prose. At one point, it occurred to me that since the Amber Room featured four mosaics depicting the five senses, then I should do the same in the story. So every section is written such that it references each of the five senses, beginning with Tina hearing something, then seeing, then touching, and so on.
For example, from the first section: we have “The slam of the door echoed in memory, but she heard now only the metronome click of her heels on the marble steps” (sound). Later in the same section is, “The windows to her right painted great rectangles of sunlight on the floor” (sight). Then “Whenever in the Room, she felt a desire to run her fingers over the mosaics’ tessellae…” (touch), and “The Room soothed her, calmed her. It smelled of history” (er, smell). And finally, “… the wine tasted unnaturally full-bodied and rich to her” (taste). It’s not always a smooth progression – and looking back at the story now, I can see a couple of places where I slipped up and used a sight reference in a line that should have been sound reference, and so on.
Choosing to use the senses in this way also proved useful as it provided a framework for the descriptive writing. Because I could only use imagery specific to the sense referenced at that point in the narrative, I had to think harder about my sentences and word-choices. Take the line “She glanced back up the cochlea-curve of the staircase”. Originally, I’d used “nautilus-curve”, which was the image I wanted; but “cochlea” is hearing-related, and of a similar shape, so I used that instead. And I think it works better too.
Then there was the research. Every single piece of art mentioned in the story is real, and very much lost. When you’re writing, research should hurt. You need to get everything right. Sf is not like it used to be – you can’t just blithely invent stuff, or wave an authorial hand in front of the reader. Like you, readers have got access to the Internet, and they can fact-check as well as you can. Science fiction doesn’t mean you can make it up as you go along. On the contrary, it’s harder to write because you can’t rely on readers’ assumptions or common knowledge.
And, I should point out, it was while researching more about the Amber Room that I learnt of the four mosaics it contained. Which I then fed back into the story as a framework for the prose in each section. So none of it was wasted.
As for the roll call of alternate history sf mentioned on page four… The novels and stories mentioned are all ones I’ve read, and some of them I admire a great deal. Sticking ‘The Amber Room’ in among them was just my attempt at a little postmodern humour. And the “two films – different futures dependent upon whether or not a train was caught” on page seven… Most people have realised that one is Sliding Doors; the other is Blind Chance by Krzysztof Kieslowski.
‘The Amber Room’ was a deliberate attempt to write a “literary” sf story. I wasn’t interested in exploring the central premise. I was interested in the premise’s effect on two people and their relationship. How their relationship came about, how it was progressing. And I wanted the story to be about politics too, about the complicity and greed of politicians. Yes, I could have written a story in which Chris uses his experiences of all those alternate universes to create the perfect political system, or to help humanity reach the stars, or something equally sfnal… But that would be a different story and, to tell the truth, I’m not that interested in writing sf which privileges the central idea. I see the premise, the sfnal aspect of the story, as an enabling device – it enables a story that could not take place without it, that could not be transposed into another genre. If you can swap out the furniture and change the labels, and the story remains unchanged, then it’s not science fiction.
‘The Amber Room’ is by no means perfect – there are rough spots in it. But I achieved what I set out to do with it, and I stand by it. I was disappointed it received so many rejections – five, according to my records – before Pantechnicon took it. I thought it was better than that; I still do. I’d like to think others do as well. And I’d like to think others have found this dissection of it informative and useful.
I hope to do the same soon for the other story of mine I’ve posted here: ‘Thicker Than Water’.
My story ‘Thicker Than Water’ was published in Jupiter magazine’s January 2009 issue. Unlike ‘The Amber Room’ (see here), it received a couple of reviews and was described as an “exciting story” (SFRevu) and “a good story with much promise, atmospheric and exciting” (SF Crowsnest). SF Site was less complimentary – “I was not really convinced … either by the motivations of anyone involved, nor by the potentially interesting conclusion, which is not sufficiently a part of the rest of the story.” For the record, ‘Thicker Than Water’ was inspired by the story of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. Click the link below to download the story in PDF format.
My story ‘The Amber Room’ was published in March this year by Pantechnicon magazine. But there appear to be problems with the magazine’s web site, so I’m putting a copy of the story here on my blog. Click on the link below to download the story in PDF format.
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 