Archive for Short Stories
(This post is specifically about speculative fiction anthologies; it’s not about magazines or novels, and it’s not about literary fiction or other genres.) Short version of this post: If you’re an sf anthology editor or an sf author, what does the idea of being “invited” to submit to an anthology imply to you about whether […]
I’m sad that Howard Waldrop has died, age 77. I’m trying to remember when I first encountered his work. Probably sometime in the ’80s? Even though he was never all that widely popular with readers, several prominent editors loved his work; for example, I might have seen a story or two of his in Omni, […]
Here are some thoughts about three old sf stories. (These thoughts include spoilers.) The stories aren’t particularly connected to each other except by appearing in the same anthology. Story 1: “Environment,” by Chester S. Geier (1944) The two male human protagonists, who are the only characters in the story, constantly say each other’s names when […]
A couple months ago, I noticed that for the past six years, a big part of my WordPress website (the section labeled “Hodgepodge”) had consisted of a placeholder page containing a paragraph of lorem ipsum text. Ever since then, I’ve been transferring everything over from my old static pages to WordPress. I’ve now finished doing […]
Neil Clarke addresses the idea that “Only writers subscribe to genre magazines.” I want to add some thoughts of my own: The community has been having this argument since at least the early 2000s, maybe longer. We occasionally worried about it when I was a Strange Horizons editor—we wondered whether most of our readers were […]
Number of stories from a given year that I normally manage to read before the Hugo nominating-ballot deadline: 0. Number of stories from 2022 that I set out (in February, 2023) to read before the Hugo nominating-ballot deadline: about 12. Number of stories from 2022 that I ended up reading over the past two and […]
I feel like a lot of recent portal fantasy has been about the kids’ trauma, either in the fantasy world or, after they come back, in the real world. But I only have a few data points, and I may be overgeneralizing, so I’m curious to hear what y’all think. Does this seem to you […]
I recently skimmed Asimov’s 1969 story “Feminine Intuition,” the second-to-last-written of the Susan Calvin robot stories. (Written about 12 years after the previous one.) The first three-quarters of the story is full of eye-roll-inducing stuff like this: “[…] call it ‘intuitive.’” “An intuitive robot,” someone muttered. “A girl robot?” A smile made its way about […]
Here’s a roundup of some responses to, and works that could be seen as being in dialogue with, Tom Godwin’s 1954 story “The Cold Equations.” (The original story is also available online.) The first five links below are nonfiction; the rest are fiction. I should note that I don’t really want to host yet another […]
I’m thinking about what the difference is between an amazing major revelation late in a story (I’ll call this a Big Reveal) and an annoying Surprise Twist Ending. Here are some of my thoughts. Some examples of good Big Reveals of the sort that I’m thinking of (no specific spoilers here, but I suppose that […]
I’ve moved this list to a separate page, and I’m adding updates to that page rather than this one. “one does not simply walk away from Omelas” (—Frumiosa, in a comment at The Toast) There’ve been many many nonfiction articles about Omelas, but the pieces that I’m linking to here are all presented as fiction. […]
Interesting situation with a recent crowdfunded anthology: The editors had sent out the ebook version of the anthology and were preparing to print the printed version, when a reader let them know that one of the stories in the book was a close copy of something published on Tumblr in 2017, specifically the first part […]