Archive for Short Stories
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 […]
“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. “A House by the Sea,” by P. H. Lee What happens to the Omelas child when they get older? […]
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 […]
A while back, I posted a chronological list of Le Guin’s major books, mostly put together by my friend Chaos. But lately, I’ve been wanting an expansion of that list that includes the original publication dates of short stories and essays. So here’s a fuller chronological list, ordered by publication year (and alphabetically within a year), […]
I didn’t manage to post last week’s planned Strange Horizons Flashback story, and in the past, falling behind has been the beginning of the end for this project; I don’t get the week’s story posted, and then time passes, and eventually I accept that I’m not going to continue the project, and then a year […]
I now have author-gender stats for over 80 anthologies that I’ve looked at in the past couple years, from my father’s and my bookshelves, with publication dates ranging from 1951 through about 1990, plus a few outliers outside of that date range. (This post is essentially an update of my post from a couple years […]