{"id":110,"date":"2001-10-21T11:52:15","date_gmt":"2001-10-21T18:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2001\/10\/21\/110.html"},"modified":"2001-10-21T11:52:15","modified_gmt":"2001-10-21T18:52:15","slug":"stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2001\/10\/21\/stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I've been reading a lot lately.<\/p>\n

Stories for the magazine, of course. And I've stolen a few guilty hours here and there recently to read the third Harry Potter book; better than the first two, but still kinda formulaic. Looking forward to the fourth when it comes out in paperback; I'm told it's a big step up in literary quality.<\/p>\n

And in spare moments, before going to sleep and after waking up, I've switched temporarily from Sturgeon to From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown,<\/cite> another one of those NESFA complete-works compendia. I'll write a more detailed review of that when I'm finished.<\/p>\n

Brown was a master—perhaps the<\/em> master—of the sf short-short story, all through his writing career, from 1941 through 1965. But he wasn't the last good short-short writer; the form still has some life in it. Michael Swanwick had planned to write a weekly series of short-shorts, one corresponding to each element in the Periodic Table, for Eileen Gunn's The Infinite Matrix<\/a><\/cite>; when that magazine sadly folded, Swanwick sold the series to Sci Fiction<\/a>.<\/cite> He's 20 weeks into this \"Periodic Table of Science Fiction<\/a>,\" having just published \"Calcium.\" My favorites so far:<\/p>\n