It seems to me (though I'm probably wrong) that I'm seeing a whole lot more stories than usual featuring things like:<\/p>\n
And in a fair number of cases, some combination of those.<\/p>\n
Not just in slush, either—seems like just about every piece of published sf I pick up to read these days features one or more of those topics.<\/p>\n
Of course, as with the Law of Fives<\/a>, this pattern is \"more and more manifest the harder I look.\" I'm imposing a pattern on things by taking a set of broad topics and interpreting them broadly.<\/p>\n And we at SH<\/cite> have always received a lot of dead-loved-ones stories (though in the past I think those have more often been dead children and people who die in accidents). And death has always been a major theme of literature. And of course I don't think people should stop sending us good stories just because those stories focus on a topic that's personally difficult for me right now, nor do I want anyone reading this to feel guilty about having sent us such a story. I imagine we'll end up buying some of those stories; it's not like these are topics the magazine tends to shy away from.<\/p>\n But still, for whatever reason or set of reasons, it feels<\/em> like I'm running into a lot more of this stuff than usual. I'm doing a lot of wincing as I read slush these days. (For reasons other than bad writing, I mean.)<\/p>\n That's one reason I liked Hitchhiker's Guide<\/cite>: not much death. (I mean, y'know, except for the total destruction of the Earth and most of its inhabitants in the opening minutes. And a couple of comedic death and quasi-death scenes later.) Kind of a relief. And I've been watching the first season of Mad About You<\/cite>; a bit too much humor-of-embarrassment for my tastes in some episodes, but I gotta say, very little use of firearms in that show. (Also, charming and often funny. And Helen Hunt has one of the best smiles in the world. And I'm a total sucker for fiction in which the protagonists truly love each other.) Oh, and that was also part of why I so eagerly devoured that latest Jennifer Crusie book<\/a> (other than the fact that it too was charming and funny and romantic): I was pretty sure none of the characters were going to actually kill each other, much as they might have wanted to now and then.<\/p>\n Anyway. I'm really truly not asking authors to stop sending us the kinds of stories I'm talking about. I wasn't even going to mention this publicly; I figured that to the extent that it's not all in my head, it was a brief wave that would pass sooner or later. (We often get little waves of stories that are related somehow, like the week when we got a bunch of cannibalism stories all at once.) But it's now entering about its fourth week with no indication of letting up, and it's been on my mind a lot, so I decided (albeit with some trepidation about unintended effects) to post about it.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It seems to me (though I’m probably wrong) that I’m seeing a whole lot more stories than usual featuring things…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2830\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}