Yesterday I made a list of ten old friends: science fiction novels I keep coming back to, over and over again. Today it's time to dip into short stories.
I have such a bizarre love/hate relationship with the short story format. It's not my natural form by any definition; it takes me and my characters four thousand words just to say "good morning", and I have been known to accidentally write the opening twelve thousand words of a novel when I meant to write a thousand-word short. (Novel-writing? That's easy. Keeping the weekly fiction posts under control? God help me!)
I read short stories to marvel at the skill of people who can make every word count. I read short stories to study them, to learn how to boil away useless flesh and hair and polish the bones that are left behind.
There are thousands of brilliant short stories out there, and there's no way I could read them all. Like yesterday, I'm not trying for "best"; this time I'm going to go for ten short stories that have stuck with me over the years. (If my list of old-friend novels was biased towards the latter half of the 20th century, my list of old-friend short stories is biased towards the Golden Age...)
I wept blood at keeping this to ten -- I mean, Asimov, Campbell, Delaney, del Rey, Ellison, Farmer, Kuttner, LeGuin, Silverberg, Tiptree, Varley, should I go on? -- but these are the ones that spring to mind immediately. (After composing it, I was talking with a friend, and we were amused to find that our lists had absolutely no overlap, but both of us went "oooh, yeah" at the other's. I am tempted to make a top one hundred between us.)
Once again in order of publication, we have:
1. "Mimsy Were the Borogoves", Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore) (1943): Okay, see, the thing is, I was viciously screwed out of adequate science and math education in my public-school curriculum, and the entire time, I was thinking: but! But! Math is beautiful! And this story is why I knew enough to know it. (Reading it at a tender young age is, now that I think about it, probably partly responsible for my belief that mathematics and linguistics, among so many other things, are the same discipline viewed through a different lens.)
2. "The Man Who Traveled In Elephants", Robert Heinlein (1948): Heinlein reportedly considered this the best of all his short stories; the older I get, the more inclined I am to agree, despite the inevitable fist-fights whenever the topic comes up about whether or not it's a science fiction story at all. (My personal answer: it's not, except in the way that it totally is.)
3. "There Will Come Soft Rains", Ray Bradbury (1950): Choosing one Bradbury: pulling teeth. But this one out of all of Bradbury's short stories is the one that works its understated way into my memory and sits there, a quiet reminder of what can be accomplished through the use of negative space.
4. "The Nine Billion Names of God", Arthur C. Clarke (1953): Every time that I start to get too full of myself, I go back and read this story, and then I want to slink off and hide under my desk for a while. By which I mean, this might very well be my favorite short story ever, cross-genre. (Okay, so it's tied with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World". Apples and oranges!)
5. "Fondly Farenheit", Alfred Bester (1954): Anything I could possibly say about this story would ruin its impact for someone reading it for the first time. Suffice it to say that it's the one of the greatest examples of stylistic bravura, like, ever. Also, have I mentioned my unreliable-narrator kink?
6. "The Star", Arthur C. Clarke (1956): Choosing one Clarke: also pulling teeth. I think, however, that if anyone deserves two places on my list, it's Clarke. It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican.
7. "The Man Who Lost The Sea", Theodore Sturgeon (1959): I've never seen opinions more sharply divided on a particular story; half the people I know call this one garbage, and the other half call it a masterwork. Me, I get chills down my spine, every time.
8. "Harrison Bergeron", Kurt Vonnegut (1961): The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal. I have actually seen people argue that the society presented in this short story is a good thing. This scares me.
9. "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", Roger Zelazny (1963): There has never been a rose on Mars. When I grow up, I want to be a poet like Roger Zelazny.
10. "Melancholy Elephants", Spider Robinson (1982): Sometimes people ask me why I hate our copyright laws. "You're a writer. Aren't you scared of people stealing your work?" Well, no, I'm really not. And this story -- twenty-five years old, even, well before the DMCA and the latest-of-many copyright extension acts -- is a pretty good insight as to why. Fittingly, it is available online from the author himself.
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9 Comments
There Will Come Soft Rains really moves me emotionally. I love the way he integrates the poem into the story, as well; it adds so much to it.
For reasons I'm sure you will understand, the opening lines of "Fondly Fahrenheit" are much on my mind at the moment.
I'm thinking of writing them on a Post-it note and stapling it to my forehead.
I've always had the opposite problem. I can crank out short stories like there's no tomorrow, but ask me to turn them into something larger and I'll just stare at you. Yes, it's one page, but I've said what I've had to say. The story is done.
This has always frustrated my professors, teachers, and everyone else who has had their hands on my writing. When I write anything other than stream of consciousness commentary, I'm terrifyingly brief. If I'm writing a short story, it's not just short. I'm lucky if I get past a page and a half.
When I write, I paint a picture, but I paint just enough of a picture. I don't want the reader to see what I'm seeing; I want the reader to see what the words pull from within them.
I need to write again. I miss it and *somebody* keeps making me think about it.
So there I was commenting on your last post and recommending Bester and Zelazny, and I read this and here they are - teach me to read posts out of order! Good for you - and I need to find the Strugeon short you mention, but do you remember his _Godbody_? Wow, and not just because I was a 17-yr-old raging sack of hormones at the time. I still come back to that.
Hmm, one of the items on this list reminded me of a story that I read and forgot the name of (and author too). It was a good story and I have been searching for it for a while to re-read or something. It deals with a civilization in a system with two (or more?) suns, so that it is never dark. Except every 2,000 years or so. And it was getting close to the time when it would be dark, and the excitement was building. When it happens and they see the stars in the sky, they go kind of crazy, because they've always believed that they were alone and seeing that there are so many other worlds out them completely threw the civilization into the dark ages...
Have you read anything like that?
Constance: I think you mean "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov -- which is one of the ones it pained me to leave out of this list.
biguglymandoll: Lord, yes; Godbody is one of those ones that makes me miss the man so damn much.
Yeah, I'd have put in Nightfall, but I'm not sure which I'd have dropped. Certainly not either Elephant story. Or Mimsy.
Now I have to rummage even further into my book-boxes. Thank you.
I came to "Fondly Fahrenheit" before the concept of unreliable narration sank in. Confusion (she says, mildly) ensued.
Short stories remind me that science fiction is often a genre of ideas and arguing about them: I rarely put short stories on my "desert island" lists, but I have the best discussions about them.
I always end up coming back to Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars in SF. There's just something about Robinson's world and conceptualisation that I adore.
--Johnfolk