stop. start. stutter.

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.

There are so many attempts out there to pick the "best" science fiction, to classify and identify those books that define the genre (and all its subgenres). This is not one of those lists.

This is a list of ten science fiction books I've re-read, over and over and over again. They're not necessarily the classics, or my pick of the "best", or the ones that have most heavily influenced me, or even my favorites. (All of which may be future list-subjects.) These are the ones where my copies are falling apart, held together at the seams; the ones where I keep having to pick up new copies at the bookstore or the used bookstore because I passed my copy off to someone who needed to read them.

In order of publication, a list of ten sf books I pick up when I need an old familiar friend:

1. Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert Heinlein (1961): I know so many people for whom the statement "this book changed my life" wouldn't be an exaggeration, and I'm no different. I read this every year; every year, it says something different to me about who we are and what we owe each other.

2. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes (1966): Heartbreaking in its simplicity and in what it has to say about the human mind and how it defines (and doesn't define) the individual. Whether I prefer the novella or the novel depends on whim at any given time, but either one scratches my intellectual love for cognitive science and reaches down into the spot of my subconscious that's perpetually chewing over the problem of whether we define our intellect or our intellect defines us.

3. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein (1966): On the one hand, it's cheating to include two Heinlein; on the other, holding it to just two is agony. If Stranger got me thinking about how to define our obligations to each other individually, this one got me thinking about how to define our obligations to each other collectively and societally. I don't agree with all of Heinlein's politics -- far from it -- but damn does he ever make me think. (Can I also include Starship Troopers as an honorable mention for the same reason?)

4. Don't Bite The Sun, Tanith Lee (1976): It's kind of interesting to see how many of my old friends are about identity and maintaining your sense-of-self in the face of sense-of-society, but this is one of the masterworks on that theme.

5. Mindkiller, Spider Robinson (1982): It brings together two of my favorite questions: how much of who you are is defined and shaped by what you remember? What do you owe yourself, and what do you owe your society? Spider returns to these over and over again, and this one's a beauty. I still remember the gut-punch of reading this for the first time and stumbling upon one of the greatest lines ever written: "God is an iron. If someone who commits felony is a felon, and someone who commits gluttony is a glutton, then God is an iron. Either that, or He's the damn dumbest designer who ever lived."

6. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card (1985): I have a lot of problems with this book, which I may go into someday, but I keep coming back to wrestle with it anyway, for what it says about desensitization and war and learning how to think in a particular fashion: the enemy's gate is down.

7. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (1992): Oh, come on, it's a book about neurolinguistic hacking, how can you not love it? But seriously, this is a book that could only have been written by someone who grew up loving science fiction intensely and passionately and wholeheartedly. It is a book for geeks and nerds, and as I am both, I love it to the bottom of my geeky nerdy heart. (Sarah and I have adopted "The Mews at Windsor Heights" as a shorthand for all the Burbclaves we keep driving past, of course.)

8. Beggars In Spain, Nancy Kress (1993): And we're back to my themes again, framed and re-framed in a different fashion and a different manifestation. Identity, duty, and responsibility-to-others, all wrapped up in a fascinating premise with stellar sociological worldbuilding. (The novella's cleaner and tighter, both thematically and technically, but I have a soft spot for the novel, too.)

9. Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (1993): I don't often turn to the dystopias for my comfort reading, but God, this one is stunning, not only for the all-too-plausible world Butler builds us but for the way there might not be any easy answers and there might not be neat solutions, but there is hope. The characters are real and flawed and achingly human, and Butler does an amazing job of showing us things about our society from what she extrapolates for a future.

10. Passage, Connie Willis (2001): I will confess that I find this book disturbing and disquieting in a way I can't exactly put my finger on, but again, I keep coming back to it. Sometimes you just need to be creeped out a bit, you know? It's about death, and belief, and identity (again) and struggling to make connections and honor them.