J-Sun
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- Oct 23, 2008
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I've read some posts recently denigrating short fiction and serendipity decreed that my copy of Nebula Award Stories 17 (back when they could still be counted on for something sometimes[1]) arrived a few days ago. It's edited by Joe Haldeman but, after his interesting "I'm back from Russia" intro, there is a beautiful brilliant Budrys piece (Budrys being a master of short and long forms) which serves as an ode to short fiction and a second introduction to the volume. I don't know if there's anything wrong with this but I was thinking everyone should be able to read it, so found an online copy. It's poorly typeset and has a couple of glitches but is quite readable (there's a stray '5' and a letter somewhere which can easily be ignored, an improperly broken line, and periods that should be commas or what have you, but the only really major thing is that "at lies" should read "as lief".)
I'll let the bulk of it speak for itself and just address some minor quibbles or things I stumbled over. If this has no interest, please skip it but I'd welcome any replies to the core of what Budrys is saying. Along with his main theme, obviously, I particularly liked the part where he says, "Therefore I am suspicious of the writer who has stopped doing short stories, and if you look around you will notice that very few of the writers who do more than entertain you as before have stopped doing short stories even when it makes no economic sense to continue." I feel like Robert A. Heinlein may have been foremost in his mind, but it applies to a lot. For myself, I've always been suspicious of authors who haven't done short fiction to start with and then also become suspicious when they quit. (Barring an exception each, Heinlein quit writing shorts c.1959-1962, the same time (1959) he quit writing juveniles and embarked (1961) on "Middle" and/or "Late" Heinlein. Even when they don't outright quit, you can see a shift of focus as, e.g., Zelazny and Varley lit up the firmament in the late 60s and mid/late 70s but then shifted to novels and became much less relevant and interesting to SF - and Varley almost disappeared entirely for awhile, including novels.)
Anyway - on to quibbles.
He says "as 'Don A. Stuart'" John Campbell never wrote a novel, which is true, but confusing. It's all on the "as" because, as Budrys even notes later, referring to The Moon Is Hell, Campbell wrote several novels as Campbell. But, yes, Don A. Stuart was a towering figure all by himself, sans novels.
When he says "[t]he novel of A Canticle for Leibowitz is not as important as the original short story," this is true in the sense in which he means it but sounds historically odd as he even notes later, referring to a similar example with Bradbury's "The Fireman"/Fahrenheit 451.
The reference to George R.R. Martin being a story writer whose reputation would stand without any novels may also strike some people as bizarre but the only reason I know directly who Martin is is due to his short work, some of which is among the best of all short work. He would indeed have been a significant figure (and more so to SF which bolsters some of Budrys' points[2]) if he had never written novels - or gigantic sprawling never-ending fantasy epics.
There is a small error or I'm misreading his meaning, when he says "the new Foundation novel is the first Foundation novel Asimov ever wrote: the longest previous piece was a two-part serial, and even so was unique for length," in that Asimov wrote two c.30-40K pieces in the original Foundation series but his central point that it was a series of shorter fiction is still absolutely correct.
Some might object to "still a large proportion of what we see...continues the historic tendency to assembled work," in 2015 vs. 1981 but it's not false even recently and now. Charles Stross' Accelerando (2005) originally appeared as a series of stories in Asimov's magazine and Brad R. Torgersen's brand new first "novel" (The Chaplain's War, 2014) is a combination and expansion of two shorter works ("The Chaplain's Assistant" and "The Chaplain's Legacy" from Analog, where I gather the expansion could be described as an interleaved third short work).
(Personal note: while I celebrate short fiction, I can't always celebrate every single example of it, of course.
If anyone's interested, they may know I've reviewed stuff on my own website before but my first review for TangentOnline is up now. There are a few pretty good pieces in it (including the two reprints, especially the Sawyer), even if I can't wax enthusiastic about the anthology overall.)
_____
[1] Aside from the great non-fiction, this includes William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" ("Neuromancer? We don't need no steenkin' Neuromancer."), Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game", John Varley's "The Pusher", and others by Kim Stanley Robinson, Gardner Dozois, etc.
[2] "[T]he conclusion one comes to is that SF readers, unlike the readers of general fiction or of any of the 'category' fictions of which SF is mistakenly adduced to be one, on some level recognize that the short-story form is the essential SF form."
I'll let the bulk of it speak for itself and just address some minor quibbles or things I stumbled over. If this has no interest, please skip it but I'd welcome any replies to the core of what Budrys is saying. Along with his main theme, obviously, I particularly liked the part where he says, "Therefore I am suspicious of the writer who has stopped doing short stories, and if you look around you will notice that very few of the writers who do more than entertain you as before have stopped doing short stories even when it makes no economic sense to continue." I feel like Robert A. Heinlein may have been foremost in his mind, but it applies to a lot. For myself, I've always been suspicious of authors who haven't done short fiction to start with and then also become suspicious when they quit. (Barring an exception each, Heinlein quit writing shorts c.1959-1962, the same time (1959) he quit writing juveniles and embarked (1961) on "Middle" and/or "Late" Heinlein. Even when they don't outright quit, you can see a shift of focus as, e.g., Zelazny and Varley lit up the firmament in the late 60s and mid/late 70s but then shifted to novels and became much less relevant and interesting to SF - and Varley almost disappeared entirely for awhile, including novels.)
Anyway - on to quibbles.
He says "as 'Don A. Stuart'" John Campbell never wrote a novel, which is true, but confusing. It's all on the "as" because, as Budrys even notes later, referring to The Moon Is Hell, Campbell wrote several novels as Campbell. But, yes, Don A. Stuart was a towering figure all by himself, sans novels.
When he says "[t]he novel of A Canticle for Leibowitz is not as important as the original short story," this is true in the sense in which he means it but sounds historically odd as he even notes later, referring to a similar example with Bradbury's "The Fireman"/Fahrenheit 451.
The reference to George R.R. Martin being a story writer whose reputation would stand without any novels may also strike some people as bizarre but the only reason I know directly who Martin is is due to his short work, some of which is among the best of all short work. He would indeed have been a significant figure (and more so to SF which bolsters some of Budrys' points[2]) if he had never written novels - or gigantic sprawling never-ending fantasy epics.
There is a small error or I'm misreading his meaning, when he says "the new Foundation novel is the first Foundation novel Asimov ever wrote: the longest previous piece was a two-part serial, and even so was unique for length," in that Asimov wrote two c.30-40K pieces in the original Foundation series but his central point that it was a series of shorter fiction is still absolutely correct.
Some might object to "still a large proportion of what we see...continues the historic tendency to assembled work," in 2015 vs. 1981 but it's not false even recently and now. Charles Stross' Accelerando (2005) originally appeared as a series of stories in Asimov's magazine and Brad R. Torgersen's brand new first "novel" (The Chaplain's War, 2014) is a combination and expansion of two shorter works ("The Chaplain's Assistant" and "The Chaplain's Legacy" from Analog, where I gather the expansion could be described as an interleaved third short work).
(Personal note: while I celebrate short fiction, I can't always celebrate every single example of it, of course.
If anyone's interested, they may know I've reviewed stuff on my own website before but my first review for TangentOnline is up now. There are a few pretty good pieces in it (including the two reprints, especially the Sawyer), even if I can't wax enthusiastic about the anthology overall.)_____
[1] Aside from the great non-fiction, this includes William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" ("Neuromancer? We don't need no steenkin' Neuromancer."), Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game", John Varley's "The Pusher", and others by Kim Stanley Robinson, Gardner Dozois, etc.
[2] "[T]he conclusion one comes to is that SF readers, unlike the readers of general fiction or of any of the 'category' fictions of which SF is mistakenly adduced to be one, on some level recognize that the short-story form is the essential SF form."
