50 authors, 50 science fiction stories shorter than novels
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bitmason.blogspot.com
Another thing I'm surprised to not see on the list is Chinese short-story sci-fi, there's been a lot of great stuff coming out of the country in recent years much of it translated by Ken Liu.
Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang is great and free to read[1], there's The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin whose Three Body books got a lot of attention, and there's another collection called Invisible Planets, which has a few good stories by Chen Qiufan. He's also written a very good novel called Waste Tide.
The affect may be touching but the social and economic system it describes makes no sense on any level. If you’re going to make something so blithering your ridiculous at least make it magical realism so it’s obvious nothing is supposed to make sense, just happen.
Are the other stories translated by Liu any better do you think? I want to give Chinese sci-fi an honest try but my attempt with Three Body Problem wasn't great.
one thing i am wondering is if having different translators for the books is noticeable in any way
An engaging novella by a now-dead luminary is The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe, 1972. It’s a book of three short stories, written in three different styles, all interrelated and containing a central mystery.
Wolfe is well-known for hiding puzzles in his books that deepen your understanding and appreciation of his stories without detracting at all from a more casual reading. He’s my favorite author, and I’ll freely admit that he’s hit-or-miss sometimes. His best works, this one included, are in worlds (usually some iteration of our own) where long-established systems are in a state of decay. More like an ill-maintained shed that’s still used while being slowly pulled apart by a beautiful trumpet vine than some catastrophic dystopia, and not without hope. He also has a knack for making sci-fi look like fantasy until you pay closer attention that I really like.
If you’re someone who likes to re-read your books, check him out. I’m still holding out for Book of the Long Sun to be made into a miniseries; it’s one of the reasons I bring him up so often. Someday, the right set of eyes may read this =)
And I’ve just learned that he wrote Cloud Atlas, a film that I started watching in the wrong headspace so didn’t get far, but I remember being intrigued by the synopsis I read beforehand. Ghostwritten is where to start, yes? Or are there short stories that I should seek out first?
Your timing is perfect: I’m waiting for 3 (!) unfinished series to release their next volumes, so a writer who will keep me busy for a month or two is most welcome!
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For (in)completeness’ sake, because I can’t help sharing my excitement about these, even though they are strictly off topic at this point and this post will be too damn long, the unfinished series I’m waiting for are:
NK Jemisin (an author in OP’s list) - Great Cities series (One book complete). What if cities can become (once they grow complex enough) living beings? What if there are extra-dimensional forces arrayed against them, and the cities raise humans as avatars to help themselves? Only one book is finished, and it’s a good one. Self-aware Lovecraft for the modern world, focused on NYC. Her complete Broken Earth trilogy is also good.
Robert Jackson Bennett - The Founders Trilogy (two books complete). In this world, “scribing” is a way to make physical objects behave as if their physical constants were altered, much like variables in programming. A thief who can “see” these scribings gets in touch with a “talking” key who has a much greater understanding of them. But what kind of graybeard made the key ages ago? What’s their long game? Why can the thief even see this stuff? Being a programmer probably adds a lot to this one, but it’s not a requirement. Reminds me some of Stephenson’s wit with a lot less of his expository narrative (no slight there—he’s easily in my top 5, and some narrative asides are some of his best bits.)
Peter Newman - The Deathless (Two books complete). This one really surprised me. Royals with flying armor live in floating castles and cultivate “heirs” who will host their consciousnesses when they die, while commoners scrabble near The Wild that grows just outside the influence of the royals’ magical roads. I‘m sorry to say that I read a preview out of incredulity, with the intent of hating on the premise. Turns out it intrigued me enough to buy the first book, and then I was hooked because the world and its inhabitants are super interesting. “Don’t judge a book by its synopsis,” etc.
Bonus, ‘cause why not: James A. Corey - The Expanse. Read your own summary for this one =)
Personally I found these more enjoyable than Cloud Atlas, which is good and a must-read nonetheless, but relies a lot on its narrative structure for its effect (this is not a negative, but the Matryoshka doll structure of the book does define it rather strongly).
225 examples : https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/7967.Best_Science_Fictio...
'Escape Pod' reads new short SF, now up to its 740s; it was a 2020 Hugo finalist : https://escapepod.org/
In general, I'd recommend to not stick to the oldies. Read a bit of the classics and then venture into the modern stuff, there's a lot to like there. Martha Wells, Matt Wallace, T. Kingfisher, K.B. Wagers, to name a few.
Indeed.
"The Machine Stops" is a must-read. It's over a century old and is not dated.
I've always liked "With the Night Mail". Kipling wrote two SF stories, and this is one of them.
"A Logic Named Joe" - the Internet and Google, from 1946.
"Ender's Game", the short story, was of course expanded into a series of books and a movie. The original short story is better.
That's also true of "Farewell to the Master", not on the list. That's the basis for "The Day the Earth Stood Still". The original short story is very rarely seen. Nor is the ending well known. It should be. Wikipedia summarizes it.
Not a lot of people know, perhaps, that Gene Wolfe was a fantastic short story writer. Among my favourites are "Hero as Werewolf" and "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" [1], the latter a pitch-perfect analysis of why we need to read stories.
R. A. Lafferty is also notably absent. If he needs to be known for just one short story, it's "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" [2]. Probably the funniest time-travel story ever written.
Of his novels, I always recommend The Fifth Head of Cerberus as a starting point. It's relatively short (it was expanded from a short story), and it marks the point when Wolfe's fiction matured. It's as deep as anything else he has written. If you end up liking it, you will almost certainly love The Book of the New Sun, his masterpiece.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Doctor_Death_a...
* The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories
* The Death of Dr. Island
* The Doctor of Death Island
An excellent story regardless. Just throwing that in the ring.
Also, there are some gems in Fred Saberhagen Bereserkers series.
Absolutely loved Chiang's short story collection "Exhalation". I didn't quite see SF as essential reading before reading this book.
Flowers For Algernon never interested me much, but learning now that it was originally a short story, I’ll put it on my list.
Here is a neat pdf of Asimov’s The Last Question, for those who are into that sort of thing: https://docdro.id/GQfVN6o
The obvious miss is John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (1938), which is the inspiration for the movie The Thing.
[0]: https://blackwells.co.uk/jacket/l/9780192831675.jpg [1]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d8/b5/d7/d8b5d7aa47735f7a0a51...
They mostly seem to be free to read directly from the websites of their online magazines, like http://www.tor.com, http://strangehorizons.com, http://apex-magazine.com, http://uncannymagazine.com, http://clarkesworldmagazine.com.
So you would read them on your tablet or notebook? How would you read them on e.g. the Kindle? Print as PDF, and copy the PDF to the Kindle? Or some better way?
Even really old stuff is not infrequently still in print. Somebody else mentioned Lem, the English translations of Lem's short fiction are generally in print, though it can be a struggle to find things like Hospital of the Transfiguration that are a bit niche (and not Science Fiction) or his literary criticism (Lem thought most SF in his day was crap, I am tempted to agree)
You will struggle to buy individual stories because that's not really a thing. Some professional writers only write shorts to introduce an idea or setting before novel-length publication e.g. Egan gives away shorts about the Amalgam, the setting for his novel Incandescence, and the intro to some of his novels works as a short (e.g. "Orphanogensis" is actually the start of a novel, but it's also a perfectly functional short story about "orphans", people created randomly in a society where people are just software...). So for those the author believes they are essentially advertising the larger product with a free story.
I got introduced to Bujold's Vorkosigan series via the short story "The Borders of Infinity" which is (amongst plenty of other anthologies and a collection of three Vorkosigan shorts confusingly called Borders of Infinity itself) included in Infinite Stars (ed. Bryan Thomas Schmidt). Getting most of the novels was easy enough, but hunting down the remaining short stories meant foraging for second-hand out-of-print anthologies.
For example, I see that Asimov's 'The Last Question' is in a giant collection called 'The World Turned Upside Down' which can be found on Amazon for 6$.
http://www.starshipsofa.com/ https://antisf.com/ http://escapepod.org/
Another masterful writer of surreal science fiction stories was R. A. Lafferty https://www.amazon.com/Best-R-Lafferty/dp/1473213444/
On that note, kinda sad that they chose "True Names" over "Fast Times at Fairmont High" for Vinge's entry. Though I haven't read the former, the latter reads like TN's description, except for phenomena that haven't fully unfurled their existence and possibility yet. AR glasses, anyone?
https://www.scribd.com/document/139440129/Fast-Times-at-Fair...
ADDED: It's also very much a story about people, not just technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
Smart contact lenses, books digitization, rejuvenation, etc.
I recommend it as much as possible, and one of my pet hopes is that it ends up getting a Ghibli-style film adaptation.
The article doesn't really do it justice. The kid in the story has God powers and can do whatever he wants, so he creates Cronenberg creatures and wantonly kills people. All of the adults have to agree that it's a good thing, otherwise he gets irritated and disappears them. So you get scenes like where a wife has to emphatically agree that it was a good thing her husband was killed.
The whole thing was like a scary David Lynch scene.
This must be an example of Sturgeon's Law.
I think I'll catch some flack for saying this, but skimming I'm only seeing 14% of the authors are female. I'm sure there are many reasons why one might say the proportion of female to male SF writers is not the same as the proportion of male to female in society at large, but it would have been nice to see more female representation on the list.
https://www.tor.com/2015/04/29/ambiguity-machines-an-examina...
Salto Mortal, by Nick T. Chan http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/salto-mortal/
Terry Bisson - They're Made out of Meat https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
Andy Weir - The Egg http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
It two futures based around easy industrial production/ai and feels closer to reality then it did a few years ago.
Here is the link for anyone interested: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
One typo: "Speaker of the Dead" should be "Speaker for the Dead".
I’m surprised to see it’s not mentioned yet! Martha Wells’ Murderbot series is really fun reading.
There's a lot of interesting short alt-history, the nice thing about the genre for shorts is that the reader needs little introduction to the setting - it's our world, except a little different, and discovering how it's different is often the core of the story.
A great many of the famous examples involve Nazis winning World War II, though e.g. Weinachtsabend by Keith Roberts puts an very interesting spin on that (Britain agrees terms with Germany and the war is over quickly, but decades later things aren't so simple) but much less obviously how about Howard Waldrop's "Custer's Last Jump" in which the Battle of the Little Bighorn happens in an alternate 19th century America that has powered flight...
But overall he's a master of the alt-history genre and worth the attention of reading his books. Guns of the South: General Lee on the cover holding an AK-47. He's a historian and did original primary research for it, but, 'nuff said. Worldwar In the Balance: Aliens attack in 1941, during fierce WWII fighting. Well fleshed out.
The only drawback is that as a non-native English speaker, the "pirate english" language at the beginning made it very hard for me to understand, so it is a story that is difficult to recommend to my friends.