Ask HN: Favorite Short Fiction? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Favorite Short Fiction?

17 pointswebmaven28 comments

Short stories (and under-100-word short-shorts) are less popular these days (and I understand why, I love immersion in doorstop novel series too), but I appreciate the craft that goes into writing them much as I appreciate the aesthetics of succinct code.

Does short fiction scratch the same itch for you?

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I love SciFi so here are my top 5 around 10,000 words or less.

1) The Machine Stops - Nothing beats it

2) The Futurological Congress - Best short SciFi novel

3) The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag - Freaking hilarious

4) Perfect Day for Bananafish - Not sci fi but amazing!

5) Blue Screen: How Peter Gustafson Defragmented the World - I wrote a short SciFi novel and my mom tells me its great :)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Machine-Stops-M-Forster/dp/1609420667

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Futurological-Congress-Memoirs-Ijon-T...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Unpleasant-Profession-Jonathan-Hoag-e...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Stories-J-D-Salinger/dp/03167695...

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Screen-Peter-Gustafson-Defragmen...

I used to love reading the Interzone compilations. I guess some are available online in various places. (One of the stories keeps getting mentioned on HN, and it's pretty good. "Blit": http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm )

I also used to enjoy lots of the stories from One Story which was a monthly single short story on Amazon Kindle. I found Caitlin Horrocks' "This is not your city" which is a great compilation.

Bruce Stirling has consistently good short fiction.

For science fiction you sometimes get great one off compilations. "Mirrorshades" is excellent; "Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet" has some great stories.

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut will always have a place in my heart. I also quite liked a Ray Bradbury short story that I believe was called "The Homecoming". However I had to look it up. I think that was it.

I used to love short stories, but I don't see as much of them anymore. I think that some of that has been swallowed by the more serial novellas that I see on platforms like kindle unlimited. I've long felt that this is incentivized by the ways that the platform pays writers (percentage of the book read). It encourages writers to write shorter gripping stories. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I've been going through quite a bit of great pulp fiction recently, but it is a bit of a departure from the more traditional novel or short story.

Absolutely. I love most Hemingway. "Men Without Women" being my favorite collection. "Banal Story" and "Today is Friday" both very short. And is "A Very Short Story" from another collection is, as the title suggests, very short.

J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" from "Nine Stories" is a good, but dark, introduction to the Glass family, who are the subject of many of his stories.

And a random one I cherish: "Boys" by Rick Moody (https://barringerlit.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/6/13263242/boy...)

I made a flippant comment during book club about how short stories are nothing compared to novels. A friend suggested I check out Raymond Carver which blew my mind.

His prose is one of a kind and his stories usually leave me floored.

I recommend the collection, "What we talk about when we talk about love" (the title of one story) -- which, by the way, is the play central to the (excellent) movie Birdman.

Man, typing this got me excited. Think I'm gonna pour a glass of Teacher's and see if anyone wants to dance.

Issac Asimov - The Last Question

David Foster Wallace - Incarnations of Burned Children

Daniil Kharms, early Soviet-era absurdist, avant-garde writer and poet. When I was in my early 20s, he had a huge influence on me.

A random piece (yes, many, or even most, are like that):

---

Blue Notebook #10

Once there lived a red-haired man who lacked eyes and ears.

He was also lacking all hair, so he was called red-haired only with a large degree of generalization.

He couldn't speak, as he was lacking a mouth. The same with his nose.

Even arms and legs, he just didn't have any. Nor stomach, nor backside, nor spine. And no intestine. He didn't have anything! Therefore it is totally unclear who is being discussed.

In fact, let's not talk about him anymore.

---

More examples:

http://www.scn.org/realpoetik/Daniil-Kharms03.htm

http://polyhymnion.org/lit/harms/

And his Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniil_Kharms

Big fan of short fiction here. I tend towards silver age sci-fi and fantasy, but I also dig a good whodunit. I think the main reason why we see less of them these days is because of the lack of popular serial format magazines.

Some favorites that come to mind at the moment:

"Goodnight Mr. James" in 'All the traps of Earth' by Clifford Simak

"Neutron Star" and "What good is a glass dagger?" by Larry Niven

"Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn" by various authors

The Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series by Fritz Leiber (successive short stories)

"If all men were brothers, would you let one marry your sister?" and "The world well lost" by Ted Sturgeon

"The Tactful Saboteur" by Frank Herbert

"The Gold at the end of the Starbow" and "The Engineer" by Frederick Pohl

It seems to me that the best aspect of a short story is that the story can present an idea or twist without long characterization and world building, so that you get the idea in a purer form.

Everyone should read Saki's The Open Window[0].

[0] http://englischlehrer.de/texts/openwindow.php

Never thought I'd see Saki mentioned on HN!

Yes. I don't understand why short fiction isn't more popular these days when many of us have shortened attention spans.

I think "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" by Hemingway should be mandatory reading in high school.

Classic short story I was introduced to in high school:

The Lottery https://fullreads.com/literature/the-lottery/

My favorite of all time is The Most Dangerous Game. I just really enjoyed it as a kid, and continue to think about it 25 years later.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna is also a great one.

Not sure what question people are answering here...

At ~65,000 words, or 225 pages how are these "short". I think of "short" as finish in one or two sittings. I read slow as hell but even for a speed reader this is not a "short" story.

If you search "short story" or "short stories" you get quite a lot of compilations and old periodicals on http://gutenberg.org/

My vote goes to short stories by Somerset Maugham. The subtle humour in the stories are a delight to read. He also captures the human nature with honesty and sympathy.

Isaac Asimov – The Machine That Won the War

Only because it paints such a perfect picture of the inanity of so much of the work that we do in the software engineering profession.

My favorites:

Larry Niven - The Jigsaw Man

Larry Niven - The Fourth Profession

Issac Asimov - The Last Question

Don't know if these count, but I'm a big fan of the BOFH series.

I believe most of them are available online on The Register now.

Also: http://bofh.bjash.com/

Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. I didn’t like all of his short stories, but a few in this book were really great.

> under-100-word short-shorts

They call that "flash fiction" these days.

Here it is:

I won the lottery, allowing me to quit my job.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller is my favorite sci-fi short story I’ve read in a long time. It follows an order of Catholic monks in the American southwest many years after a nuclear holocaust. I won’t say more than that.

It was originally just 1 story, Fiat Homo, and then was expanded into a novel. Fiat Homo is freely available in audio form from the BBC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03w355l/episodes/guide

320 pages (almost 100,000 words) is short? I need to re-calibrate. I know I'm a slow reader but anything that I can't finish in a day (about 10,000 words) is "long" for me.

I agree, one of my ALL TIME favorite books but the second half took me weeks to get through.

320 pages would not be short fiction. Short fiction is going to be a novella or a short story. Novellas tend to cap out around 150 pages depending on the definition, and many definitions are much shorter (50-100 pages).

Just the first story, Fiat Homo! If anyone wants to stop there I won’t judge

death of ivan ilyich by tolstoy

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