Some of my earliest memories are of speculative fiction. Whether it was Star Trek, The Wizard of Oz, or Space Quest, I was surrounded by, and surrounded myself in, genre fiction.
The art of the short story really came to my attention as an adolescent at the local library. I borrowed a cassette tape with short stories by Ray Bradbury, which was probably a part of the Bradbury 13 series. “Dark They Were, and Golden-eyed” and “The Veldt” are the stories I remember from the collection, probably because it was a 60-minute tape with a story on each side, but also because the stories were imaginative, inventive, and revolutionary for my young mind. These stories may have just been 30 minutes of listening, but they contained volumes. There were worlds to explore here and implications to unravel.
My first experience with one of the major periodicals was as a teenager, probably with an issue of Analog or Asimov’s. Not every story was pure gold, but that didn’t sway my desire to read more. There’s a certain element of discovery: When you find a story you really love, you learn something about yourself. That’s what I’ve felt repeatedly over the years, whether it’s reading an anthology from the last year, a new issue of a magazine, or stumbling on some short fiction online.
I reached a point in the last two years in which I wanted to be more serious about my short fiction reading. I’d been going through some classic publications, like If and Galaxy, and I started a podcast in which I read stories that are in the public domain. There are a lot of hidden gems, and the idea that they might otherwise be lost to time gave me some inspiration. I started Vintage Sci-Fi Shorts to highlight those stories. Along the way, I discovered that an old adage I’d been constantly told — that women simply didn’t write much science fiction until the ‘70s or ‘80s" — was demonstrably untrue. I stumbled across writers like Zenna Henderson, Lyn Venable, and Mari Wolf, whose science fiction captured me in a way I hadn’t expected.
This newsletter, or at least the germ of the idea, follows from that. My intention is to share some of the stories I’ve read over the last month, and that’s where we’ll start. Where we’ll end up remains to be seen.
My top ten, May 2022
Sarah Pinsker, “Wind Will Rove” — featured in Sarah Pinsker’s first short story collection, Sooner or Later, Everything Falls Into the Sea (2016)
Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling” (2013) — featured in Ted Chiang’s second short story collection, Exhalation
James Tiptree, Jr., “The Screwfly Solution” (1977) [listen]
S. B. Divya, “Two Hands Wrapped in Gold” (2022) — Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2022 [read]
C. L. Clark, “Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being An Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home” (2022) — Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2022
Fonda Lee, “The Eternal Cocktail Party of the Damned” (2022) [read the full story for free] — Uncanny Magazine,
William Gibson, “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981) — featured in Burning Chrome
Mel Kassel, “The Crawfather” (2020) — featured in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021
Maurice Broaddus and Rianna Butcher, “Spirit Folks” — Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2022 [read]
John Wiswell, “The Coward Who Stole God’s Name” — Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2022 [read]
Quotable
It’s been argued that “the single” (a one-cut vinyl recording in either 78 or 45 rpm format) was the medium that defined the most perfect expressions of rock: that the single is in fact music’s optimal form. The same has sometimes been said of short story and science fiction. In the case of rock, I’m inclined to suspect nostalgia for a dead media platform. In the case of science fiction, I think there may be something to it. It requires a very peculiar sort of literary musculature to write a very short piece of science fiction that really works.
— William Gibson, “Source Code: an introduction” (Burning Chrome)
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading this month, or if you found any value in this newsletter. Share it with friends if you’re so inclined. You can find more from me at Don’t Eat the Meeples, a board game newsletter that’s published currently about once a month.