Short Fiction : Do we need it?

My brother in Christ Paul Raven has produced THIS rather smashing post about the dwindling fortunes of short fiction magazines.  He's reacting to THIS post by Doug Cohen.  Paul's in an interesting position because while he's long been an eloquent mouth-piece for the cause of digitising genre magazines, he's also a member of the editorial staff for one of the oldest and best known dead tree SF publications there is, to whit, Interzone.  As a result, Paul hints at digitisation but then agrees that we should all subscribe to a short fiction publication if we can afford to.

I'm not so sure.

A few weeks ago I had a very enjoyable lunch with two notable illuminati of the British SF publishing scene and in and around a number of interesting points of discussion, what came up was the fact that they didn't really have time to sift through short fiction magazines looking for the "Next Big Thing".  I suspect that this is one of the unfortunate side-effects of the publishing industry having been squeezed and squeezed again with every new generation.  A while back, when my lack of interest in my PhD began to bite, I decided to poke my nose into the possibility of a job in publishing.  Through an author my girlfriend at the time knew, I was able to meet with a quite well known publicist who pointed me towards Jason Epstein's Book Business: Publishing, Past, Present and Future.  Epstein's book is fascinating because it talks of a time when publishers were left largely to their own devices, much like tenured academics.  They'd run their own lists and work with authors and if they made some money at the end of the day then everyone went home happy.  However, since Epstein's day the publishing business has become more and more "professionalised" and nowadays it's not the intellectual's hide-out it maybe once was.  If Epstein's account is correct then you can bet that the same process has gone on in genre publishing.

This explains why so many established authors now have free hands leading to self-indulgent page bloat and why there's little talent spotting going on in short fiction magazines.

In short, SF short fiction mags are not the shop windows for young talent that they once were.  You can produce great short story after great short story and never get a book deal unless you're a) lucky or b) have what they TV show The Wire calls a "rabbi", someone with a bit of influence to recommend you and look out for you.

I think short fiction's real purpose is two-fold.

Firstly, short fiction writing is a scene in an of itself.  People trying to get published talk to each other and help each other out by critiquing stories.  They also argue and damn each other to hell in a way consistent with every other scene or sub-culture on the internet.  I suspect that people interested in writing short fiction make up the backbone of any short fiction magazine's subscriber base.  They provide a focus for their activities and give validation for skill within than community.  This is a similar issue to the fact that most critical reviews are read by people who themselves write critical reviews.

Secondly, getting into writing short fiction is a popular way of "getting into" writing publishable novels.  While writing a great short story might not guarantee you a book deal, having your story praised to heaven and back by everyone is a good way of making you feel "ready" to go out and write that novel you've been working on.  After all... you're a feted short fiction writer and lots of people started out that way, right?

Like most genre fans these days, I'm not hugely interested in short fiction.  I don't particularly like long books either but I think that any idea worth developing is worth developing in some depth.  On a purely shallow level, if short fiction magazines were to be wiped from the Earth, I don't think my enjoyment of genre would be hugely curtailed.  However, I try not to be the shallow type so I think the question one needs to ask oneself when considering Doug and Paul's advice is, what are short fiction SF magazines actually for if they're not shop-windows for people who go on to write novels?

Comments

[Ian Sales]

I'm not sure I agree with this. There are many genre authors who have had novels published... but never sold a short story. There are also authors who have published (almost) as many collections as they have novels - Michael Swanwick, Lucius Shepard, Ian Watson, for example.

Writing successful short fiction doesn't necessarily mean you're "ready" to write a novel, but published short stories are exposure - and so useful when it comes time to try and sell that novel...

[Patrick H]

Who gives a shit if the great short story writer doesn't write a great novel? Great writers can do more in short space than most writers can in a 17-volume series - eg, Bruce Sterling, Ted Chiang, Steve Aylett, Greg Egan, Jeff Van Demeer.

It's an end to itself, and just because it doesn't generate a truck load of revenue for global conglomerates is no reason to dismiss it (I would say it's a reason to embrace it). Short-stories are still more important to the scene - and the development of the genre - than, say, online review sites.

Patrick H

[Paul Raven]

Once again, I'm going to drag up my music industry comparison. The short story markets are like the toilet circuit, where young acts who don't make mainstream commercial product can learn the craft, become part of the scene, and attract the attention of the core alternative audience; all necessary for an artist who isn't thrust into the limelight by the corporate suits. Which is why I think it would be a terrible thing for the market to die off, just as its sad to see the 'toilet circuit' venues being closed down due to noise complaints, or being snapped up by subsidiaries of ClearChannel. The scene is hugely important, but it needs to look at *why* the decline is happening.

[Patrick H]

It never recovered from the death of pulp. It coasted by on inertia and nostalgia for a generation, but that is now pretty much all used up. The short-story (in whatever genre) simply isn't a "pop" form anymore. It's an academic/literary form and the audience is accordingly very small.

Patrick H

[MattD]

And of course what publishing novels is actually for is pre-release marketing and focus-group testing of stories before the writer can sell them on to Hollywood... ;)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Paul - That's the thing though. I don't think that anyone is getting "signed" off the back of short fiction any more. I get the impression that these days it's more about agents and recommendations from other authors.

I think that if the "core audience" for short fiction isn't big enough to healthily sustain a magazine then it's unlikely to matter to publishers all that much.

Patrick - Yes, I suspect you're probably right. It's a literary form of its own right. It's essentially parasitical on the more populist genre novel business but it's really its own medium with its own scene.

[A.R.Yngve]

Good question!

Here's another good question:
Big Brother (and reviews of Big Brother, incidentally) -- do we need it?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Heh... meeeow! You bitch!

Fair point. I've shut up about Big Brother now anyway.

[Patrick H]

>>> I don't think that anyone is getting "signed" off the back of short fiction any more. I get the impression that these days it's more about agents and recommendations from other authors.

I know that Lavie Tidhar has been approached by agents and publishers interested in looking at a novel manuscript based entirely on his short fiction output of the last couple of years. (It's been a problem for him as he has not had a manuscript to show until recently.) I'm also surprised you haven't read the accounts of agents and publishers hovering around Ted Chiang every time he turns up at a con hoping that they'll be the ones that sign him.

There is a problem in attributing the "sell" for authors with long histories of short fiction (eg, and Neal Asher and Charlie Stross were stalwarts of the short-fiction scene ofor a decade or more before becoming novellists - is this evidence for or against your position?) but I think it's clear that exposure in the "scene" is very important when trying to get somewhere with a novel. At the very least, a letter of enquiry that starts "I won the short story Hugo last year..." is likely to open more doors than one that starts "I am another unpublished dumbfuck please throw me a cookie."

You are also ignoring (or ignorant of) its importance as a venue to learn your craft and develop your ideas. Reynold's conjoiner universe stuff and Peter F Hamilton's Greg Mandel books were both based on early work published in Interzone and Asimovs. Without the short story markets, where would that development have occurred?

I think you are pretty much 100% wrong on this one in just about every regard, and display a startling ignorance of the recent history of the genre. It's an accident of history that SF has a solid fan base with a nostalgic longing for the days of the pulps - even crime appears to have shaken that off - but short form SF and fantasy is no more pointless than mainstream writers finding early exposure in Granta or anthologies from Serpents Tail.

Patrick H