Science Fiction Short Story Collections
Best Science Fiction short story collections from single authors.
For anthologies (a collection of short stories by a variety of authors), check out this list:
Best Science Fiction Anthologies
For anthologies (a collection of short stories by a variety of authors), check out this list:
Best Science Fiction Anthologies
Nick
486 books
25 friends
25 friends
Susanna - Censored by GoodReads
3288 books
871 friends
871 friends
Buzz H.
1541 books
39 friends
39 friends
Raymond
32 books
108 friends
108 friends
Sorin
24 books
19 friends
19 friends
Gregory
372 books
334 friends
334 friends
Ryanauthor
3 books
0 friends
0 friends
Ky
519 books
623 friends
623 friends
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Comments Showing 1-6 of 6 (6 new)
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Dan
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Feb 20, 2021 07:55PM

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Agreed! I originally created this list in the spirit of your definition. I'll make the definition in the description more clear and link to a similar list for anthologies. Do you know of one (to save me some searching)?
Also, I'll work on cleaning this list up, but it might take some time.

An SF anthology to my mind is little different than an SF magazine, most any SF magazine. The only two differences I can think of is that book SF anthologies have 1) a paperback cover or a hardback cover rather than just a paper magazine cover, and 2) most anthologies are organized on the basis of a theme that's slightly more specific than magazines. For example, Orbit 8 has the best stories of a particular year an editor could get permission to publish. An issue of Astounding just has some hard SF stories (in general). There have been hundreds probably thousands of SF magazine issues to have come out. Therefore, listing SF anthologies, if one includes individual magazine issues, is not much different than trying to list SF novels. The list of anthologies (that included magazine issues) would be about equally long.
Your list here, which is designed to list only SF short story collections, has more value in my opinion because it's drawing from a shorter list of potential candidates. Even then there are many SF short story collections. I don't know if a comprehensive list of them has ever been attempted, but I guarantee it would be woefully incomplete if so.
For example, take one SF author, Ben Bova. You can go to isfdb.org and pull up his page: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?184 There, you will observe he has thirteen short story collections. I recently read one of them, Challenges, which was quite good actually.
Anyhow, you can do this for hundreds of authors, and if you do you will soon have thousands of short story collections. Most of their collections will contain short stories the author previously published in SF magazines, or in anthologies if more recent, a distinction I don't make. Some authors include a few new stories in their collection. Most just reprint already published ones.

As an indie science fiction author, I think that short stories will always be a niche market. I would like to offer up my book The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories for consideration. If anyone would like to receive a free review copy, let me know.
I would love to be in the company of these other fine writers.

What should not be on this list are anthologies, collections of short stories by a bunch of different authors, like #8: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Anthology. It's right there in the title. But it probably asks too much to expect cyberpunk enthusiasts to understand such distinctions, or any others for that matter.
#18, Borders of Infinity, is an omnibus, a collection of novels, which also is NOT a short story collection.
I could go on, but I'd rather continue to snicker privately. Over ninety percent of these listed books are actual SSCs, some really great ones by the looks of them. So the list serves its function. People should just beware that some of the listed books don't belong and to do their own research before acting on the listed book if it's truly a SSC they want to consider.
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