Speculative Short Fiction Deserves Love discussion
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Sarah
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May 30, 2014 03:19PM
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I'm in the middle of "Sword and Mythos" right now. (Pretty much literally the middle. I still have yet to read about 50% of the stories.) It's very good! I am especially enchanted with Paul Jessup's "Sun Sorrow", which is beautiful and creepy in a very dreamlike way.
I feel like I have read or sampled basically all the anthos that have come out this year, but I wanted to talk Sword & Mythos since Ada brought it up...I'm having a hell of a time with S&M (...), and I think it's because I don't know my Mythos very well. I've asked my partner, who knows Lovecraft very well, to read it with me do he can decode the stories for me, but he's a slow reader. I've read the first 5 stories, and of them the only one I really understood was “The Wood of Ephraim” by Edward M. Erdelac. (Oh, and “Jon Carver of Barzoon, You Misunderstood” which was great.) "Sun Sorrow" was BAFFLING to me. I don't know if this is because I lack background knowledge or if the story just isn't that effective. Ideas? So far, I'm thinking I might blog about it as a dialogue between the Sword (me) and the Mythos (partner)...
Mod
- y'all can do that too with the 'add book/author' feature above the dialogue box.
Mod
I think I know the problem you might be having with "Sun Sorrow"; it's hard to know what is actually going on, or whether anything has been resolved, or even in some cases what order the events happened in.I usually get bored / lose interest when stories have this problem. "Sun Sorrow" was the rare exception that held my interest because I was so fascinated by the way things were being described that I got a little distracted from the plot anyway. :P
YMMV, obviously.
(Aaannnd I will not comment on the public/private-facing group issue, since I am very new to Goodreads and have no idea what the actual practical implications of such things would be!)
I'm a fan of public groups. Trouble with closed/invite-only is you have to know the right people to find out about it, and you end up with the same crowd. It could turn a little preaching-to-the-converted. :)I understand if some people prefer more protected spaces, though!
Mod
Maybe we collect some awesome people first and then open it wider?
There are two dangers with SF groups on goodreads:
1) Attracting the authors who think they are supposed to spam
2) Groups getting so large that they become lowest-common-denominator. At that point nobody ever wins a poll but Neil Gaiman (no offense to his work or his fans. There are just lot of them.)
I do have a private group called The Alternative World that has been around for a while and is a decent retreat. So if this were to be an experiment in public cheerleading for short fiction, I'd be down with that. Maybe after we establish a tone. Easier to moderate people if they can see how people are throwing down.
Re: Sun Sorrow - I was trying to let myself be led through, but I didn't grok whether the protag was going to Carcosa or if she was from there, if it was destroyed or if it was the setting. When I got to the "take the bride's path" line, it twigged some memory, I Googled it and came up with the Bierce origin of "Carcosa". I think I might have understood its significance better in SS if I'd known the source!There were definitely some lovely lines. :)
Sarah: Do I need to do anything special to invite people to this group? Just link?
(I need to figure out this quote thing... The app has buried it somewhere. :/)
Mod
Link should be fine - but I'm happy to make you a moderator, or a moderator for a day, however you'd prefer. Then you can invite people directly.
Let's see how far I get with the link, but I never object to moderating if you're looking for bodies. Goodness knows, I live on the Internet.
Mod
I just ordered this anthology. Looks great, though I haven't read it yet.TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES: STORIES FROM THE TRAILBLAZERS OF DOMESTIC SUSPENSE, edited by Sarah Weinman
Includes stories by Patricia Highsmith, Vera Caspary, Dorothy B Hughes, Shirley Jackson, and ten other women. Usually historical noir/pulp anthologies are approximately 100% male, so this is an awesome antidote to that.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143122541/r...
I would be open to making this a public, or at least more or less public group. The other challenge with very public groups is that they can attract not only spammers but trolls. Then you need someone who wields a decent mallet or you just end up in endless battles with the people who are disrupting for some agenda or just for the fun of it. But the longer I'm on the internet the more I become a fan of public with a damn fine mallet. As Charlotte says, private can get a little insular and stale.
Mod
Do which? Make the group public? Or some other thing?If its making the group public I do take your point about establishing a tone first. So maybe we wait a few weeks until there's some history built up?
Also as you know, I've been known to mallet a fella now and then if any malleting should be required.
Mod
Matthew's Troubled Daughters anthology looks pretty cool - both the TOC and the cover.
Wanted to put in a plug here for Charles Tan's anthology Lauriat, which has stories by Filipino-Chinese spec-fic writers--so is a good way to get exposed to writers you might not otherwise run across.
I've been slowly making my way through Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. Just finished Scalzi's “The Tale Of The Wicked.” Anyone else reading this anthology?
I've got three anthologies on my reading table right now: Women Destroy Science Fiction, The Secret History of Science Fiction, and Long Hidden. I believe I first heard about the last one somewhere in this group, and grabbed a copy as soon as I found out what it was. I've been going through an alternate history phase.I don't know if I've ever had that many anthologies going at once. There just seem to be a lot of irresistible ones lately.
The Secret History one isn't new, though. I picked it up for my husband when we were traveling a few years ago, and am just getting around to reading myself. It includes sci-fi stories through the years written more on the literary side, less on the pulpy side. I don't think Dan liked the collection much, but it's interesting to me.
I have both Long Hidden and Women Destroy on my reading device at present as well.
Mod
Yes. I'm never going to read an anthology in order -- just, not going to happen -- and it's unlikely I'll read every single story. At present, anthologies work much, much better in paper. Poetry, even more so.
I want to be able to mark the stories I've already read. I want to proceed at my own pace. I want to put big Xs through the ones I've looked at and have no intention of reading.
I love my Kindle for novels and book-length nonfiction, but it's never been optimal for any kind of non-linear reading.
I just finished--and reviewed Kaleidoscope, an anthology of diverse YA fantasy and science fiction stories with lots of *very* inventive stories. It's due out in August (TBH I thought it was already out!)--do keep it in mind.
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Julia Rios let me look at an ARC of Kaleidoscope at Readercon, and I heard E.C. Myers read from his story at Philcon. I'm looking forward to reading that one!
Mod
Yay! You're in for some treats. I'll be interested to know which stories you especially like.
"Beyond the Sun" is amazing. That is all.
Shall we just talk about Long Hidden in here, or make a separate thread d'ya think?
Mod
Cathy wrote: "I'm never going to read an anthology in order -- just, not going to happen -- and it's unlikely I'll read every single story. At present, anthologies work much, much better in paper."I couldn't agree more about the "in order" bit. If it's an anthology, for the most part I expect to read a story where I don't have to know the characters. I don't have to have read other books, especially series. If it happens to be a part of a larger work that's fine, but at least give me the courtesy of figuring that I don't know anything.
It REALLY bothers me when I'm supposed to have read a novel in order to get involved with a short story. Bleh!
Mod
Glad to hear it!
Lauriat is well worth picking up. My favorite story there was the first one which is available in the free sample if you download via Amazon - although the price of the anthology digitally is so cheap that it is not far off being free.I am also slowly working my way through "Women Destroy..." having read all the non-fiction.
I am in two minds in terms of short fiction and way of reading. I like that I can hop from collection to collection via my kindle and not have to get the book off the shelf etc. but it can be nice to hop to the back and read about the author or when and how a story was first published etc.
I tend to favor the "Year's Best" type anthologies, but I'm also a sucker for charity anthologies like Rage Against the Night. If you're a horror fan, I recommend the collection, though I haven't finished reading it yet. Rage has been my guilty pleasure to reward myself with a little "want to read" time, outside of the "have to read" pile.
Ben wrote: "but it can be nice to hop to the back and read about the author or when and how a story was first published etc."I thought most reading devices allowed you to jump to the another page and back.
Cathy wrote: "I want to be able to mark the stories I've already read. I want to proceed at my own pace. I want to put big Xs through the ones I've looked at and have no intention of reading."
And there are some devices which allow you do do just that.
In fact I often scribble on the pages with the publication dates and stuff, which also makes it easier for me to jump to it and back when reading one of the stories in an ebook.
An announcement that some folks might be interested in: Long Hidden 2 will be edited by Mikki Kendall and Sofia Samatar, and will focus on protagonists who are under 18! http://longhidden.com/2014/09/17/long...
I'm super excited to see what Mikki and Sofia will do with the project.
Mod
http://longhidden.com/201..."
Very exciting!
I'm currently working through "Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future", edited by Kathryn Cramer and Ed Finn. Is anybody else reading it?
Rose wrote: "An announcement that some folks might be interested in: Long Hidden 2 will be edited by Mikki Kendall and Sofia Samatar, and will focus on protagonists who are under 18! http://longhidden.com/201..."
Very interesting thanks for the heads up!
Mod
Terry, I just got that book this week! I'm looking forward to reading it.
Recommending Altered States: a cyberpunk / scifi anthology - with reprints and new stories. Disclaimer: I wrote the Intro to antho, and also have a story in it, but I read all the other stories (in order to write the Intro), and they're excellent indeed.
Point of order? Is a book of short stories by a single author an Anthology or a Collection? In other words should I post here or elsewhere?
Mod
I'd call it a collection. If we don't already have a collection area I can start one.
Speculative Short Fiction Deserves Love
Books mentioned in this topic
Altered States (other topics)21st Century Science Fiction: The New Science Fiction Writers of the New Century (other topics)
Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology (other topics)
Sword & Mythos (other topics)