Confession: I haven’t read short stories since graduating from college.
This is probably not much of a shock to you. Unless you are a writing professional, you probably don’t read short fiction either. Novels really are the prevailing art of the day. But I’ve been trying to get back into them because they let you see a whole idea very quickly. I will never be able to read as many books as I wish I could, especially since I read so many genres. But with short stories, I can at least get a taste of what an author is like.
A great tool for this has been the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. I recommend it to everyone. It’s like Reading Rainbow but for grownups! And the vast majority of the stories fall into the SFF genre, so I’m getting exposed to a lot of authors I wouldn’t have time for otherwise.
But I set a goal to read one whole collection by a classic SFF author this winter. I wanted to really understand what one author was about without having to spend a year reading their whole backlist. I picked Ray Bradbury merely because I was looking for authors who had written about time travel, and his story “A Sound of Thunder” is, as far as I know, the origin of the butterfly effect as used in fiction.
Well, turns out most of his other stories are not about time travel, but I did enjoy reading A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury. Some of my observations from the collection:
SciFi Author Doesn’t Mean Only SciFi: A lot of the stories in this collection are only barely SFF or not even at all. I guess I should have expected this, given that Bradbury wrote Dandelion Wine as well as Fahrenheit 451. Many of the stories in this collection are about how the feelings and daily life of ordinary people are affected by space colonization and rocketry, like the wives in “The Wilderness” or the boys who dream of rockets in “R is for Rocket.” Some have no speculative element at all like “The Great Wide World Over There” (which I realized halfway through I had read before in an English class) and “The Big Black and White Game” (a chillingly realistic look at race relations in something as ordinary as a baseball game–this has white fragility written all over it).
As an author, I found this dichotomy comforting. I often wonder how to balance my love of epic fantasy with intricate magics with my love of writing creative nonfiction. I wrote a short story over Christmas that my critique group described as very memoir-like, and I had started to worry that it was somehow “wrong.” Now, marketable may be another story, but Bradbury shows that you can write about people when you write SFF.
Rapturous Rambling: I remember this now from reading 451, but Bradbury has a tendency to wax rapturous when he reaches a place of great emotion. He throws grammar rules out the window and lets his characters wax on and on about what’s important in the stor. You can tell when one in coming by the sudden appearance of a whole page with no paragraphs (at least for my kindle settings). This is an interesting technique and not one I’ve been used in my writing. It may just find a place in my next short story.
A Short Story Doesn’t Have to Have a Whole Story: Many of the early stories in the collection are mere snapshots of feelings and emotions brought on by some incident (usually having to do with space and rockets). They work for what they are. This kind of short story makes me sad that short stories not more widely read. They are almost poetry-like in their evocation of one particular feeling at the expense of plot and character details. Yet they are so much more approachable than the esoteric nature of poetry.
Those are my thoughts for now. I hope to tackle more short story collections in the future. I read last year’s Writers of the Future collection and I’m looking forward to buying this year’s when it comes out in April.
Do you read short stories? Are they significant anymore outside of writers showing off for each other?
