Confessions of a Short-Story Burnout

Notes from a survivor of the year 2005 by Matthew Cheney

1.

I spent much of 2005 reading stories from 2004, because I was on the jury for the Speculative Literature Foundation's Fountain Award, and so by the time I was ready to catch up with the short fiction of 2005, half the year's stories had already appeared, and I couldn't bear to wade through all the competent-but-not-much-more-than-that stories in search of a few gems. Now and then I gave in to the exhortations of friends and read things they were particularly excited about, but for the most part I focused on novels, until in the autumn I read a few collections and a couple of issues of magazines. But the idea of trying to catch up with all the short fiction flooding the SF field in 2005 was nauseating, and I didn't give in to it.

This is not to suggest that 2005 was a bad year for short fiction. It seems to have been as scattered and diverse a year as any other, and, following recent trends, probably more scattered and diverse than ever before. Various small publishers are finding odd, interesting work, and more and more people have discovered the range of fiction available. This has caused some geezers (young and old) to grumble about boundaries being eroded and genres being miscegenated, but such changes seem healthy to me, because diversity is better than stagnation. Diversity doesn't mean there will be mounds of great work published; it just means various types of writing will mingle, opening wider possibilities for how stories can achieve excellence.

It may be that too many stories are being published. Most of the magazines and anthologies I've read over the past few years have all felt like they would have been stronger with half the material in them. The SF field is caught in a bind, though, because we all want to provide opportunities for writers to be published. We like writers, and we don't want them to get too discouraged. (I could say we don't want them to go broke, but they've all gone broke already.) Mix the desire for diversity with the desire to publish as much as possible, and what you get is a lot of dull stories told in a wide variety of styles. If anything, the SF field provides numerous opportunities for us to discover all the ways that short fiction can be unexceptional.

These are, of course, the words of a burnout. I'm being intentionally vague and not naming names, because it's a new year now and there's no need to beat up on stories that are most likely to be forgotten anyway. But you can try this test at home: choose the magazine or anthology that you most respect, and read all of it. All of it. Every word. Then tell me I'm wrong and why. I will be grateful to you, because I would like to be able to believe in short stories again.

2.

The best service that someone who reads a lot of short fiction can perform is to find the gems in the mud and explain why these gems glitter and shine. I'm certain there are plenty of good stories I have not yet read from 2005, but two gems most impressed me this year, despite my burnout: ‘Heads Down, Thumbs Up’ by Gavin J. Grant and ‘There's a Hole in the City' by Richard Bowes, both published online by SCIFICTION.

2005 saw the unfortunate end of SCIFICTION when its sponsor, the SciFi Channel, withdrew support. Despite this loss, SCIFICTION, edited by Ellen Datlow, must be seen as a success: it lasted longer than many online magazines, it paid relatively high rates for fiction, and it showcased quite a few excellent stories. It was also one of the most diverse venues in its content, publishing traditional stories alongside innovative stories, core genre stories next to the most bent of genre-benders. In 2005, the quality was, to my mind, wildly uneven. The unevenness was wild because along with some clunky clunkers appeared the two truly extraordinary stories mentioned above.

These two stories demonstrate that diversity does not have to be a false dichotomy between obscure art and easy drivel. ‘There's a Hole in the City’ is the sort of story that gets called "accessible" by people who want everybody to write and read in the same way (thus ensuring "accessibility"), because it is told in the standard form of most short fiction these days, with prose that does not call attention to its artificiality and a structure that is similar enough to the structures of other stories to seem normal to a basically literate reader. I don't mean to cast aspersions on normalized fiction—it's what I most often enjoy reading—but such normality is not some grand Platonic idea, and its presence or absence is neither a positive or negative thing. The beauty of the story lies in its careful conjoining of the reality of life in Manhattan after September 11, 2001 with a subtle ghost story. The effect could have been mawkish, but the restraint of the writing and the clarity of the details make ‘There's a Hole in the City’ a deeply affecting tale.

‘Heads Down, Thumbs Up’ is not a normal story. Anybody could tell you this. It is bewildering, contradictory, full of odd images, and seems to be making up its structure as it goes along. (Again, this is not a positive or negative fact.) The story's real oddity, though, comes from its content and subject matter; the world of the story is reflected in the language and form. The world is one where nothing is solid, where identities and locations shift with the wind, and rather than explain and explore this idea in a ploddingly expository manner, Grant lets the story embody what it is about, creating an effect for the reader that demands an open mind and some careful attention, but the open-minded and attentive reader is rewarded with a story of great depth and suggestion, a story that cannot be reduced to summary.

These two stories, one normal and one not, are both excellent because they evoke emotion without demanding it, they present vivid and unfamiliar imagery, they wield language with care and exactness, their strengths are destroyed when summarized rather than experienced, and they provoke the reader to reflect and reread. These are good values; their opposites are, in most cases and in the aggregate, negative values.

3.

I ruffled some feathers at the end of 2005 when I defended Eliot Fintushel's story ‘Bone Women’, published online by Strange Horizons. Like many magazines, Strange Horizons hosts a message board where people can post thoughts and questions about what they read, and "Bone Women" was condemned by Strange Horizons readers on the message boards for being self-indulgent, masturbatory, pretentious, meaningless, and literary. This was not a story readers merely disliked or didn't connect to, this was a story they loathed.

I enjoyed the story for a variety of reasons, and found the hatred of it frustrating. That frustration prompted my defense of ‘Bone Women’ to be at times overwrought. In the comments to what I wrote, far more people condemned the story, including leading editors and writers in the SF field, than defended it. Most of these condemnations were simple statements that defied argument: "I didn't like it," or "I got bored."

I won't rehash my defense of the story here; it worked for me, it made me laugh, and I thought every "self-indulgence" necessary to the way I understood how ‘Bone Women’ conveyed its purpose and meaning. I certainly can understand the story not grabbing some readers' attentions, and wouldn't blame anyone for giving up on it. It was unfortunate, though, that most readers tranferred their own anger at not understanding and appreciating what the story was doing onto the structure and purpose of the story itself, thereby creating and perpetuating misreadings of the story that made it more and more difficult to see it on basic terms of language, narrative, and character, the terms under which a story's value can best be argued. (One or two people did engage the story at this level, and though I disagreed with their assessments, those disagreements did not involve willful misreading, and they were more than hollow pronouncements of like or dislike.)

The SF field has long been aesthetically conservative, perhaps because of a sense that the strange subject matter needs to be presented in as familiar and unchallenging a manner as possible. Such writers as Alfred Bester rejected this idea, as did the various writers of the New Wave, many of whom applied forty-year-old techniques of Modernism to gloomy presentations of SF tropes, but as a popular literature SF has, with rare exceptions, stuck to narrative forms developed in the 19th century, which, through reiteration, have become the most familiar, least challenging forms for written storytelling. Fintushel's story is not in any way particularly innovative—its techniques would seem conservative to readers of such early-20th-Century writers as Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner—but it is quite different from most SF stories in that it melds the interior, subjective, and even unconscious perceptions of the narrator to the mode of expression itself. This brings us close to the realm of stream-of-consciousness, a technique seldom used in SF because it tends to make a plot more difficult to separate from characterization. Plot and character are both expressions of the writer's language—the diction, phrasing, and paragraphing—and stories such as Fintushel's heighten the reader's awareness of that language, then heighten awareness of the character's viewpoint, and only then allow some consideration of plot. This is a reversal of the more familiar and normalized hierarchy of popular fiction.

The discussion of Fintushel's story particularly disappointed me because I wish the Strange Horizons editors would publish more difficult, challenging fiction, and I don't want them to become discouraged. Strange Horizons is funded through grants and donations, much like a literary journal, and does not need to rely as much on the whims of readers' and advertisers' tastes as do commercial magazines. A magazine can educate its readers by continuously publishing surprising fiction of high quality, and it is unfortunate that Strange Horizons often settles for publishing somewhat bland stories instead. ‘Bone Women’ may have been controversial, but such controversy can create valuable discussions that open new ways of perceiving stories, and such controversies may be one way we can combat the flood of mediocrity that has drowned all of the outlets for SF short fiction.

4.

Realms of Fantasy is a magazine that publishes more good fiction than it gets credit for, perhaps because the covers and advertisements seem to be aimed at adolescents, gamers, and aspiring knights, maidens, and fetishists. Something is working within this combination, though, because the magazine continues to survive and to publish a remarkable array of stories.

Let's consider two stories, ‘A Bedtime Tale for the Disenchanted’ by Amy Beth Forbes and ‘Lavender's Blue, Lavender's Green’ by Patrick Samphire. Both are tales of loves lost and yearned for, of mistakes made, of magics implied and stated. Both are short and efficient, though ‘A Bedtime Tale for the Disenchanted’ is fragmentary, nonlinear, and epigrammatic, while ‘Lavender's Blue, Lavender's Green’ is more straightforward. The stories approach the idea of fantasy differently: Forbes's story has a man who turns into a tree and roads that liberate themselves; in Samphire's story the fantasy element may be a matter of madness, and the story could be read as a mainstream, nonfantastic tale. Both stories are grounded in a world of real emotion: for all its absurdities, ‘A Bedtime Tale for the Disenchanted’ is an affecting allegory of how much we want the ones we love to remain with us, and the emotional core of ‘Lavender's Blue, Lavender's Green’ does not change whether the ambiguities of the fantasy are resolved as real or imagined. Samphire lets dialogue carry the weight of his tale, and he does so in a way that undercuts potential sentimentality by maintaining an objective tone and avoiding prolonged scenes, instead allowing what is not stated to be richer than what is. Forbes, on the other hand, fills an extremely short story with a wide range of imagery, myths, and imaginings—the story feels unhinged, wild, zany, and yet the brilliance of the execution is that every sentence comes back to the very simple predicament of the main characters, the conflict of one person who moves and another who will do anything to get him to stay still.

Interzone and The 3rd Alternative both published some interesting stories this year (and I was excited to discover that the design of both magazines seems more consistent than in some past issues, with the truly extraordinary artwork and layout now seeming to enhance the fiction rather than distract from it). Vandana Singh's ‘Thirst’ in the Winter issue of The 3rd Alternative is a remarkably vivid story, one paced in a slow, deliberate manner that makes the events of the tale all the more powerful. There is nothing particularly innovative about Singh's story, and yet I don't doubt that some readers had as strong a negative reaction to it as did the readers of Eliot Fintushel's ‘Bone Women’, because though the language is precise and exact, it is also lyrical; this is a story that needs readers who can appreciate the fine balance of its sentences and paragraphs as much as the breathtaking imagery and complex, heartrending characters those sentences and paragraphs create.

Nothing in Interzone struck me with the same force as ‘Thirst’, but I particularly enjoyed Will McIntosh's ‘Soft Apocalpyse’ in Interzone 200. Like so many of the stories that most appealed to me in 2005, ‘Soft Apocalypse’ is a tale of yearning, grief, loss, and love that links these emotional elements to other elements of the story, in this case the setting and plot. McIntosh uses a familiar apocalyptic scenario to heighten the resonance of his protagonist's emotional life, and both the characterization and setting gain depth from this pairing.

Fantasy Magazine was a new venture this year from Prime Books, and the premiere issue, published in the fall, was stronger than many issues of more established magazines. The stories tended toward the mythic and lyrical, and the story that most appealed to me was Nick Mamatas's ‘At the End of the Hall’, wherein a hospitalized woman's sense of failure, rage, and helplessness finds expression in a remarkable way. Once again, we have a writer handling material that could have been sentimental in a manner that avoids sentimentality through careful control of tone and pacing, and through a willingness to allow some ambiguity to the fantasy, to let the reader decide where the line between the real and the imagined exists.

5.

These are some of the stories that broke through my burnout in 2005. There were others, but these are representative. There is diversity of technique and subject matter here, as should be expected and demanded, but there is a unity of effect: Each of the stories I have discussed links ideas, emotions, events, and characters in a way that respects a reader's intelligence and avoids easy effects. Each of these stories seeks to appeal to the reader's sense of language and narrative, as well as both the mind and heart.

It probably says more about my moods and tastes than anything else that these stories all utilize some of the traditional (and traditionally innovative) techniques of mainstream fiction along with techniques of fantasy and surrealism. None of these stories create fantastic situations or worlds for their own sake; all create a space wherein readers can think about their own worlds, their own lives, and the wonders and mundanities of things that lie outside and beyond the text. None of these stories take their sentences and structures for granted. Each is an event of language first, and the stories that are told in the most normalized way do so because it is a good option, not a required one.

The future of SF short fiction will remain bright so long as writers are encouraged to care about language, structure, and emotional honesty while being discouraged from settling for familiar effects, sentimentality, cliches, and manipulation. More great fiction exists now than any one person could ever read in a lifetime; there is no need to settle for anything that aspires to be less than great.