Editorial
A Tall Tale of Short Stories

Four years ago, I took Michael Chabon to task for what I saw as a misguided—and, considering the source, particularly disappointing—assessment of the then-current state of the short story. In his introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, he bemoaned "the lost genre of short fiction," even though it was all around us in print and online science fiction, fantasy and horror publications, and it distressed me that this work would be declared invisible.

I didn't understand how a writer who had proven himself to be intricately tapped into the pop-culture zeitgeist with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay could have been so wrong in his survey of what was actually out there. At the time, I cited Stephen King as an example of a writer I felt knew the short fiction market well enough to avoid ever making the same mistake, but ironically, King seems to have done just that recently in the New York Times while relating his experience editing The Best American Short Stories of 2007.

He relates that his heart sank when he found that so many of the candidates failed to fulfill their primary purpose, writing that:

"These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers."

He blamed the apparent pretentiousness of the prose on the difficulties short fiction magazines have in getting to market, and the many barriers put up by an antiquated distribution system. I doubt there are many working in science fiction today who would disagree—the economic model of print fiction magazines is broken. And if King's essay had been just a complaint about distribution without trying to tie that disaster to the quality of the stories themselves, I'd have had no problem with it.

A shelf-fulfilling prophecy

But he seems to feel that the shrinking market has resulted in a situation in which most writers have abandoned their responsibility to entertain, as if, with audiences harder to reach than ever, writers have given up even trying. Since there are fewer readers, he claims that many writers have stopped trying to communicate with them, and are now only talking to each other. I'm sure that there are indeed those out there who have gotten stuck in an incestuous loop. But these two separate issues—one surrounding the delivery system and the other related to the end product—have nothing to do with each other. What's worse, telling people that the latter is broken could mean that there'll never be an opportunity for the former to be fixed.

The danger here is that the average reader digesting King's account of his search for perfect stories is going to assume that he hasn't missed anything by not having read short fiction all along. Instead of winning new readers to the cause, this essay justifies people in their desire to stay away from the short story. It only props up a reader's initial reluctance. Rather than seeing the contents of the King-edited The Best American Short Stories of 2007 as just the tip of the creative iceberg and growing enthusiastic to find all the other great stories out there, a reader could just as easily come away buoyed by King's charges, thinking that King had already found all the stories worth reading.

So while I'm sure that it wasn't King's intention, this essay does more harm than good. Because by bemoaning the flatness and insularity of some short stories, he—like Chabon—is giving the false impression that all entertaining stories have been abandoned, that reading short fiction is an empty chore, more work than fun. But it's not. Exciting work is being done all the time, in the traditional print magazines such as Asimov's and F&SF, boutique magazines such as Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Internet magazines such as Strange Horizons.

We shouldn't make potential readers feel as if dipping into the average science-fiction magazine won't be worth it, because there are treasures out there. The treasure-hunting might be more difficult than it was in decades past, when there were dozens of nationally distributed magazines on newsstands, but the extra effort today's marketplace requires will definitely be rewarded.

Besides—if our brightest minds keep talking down the current state of the short story, they'll create the future they hoped to prevent, and eventually there won't be any science-fiction magazines.