Second Thoughts on Beehive-Poking

Why is it always the quick half-baked posts that stir up all the debate, while my long, carefully-thought-out words on medium-old movies and The Literary Novel sit collecting dust? Such is the way of th' Intarwebs, I guess.

Anyway, some more possibly derogatory or mistaken musings on the state of the science-fictional short story. (I read a huge chunk of 2005 fantasy stories for my World Fantasy judging, but otherwise haven't been reading widely there, so I'll spare that end of the genre my opinions for now.)

One possible mechanism I've been wondering about is award-seeking. As the readership for short science fiction has been drying up (yes, for the purposes of this argument I'm focusing on the print magazines and mostly ignoring the web, which is ironic but not totally unreasonable, since my impression is that most web magazines skew more fantasy than SF), writers of short SF have possibly gone from trying to entertain audiences to trying to wow other writers/editors/professionals. Short stories are thus now a way to break in, to make one's name, but not a way to build or sustain a solid career by themselves. (The model here is Gardner Dozois's comment that the way to sell a novel, and get a lot of attention in the field in general, is to write quickly a series of strong stories with a common background -- preferably all published in the same venue.) If that's the case (and I'm sure people will argue with me), then it's to a young writer's benefit to deliberately write the kind of stories that Year's Best editors prefer (as well as that can be figured out) and that are nominated for awards.

Obviously, awards (and Year's Best slots, I think) tend to go to "serious" stories -- ones that deal with major issues of the time that they're written (either in the wider world, or in SF circles in particular). So I'm postulating that perhaps a larger percentage of the writers out there are writing more "seriously" than they normally would, in hopes of getting noticed, and getting that novel contract. (And the best SF stories are more often than not downbeat.)

(Or is it that the field has always been like this, and people like me only realize it when they read the previous year's "best" stories all in one big clump at this time of year?)

Secondly, and much more frivolously: I am happy to see that the mutant strain of "alternate history space program" stories seems to have gone dormant -- even when those were supposedly positive (and no matter who wrote them), I always hated those stories. One more tale of the glories that could have been ours if only NASA had an unlimited wallet and I might have snapped...

One final note: I am at least slightly hypocritical in all this. I don't think I'm precisely complaining about the mass of gloomy stories -- I'm trying more to comment on it, and to try to explain it -- but I'm afraid it might be coming across as complaining. And, since I usually say that my favorite SF stories are "Fondly Fahrenheit" and "The Man Who Walked Home" (two awfully gloomy tales, one of which breaks my rule and murders me offstage), I could be seen as wanting things both ways. So I'll just say: yes, I see that. It's not exactly what I mean, but yes.