Friday open thread: short fiction
Jan. 27th, 2023 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I'm going to start this post with a brief review of some short stories I read this week, and then I will get to the question. I am trying a thing with SFF short fiction this year (namely to read more of it; by 'short fiction' I mean anything shorter than a novella), and am jumping between various online magazines and reading anything that takes my fancy. This week, I read four stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies — the first two were in a very early issue ('Beneath the Mask' by Aliette de Bodard, and 'Winterblood' by Megan Arkenberg), and the second two were in the current issue at time of reading ('Constant Ivan and Clever Natalya' by M.A. Carrick and 'Notes on The Seventh Battle Of The Queen Of The Ruby Mists' by Mari Ness).
Of the four stories, the latter two were probably most to my taste, and the Bodard one was my least favourite. The Carrick story was essentially an invented fairytale, with folkloric quests, characters with fixed personality traits that made them vulnerable to folklore situations, and a marriage at the end. The Ness story is a pastiche of old-school folklore encyclopedia writing, as if written about a genuine fairy otherworld kingdom. 'Winterblood' is about aristocratic families with mythological creatures in their family trees, and bargains with the supernatural, and vampires. Aliette de Bodard these days tends to write space operas inspired by Vietnamese history and culture, gothic fantasy set in post-apocalyptic Paris, and spin-off novellas featuring the Vietnamese dragon prince and his fallen angel husband from her post-apocalyptic series solving supernatural mysteries. But her earliest published fiction was set in a world inspired by Aztec history and religion, and 'Beneath the Mask' is part of this set of stories. As always, it features Bodard's two favourite common threads: lots of descriptions of food, and tensions that hinge on family relationships, particularly those of mothers and children.
As I was reading my way through these stories, I finally figured out something that had been eluding me for years: the key factor that is likely to determine my enjoyment of short fiction (again, a reminder that here I mean anything shorter than a novella). And that factor is that I need short fiction not to make me work too hard to get something out of the story.
This is obviously very subjective, but basically I am not prepared to spend a lot of time (when the story has such a limited word count) figuring out the context, the rules, and the frames of reference that inform the story. For me, this means it either needs to draw on a literary tradition with which I'm very familiar and well-versed (I've read a lot of folklore and fairytales, so fake fairytales told in a folktale style are no work at all), be set in a cultural context with which I'm familiar (either through personal experience or through exposure to nonfiction or longer works of fiction that draw on this cultural context), or it needs to be by an author whose longer work I have read and enjoyed. When at least one of these three factors aren't present, I'm more likely to just let the story wash over me and come out the other side having absorbed nothing, such that I'll need to read Goodreads summaries even an hour later to remember what the story was about.
In longer works of fiction, however, I'm quite happy to be forced to work a lot harder: I'm with the story for tens or hundreds of thousands of words, for at least an hour, and I'm making a commitment to spend time and effort gaining understanding of unfamiliar contexts, storytelling conventions, and literary and cultural allusions. But in short fiction, this is to me an unreasonable amount of effort for such a small thing. I realise this is a me problem and not a sort of objective attitude to quality or taste in writing, and it's potentially cutting me off from a lot of clever, experimental or interesting work that might expand my frame of reference (though I would hope, since I'm more prepared to put in the effort with longer pieces of writing, eventually my frame of reference will expand to encompass more cultural settings or literary traditions, rendering more short fiction 'easy' to me). But I'm not a paid editor or reviewer, reading (other than professional texts) is not a job for me, and I read to learn, and for pleasure. I don't enjoy learning from short works of fiction, and it's as simple as that.
So, all of the above basically forms my answer to today's question:
Do you read short fiction? And do you have different markers of enjoyment for short fiction than you do for longer pieces of writing?
Of the four stories, the latter two were probably most to my taste, and the Bodard one was my least favourite. The Carrick story was essentially an invented fairytale, with folkloric quests, characters with fixed personality traits that made them vulnerable to folklore situations, and a marriage at the end. The Ness story is a pastiche of old-school folklore encyclopedia writing, as if written about a genuine fairy otherworld kingdom. 'Winterblood' is about aristocratic families with mythological creatures in their family trees, and bargains with the supernatural, and vampires. Aliette de Bodard these days tends to write space operas inspired by Vietnamese history and culture, gothic fantasy set in post-apocalyptic Paris, and spin-off novellas featuring the Vietnamese dragon prince and his fallen angel husband from her post-apocalyptic series solving supernatural mysteries. But her earliest published fiction was set in a world inspired by Aztec history and religion, and 'Beneath the Mask' is part of this set of stories. As always, it features Bodard's two favourite common threads: lots of descriptions of food, and tensions that hinge on family relationships, particularly those of mothers and children.
As I was reading my way through these stories, I finally figured out something that had been eluding me for years: the key factor that is likely to determine my enjoyment of short fiction (again, a reminder that here I mean anything shorter than a novella). And that factor is that I need short fiction not to make me work too hard to get something out of the story.
This is obviously very subjective, but basically I am not prepared to spend a lot of time (when the story has such a limited word count) figuring out the context, the rules, and the frames of reference that inform the story. For me, this means it either needs to draw on a literary tradition with which I'm very familiar and well-versed (I've read a lot of folklore and fairytales, so fake fairytales told in a folktale style are no work at all), be set in a cultural context with which I'm familiar (either through personal experience or through exposure to nonfiction or longer works of fiction that draw on this cultural context), or it needs to be by an author whose longer work I have read and enjoyed. When at least one of these three factors aren't present, I'm more likely to just let the story wash over me and come out the other side having absorbed nothing, such that I'll need to read Goodreads summaries even an hour later to remember what the story was about.
In longer works of fiction, however, I'm quite happy to be forced to work a lot harder: I'm with the story for tens or hundreds of thousands of words, for at least an hour, and I'm making a commitment to spend time and effort gaining understanding of unfamiliar contexts, storytelling conventions, and literary and cultural allusions. But in short fiction, this is to me an unreasonable amount of effort for such a small thing. I realise this is a me problem and not a sort of objective attitude to quality or taste in writing, and it's potentially cutting me off from a lot of clever, experimental or interesting work that might expand my frame of reference (though I would hope, since I'm more prepared to put in the effort with longer pieces of writing, eventually my frame of reference will expand to encompass more cultural settings or literary traditions, rendering more short fiction 'easy' to me). But I'm not a paid editor or reviewer, reading (other than professional texts) is not a job for me, and I read to learn, and for pleasure. I don't enjoy learning from short works of fiction, and it's as simple as that.
So, all of the above basically forms my answer to today's question:
Do you read short fiction? And do you have different markers of enjoyment for short fiction than you do for longer pieces of writing?