The Death of the Short Story

[ossuarian]

I've just read a couple anthologies, and I was puzzling over why speculative fiction short stories have come pretty close to extinction.  At one time, a short story around a single concept existed and was popular among several media.  There were radio shows with short story readings as recently as 1978 (hmm, maybe there still are, but I'm no longer

Comments

[goulo]

In the 80s I remember many magazines existed with SF, and then they started dying off. I recall hearing economic reasons: rising costs of paper, and the corporatization/centralization of bookstore distribution systems led to it being infeasible for most of the smaller magazines to continue.

Perhaps also the rise of the net has led to people getting more used to reading shorter works online instead of buying them on paper.

Of course that doesn't explain why such TV shows disappeared, unless it's simply a matter of the disappearance in one medium causes the public to lose interest and so it disappears in other media...

Theories and/or refutations.

[buddhafiddle]

There are still lots of collections of sf short stories. What has fallen off are magazines.

goulo's comment raises a point that might shed more light on this. People do more of their reading on the net, but most of what they read are weblogs that express facts, impart information, or express opinion. The preference of "serious" knowledge or opinion (and, at the other end of the spectrum, gossip) to fiction may be the main trend. This actually predates the net (and my existence, and my brother's) by a decade; there were several magazines that lived by their fiction (our grandfather drew a decent paycheck publishing stories in the Saturday Evening Post), and several more that still public fiction, but that were more famous for it then

Re: Theories and/or refutations.

[goulo]

I agree that many people (including me) seem to read less fiction than we used to, and more nonfiction/opinion/etc.

People talk about what TV they watch as if it says something about them. Short stories are non-committal(Or they talk about how they don't watch TV as if it says something about them

Re: Theories and/or refutations.

[buddhafiddle]

That train of thought is highly contentious, very convoluted, and also insightful and probably true.

I like the way you think.

So, since you live in the city of the instant tradition (if somebody did it once in Austin, people will get together to do it every year, and twice as many people will do it the following year), I challenge you or a friend to do the following:

Start a short-story reading group. Have people rate stories that they read, set up a spot to exchange copies of the stories, and have an lj community to rate the stories and summarize them.

At the end of, say, a year, make a pirate anthology of the stories that were the most widely read and/or loved. Write the authors to tell them that they were chosen, and solicit their responses.

Betcha if three or four college towns like Austin did that, it would become a phenomenon that people write about. Betcha.

[luvcraft]

Maybe video games are replacing speculative fiction.

I only say that because, in the world I live in, everything's somehow related to video games. :)X

Perhaps!

[buddhafiddle]

It's interesting that you should say that. Book selling is way, way up, and sf is more stable or stagnant, which would tend to support your theory, as more sf readers also play video games.

But short story reading is down way more than novel reading. That's what's most interesting to me (and I assume, to bro ossuarian

[ossuarian]

The main reason I can't credit this theory is that it happened too early. Maybe goulo is right and there's fewer fantasy and science fiction periodicals than there were in the 80s, but maybe not. However, the decline since the 60s is far more pronounced.

I'd be curious what is happening with that niche. It's a gigantic industry and it barely existed a decade ago. People have a limited amount of time, so what are people not doing with the time they're on the X-box?

Video Game niche.

[buddhafiddle]

In my personal experience (present company excluded), most people who play lots of video games take that time from talking to people in person, dating (or participating in their marriages), and (ahem) having sex. I have had least three female acquaintances who ended relationships mostly over loss of consort to video games (both talking and etc.)

Today, at least a quarter of Americans say they have NOT ONE close friend in which they can confide. Not having any friends at all sure frees up bunches of time for the XBox.

Re: Remember whent hey said the novel is dead?

[ossuarian]

Nice picture!

I used the clunky term 'speculative fiction' because I didn't want the comments cluttered up with arguments about the state of fantasy vs. horror vs. science fiction. I assumed, and I think I was right, that no one had the stomach for the tedium that comes from arguing what is or isn't spec fic. You can call it all 'sci fi' or all 'fantasy' or all 'those stories read by white boys 14+'.

I'm not asking whether the genre is artistically dead, about whether short stories have become a tired parody of things done over a century ago. Maybe, but the discussions tend not to be good.

It's possible one of the answers is that magazines have to be shorter because paper's more expensive. In the 60s, Playboy used to have at least five times as many pages filled with short fiction as it did pages filled with tits, and it was thick enough that you could reasonably beat someone to death with a copy. If the fiction was just window dressing, it'd be awfully expensive window dressing these days