Exceptions to Reality

Introduction

There was a time when writers of short fiction used to be able to make a living at it. Back in the heyday of the slicks and pulps, the 1930s and ’40s, magazines vied with radio, sports, and going out to the movies as a major arena of popular entertainment. Nowadays magazines containing fiction are an endangered species. Shifting short fiction to websites has not proven the savior of the genre some thought it might be. It may yet turn out to be the case, perhaps when soundtracks and illustrations are added. But at present the auguries are not good, the entrails being read less than sanguine.

While novels remain highly popular, the market for short fiction of every kind appears to be on the wane. I find this surprising. Today’s denizens of planet Earth, raised on ever-briefer and more compacted bursts of information delivered via the Net and the ever-accelerated editing of the visual image, would seem ideally conditioned to accept their printed fiction in equivalently more concise packages. Yet the fantasies that sell best have mutated into gargantuan doorstops spanning multiple volumes. As for science fiction, it largely continues to resist the trend toward obesity, though the spawning of sequels (an inclination to which I, too, must plead guilty) continues unabated.

Therefore whence then the short story, that polished gem so demanding of readers’ attention but not of their time?

It has been saved for now, not by the brave magazines that continue to hang on in the face of ebbing coteries of truly dedicated readers, but by the anthology. Buyers who shun the magazine section of a bookstore, and never seek out magazines online, who don’t want to be bothered with subscribing to anything anymore, be it Analog or the Fruit-of-the-Month Club, will find anthologies of short fiction conveniently included alongside the monolithic novels on bookstore racks and available in the book section of their favorite Web retailer. That is where short fantasy and science fiction continues to survive and, on a modest scale, even prosper.

I love the magazines. I miss the illustrations they provide (why can’t we have illustrated anthologies in the United States as they do in Europe?) and their sense of immediacy. But they do not wear well, they don’t fit on bookshelves cleanly alongside all those bloated epics (where are the magazine publishers who have modified the size of their ’zines to match that of the standard hardbound novel?), and their built-in impermanence makes them look and feel cheap. Readers today like their purchases to have heft and solidity. Books continue to provide that extra tactile bonus. Magazines do not.

Marketing isn’t my job, though. I just continue to write short stories and hope that whatever the venue, readers will continue to find them.

I’m pleased that you found these.

ALAN DEAN FOSTER,

Prescott, Arizona, 2006