The Meat
As my recent reviews
have amply attested, I have an almost instinctive dislike for anthologies.
Analyzing my own knee-jerk dislike for the third
time now, I've hit upon a new potential reason: I think the real problem is
I don't really like short stories very much. After all, let's be honest—most short
stories have, at their heart and core, either sub-par ideas which cannot
sustain a novella or novel length treatment, or really clever ideas that should have been expanded into a novel. It's
a rare story whose ideal (in the Leibnitz sense of the best of all possible
worlds) length is just a few thousand words. I mean, that's only like three
pictures!
Maybe this
resentment at the existence of short stories comes from the fact that by nature
I personally am firmly in the "Why use 100 words to say something pithily when
you could use 10,000 prettier ones to say it floridly?" camp. In other
words, I am incapable of writing short stories; even simple ideas take so long
for me to dress them up in description and hyperbole that they quickly become
anything but short.
However, I will
certainly acknowledge the existence of a certain rare beast, that short story
so cleverly done even I cannot imagine it any longer (or shorter, come to think
of it!) than it is. A few of Philip K. Dick's stories, despite their inevitably
atrocious titles, are like that: he sketches out a brilliant and intriguing
idea, spins together a little story-meat to hang onto the idea-bones, and then
poof! it's over, at least until it's made into a fantastic (Verhoeven's Total Recall, Scott's Blade Runner), acceptable (Tamahori's Next, Woo's Paycheck, Spielberg's Minority
Report) or puzzlingly bad (the other Total Recall, A Scanner
Darkly, etc.) movie.
Yes, great short
stories can haunt readers big-time with their pithy goodness. No less a
literary giant than Edgar Allen Poe once famously said (or at least, someone
once claimed to me that he said), no one should ever write anything longer than
one can read in a single brief sitting. On the other hand, he was a creep-toid
who married his thirteen year old first cousin, and I liked the novel inspired by his poem Annabel Lee way more than I liked anything actually
written by Poe himself, so in that sense I'd say the score is People who Write Novels:
1, People who Write Short Stories/Marry Teenage Relatives: 0. Purloin that, Poe!
This seems like as good a time as any to turn to Rocket Science, which I can say is
unlike any other anthology I've ever read or even heard of, and I definitely
mean that as a compliment. What surprised me was how much I enjoyed reading it,
despite it being an anthology full of very short stories, and me with an
instinctive dislike for both a) anthologies, and b) short stories. Some such
stories are really excellent—I think editor Ian Sales got the volume started on
exactly the right foot with the first story, Kimmel's multi-generational,
whimsical romp through space which has a children's book about the moon as its timeless
anchor. This is the sort of story that can recapture for all of us former
children the sense of wonder we all must surely have felt at the thought of
space flight or travel, or indeed space in general.
Thematically, the
anthology is strongly rooted in hard science (fiction), specifically space
travel and the various logistical and other issues such travel has already
raised or may raise in the future. With such a consistent theme, it avoids the
most common pitfall ensnaring anthologies everywhere: having a loose,
ill-defined generic theme that lacks cohesion (another way of saying
"having an editor who isn't invested in the project or, for political
reasons, can't or won't reject/demand heavy revision of the weirder or less
thematically appropriate entries"). Some of the better-themed anthologies
out there will refuse to limit themselves to a single genre, instead exploring
ways the theme can maintain cohesion even across genres.
But this anthology
took the idea of a unifying theme to a whole new level, including—get ready for
it—non-fiction articles as well! My goodness, I learned things about space and traveling in it, cold hard facts no
less, from reading this book! How often can one say one genuinely learned
something from one's ostensibly fluffy nighttime sci fi reading material? I am
totally on board with this editing strategy—perhaps this will start a trend and
we'll begin seeing more volumes that put the science back into science fiction,
breaking down the Great Schism between 'fiction' and 'non' still further! I
hope so.
That said, a few of
the non-fiction entries (especially the final one), while informative, read
more like plugs for the author's own books and accomplishments than an attempt
to explain to today's mindless youth some genuine problems humans already do
and will continue to face in attempting space travel. This is another way of
saying that a few, though by no means all (the one on radiation was great, for
example), of the non-fiction pieces could have used more bells and whistles
writing-wise and fewer self-promotional statements, which are doubtless to be
expected in publications for the scientific community where precedence and name
recognition are presumably of vital importance, but feel out of place in a
volume like this.
My only other gripe
with the volume is my usual one: while some of the stories were perfect as is, several
others felt like the fascinating beginnings of a longer story, ending just when
things were getting interesting and readers began to form emotional bonds with
characters. So, ultimately, I pose this challenge to all you short story
writers and fans out there: how can you be certain that leaving a story in
'short' form is the best length? I have yet to hear a convincing argument in
favor of short stories as a medium, and would instead suggest that most short
stories are failures by virtue of their length—bring on the indignant
responses! (And if you try to bring in Poe to support your "short stories
are best" argument, keep in mind that you'll automatically lose tons of
points because he was an incestuous weirdo.)
 |
| My new favorite short story (until now it was Hemingway's "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.") |
The Math
Baseline assessment: 6/10
Bonuses: +1 for having real gems like Kimmel's story (and
editorially for leading off with it, making full use of the primacy effect), +1
for (mostly) seamlessly weaving non-fiction into the volume, +1 for having such
a strong unifying theme
Penalties: -1 for being mostly (too) short stories, -1 for
the self-promotion in some of the non-fiction (if I wanted to read about how
awesome you are, brainiacs, I'd just read your articles in Nature or whatever!)
Nerd coefficient: 7/10 "an enjoyable experience, but not
without its flaws"
See here why
anyone could and should be proud of a 7/10 from us!
