http://crookedtimber.org/category/mieville-seminar/

Pat: I had not heard Budrys’ passing. His old review columns were how I found out about Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and a number of other things that made me weird.

fromtherivers: Nah, tomorrow ain’t done with us yet. Look what happens anytime humanity begins to think it’s living in the future, or that history is over.

But it does show something about sci-fi today that too much of it reads like a period piece. To my mind that says more about the insular culture that’s sprang up around it: too many writers have their influences — and they’re sticking to them, afraid to stray out too far because the niche won’t be happy.

Nadya: Bester was awesome and yes, very groundbreaking. While All Tomorrows is mostly devoted to the Deviant Age, I will be doing “out/ahead of their time” pieces occasionally. Bester’s definitely getting his due and proper.

Camille: Good ones both. Interestingly, my first experience with Sterling was through the aforementioned F&SF short stories towards the tail end of that time period (early 1980s). Sterling has since been fairly dismissive of the writing coming out then and he’s got a point: trying to be dangerous and oh-so-meaningful in every story led to some really bad crap.

But reading over those same issues now, a thing or two could be learned from the overall storytelling quality and the lack of technophilia. I like technology. Its impacts are absolutely essential to consider and they can make for a great story. But a great strength of the Dangerous Visions era was the realization that the future’s stories were about a hell of a lot more than what devices we’ll be plugged into.

James Russell: Yes, I found some of that tone in DV annoying, as noted above, but it was balanced out by the fact that so many of the stories actually lived up to their hype. More of the stories in DV won awards, but personally (and it’s close) I like more of the stories in A,DV.

When I call A,DV groundbreaking it’s mostly because a lot of the stories remain extremely shocking and innovative today. Admittedly, it didn’t have quite the same impact on the sci-fi culture as DV because, well, it was a sequel.

John: Yes, Gene Wolfe. Yes. The man is perhaps my all-around favorite author in print sci-fi. He’s still damned dangerous. Some writers (like Tanith Lee) did brilliantly weird work early in their career but settled down as time went on.

Wolfe has not. Both his short stories and novels are just about perfect. In future days he will hopefully be regarded not just as a giant of sci-fi but as one of the most daring writers of the last 50 years, period.

Peter Tupper: In general, it does. That’s one reason i think DV and A,DV were so effective. You could take an hour or less, absorb a unique, well-crafted shiv of a story. Scream Blink, let it sink in and ponder it for awhile. Few writers (Delany’s one of them) can keep up that impact at novel length: even most of the best gutpunch novels are relatively slim.

Warren Ellis: The problem exactly. I’ll see authors in some of the mags today that will occasionally demonstrate flashes of the same insight, daring and yes, viciousness, but very rarely all of it together. They mostly stand out because of how badly things have fallen apart around them.

As for the sci-fi mags, my own (admittedly brief) inquiries back that up: the starting rate for a freelance journalist at an average weekly paper is slightly better or about equal to what the “big name magazines” offer. That’s insane.

It’s a wider issue than just sci-fi, however. Short stories in general seem dead or dying. Today, very few magazines publish them, very few writers get their start with that form and I can’t imagine anyone makes a living off them.

Lastly: $3.50? Really? Well hell, that’s interesting.

Bad contracts, bad fees, bad publishing. In the 90s, writers assure me that sf magazines were asking for a ridiculous amount of rights over short stories while paying rates that hadn’t changed since the 1960s.

Sooner or later, someone will notice that the manufacturing cost for a 90-page digest size publication at Lulu’s POD setup is $3.50 or thereabouts.

In that case, the related question to this debate is, what killed the sf short story? And what, if anything, will revive it?

I think it won’t be the print publishing industry. More likely some online ebook business model will come out of left field and completely change the game.

And thanks, I’ll be tracking down both volumes A.S.A.P!

Regarding Wolfe’s “The Tree is My Hat”, are you aware of the radio play made of it? Neil Gaiman did one of the voices. It used to be free online somewhere but a quick google hasn’t found it.

Gene Wolfe’s short fiction is pretty dangerous, imho. I’m thinking mainly of stories like “Lord of the Land” from the Starwater Strains collection (probably the best SF Cthulu story I’ve read) and the novella “Zigurat” from the Strange Travellers collection. “The Tree is My Hat” from Innocents Aboard left its mark on me as well.

M. John Harrison’s Light was a serious mindfuck of a space opera and a dark meditation on life (among many other things).

Kelly Link writes some of the most gutpunching (to lift some vocab from Mr. Ellis) stories Ive read. In particular, “Zombie Contingency Plan” and “Stone Animals” from Magic for Beginners and “The Specialists Hat” from Stranger Things Happen still manage to disturb me mightily when I turn them over in my head.

And, finally, Thomas Ligotti – though the stories of his that I’ve read (i.e. the three novellas in “My Work is Not Yet Done”) are not quite SFish, they are profoundly intense, disquieting fantasies.

As for the question of whether it’s possible to write a SF story these days that doesn’t feel like a period piece, I don’t think I’ve ever read any SF story ever written that wasn’t a period piece.