OI! OI! OI!
Sep. 28th, 2006 11:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threemonkeysI got a bit carried away with Aussie published short fiction. I meant to just read ASIM 25 (edited by Nicole R Murphy) and New Ceres 1 (Alisa Krasnostein) but I didn't stop there and went on to read Encounters (Maxine McArthur & Donna Maree Hanson), The Outcast (Nicole R Murphy) and Ticonderoga 9 (Lyn Battersby, Russell B. Farr & Liz Grzyb). That is over 50 short stories and I'm still tempted to go read more.
I find myself in the position of not being a typical fan in this particular little corner of the literary world. I'm not a writer, an editor or a publisher. Nor for that matter am I an Australian. It has got me thinking about why I do like it. Most of the blame lies with Andromeda Spaceways - the pulpy fun goodness of ASIM 17 was the gateway drug for me. I have read over 20 issues now and the fun just has not stopped. Beyond that I have found myself drawn to the intimate personal scale that a large proportion of these stories are told with. They seem to be told from inside the skull rather than at a detached distance. It isn't just a matter of telling stories in the first person, although that seems to be a contributing factor in some cases, it is an approach to the telling of stories.
It is worth noting that all the stories in the above publications are quite short. Not many of them are much more than 10 pages long. For some reason I have always liked short stories at this shorter end of the spectrum more than longer ones. Something to do with keeping the focus on a single concept I think. If things are more complex then I would prefer to read a novel. If I look in the pages of a magazine like Asimovs (which I read fairly regularly), there are often more Novellas and Novelettes than genuinely short stories.
None of the above is a blanket endorsement of Aussie small press short fiction for its own sake - there have been some collections which didn't work so well for me at all. The stories have to be good and worth the reading. This is true for a good proportion of the ones this time with a few being very good. But there are some turkeys too. The thing is that as an overall experience I did enjoy getting carried away by the reading.
I find myself in the position of not being a typical fan in this particular little corner of the literary world. I'm not a writer, an editor or a publisher. Nor for that matter am I an Australian. It has got me thinking about why I do like it. Most of the blame lies with Andromeda Spaceways - the pulpy fun goodness of ASIM 17 was the gateway drug for me. I have read over 20 issues now and the fun just has not stopped. Beyond that I have found myself drawn to the intimate personal scale that a large proportion of these stories are told with. They seem to be told from inside the skull rather than at a detached distance. It isn't just a matter of telling stories in the first person, although that seems to be a contributing factor in some cases, it is an approach to the telling of stories.
It is worth noting that all the stories in the above publications are quite short. Not many of them are much more than 10 pages long. For some reason I have always liked short stories at this shorter end of the spectrum more than longer ones. Something to do with keeping the focus on a single concept I think. If things are more complex then I would prefer to read a novel. If I look in the pages of a magazine like Asimovs (which I read fairly regularly), there are often more Novellas and Novelettes than genuinely short stories.
None of the above is a blanket endorsement of Aussie small press short fiction for its own sake - there have been some collections which didn't work so well for me at all. The stories have to be good and worth the reading. This is true for a good proportion of the ones this time with a few being very good. But there are some turkeys too. The thing is that as an overall experience I did enjoy getting carried away by the reading.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 02:45 am (UTC)Of course, it helped that the world was so much in flux (and still is) at the time of writing that I could make stuff up and then add it as canon. :)