The essay that follows will be published a couple of years from now as the introduction to the seventh volume of my Collected Short Stories series, which Subterranean Press has been bringing out one book at a time since 2006. (Volume Three, covering the stories I wrote between 1969 and 1972, is just about to be published as I write this.) All of the Silverberg stories that are mentioned here first appeared in this magazine between 1988 and 1990, except for “To the Promised Land,” which was published in Omni in 1989.
A couple of working definitions:
1) A short story is a piece of prose fiction in which just one significant thing happens.
2) A science fiction short story is a piece of prose fiction in which just one extraordinary thing happens.
These are not definitions of my devising, nor are they especially recent. The first was formulated by Edgar Allan Poe more than a century and a half ago, and the second by H.G. Wells about fifty years after that. Neither one is an absolute commandment: it’s quite possible to violate one or both of these definitions and still produce a story that will fascinate its readers. But they’re good working rules, and I’ve tried to keep them in mind throughout my writing career.
What Poe spoke of, actually, was the “single effect” that every story should create. Each word in the story, he said, should work toward that effect. That might be interpreted to be as much a stylistic rule as a structural one: the “effect” could be construed as eldritch horror, farce, philosophical contemplation, whatever. But in fact Poe, both in theory and in practice, understood virtually in the hour of the birth of the short story that it must be constructed around one central point and only one. Like a painting, it must be capable of being taken in at a single glance, although close inspection or repeated viewings would reveal complexities and subtleties not immediately perceptible.
Thus Poe, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” say, builds his story around the strange bond linking Roderick Usher and his sister, Lady Madeline. The baroque details of the story, rich and vivid, serve entirely to tell us that the Ushers are very odd people and something extremely peculiar has been going on in their house, and ultimately the truth is revealed. There are no subplots, but if there had been (Roderick Usher’s dispute with the local vicar, or Lady Madeline’s affair with the gardener, or the narrator’s anxiety over a stock-market maneuver), they would have had to be integrated with the main theme or the story’s power would have been diluted.
Similarly, in Guy de Maupassant’s classic “The Piece of String,” one significant thing happens: Maitre Hauchecorne sees a piece of string on the ground, picks it up, and puts it in his pocket. As a result he is suspected of having found and kept a lost wallet full of cash, and he is driven to madness and an early death by the scorn of his fellow villagers. A simple enough situation, with no side-paths, but Maupassant manages, within a few thousand words that concentrate entirely on M. Hauchecorne’s unfortunate entanglement, to tell us a great many things about French village life, peasant thrift, the ferocity of bourgeois morality, and the ironies of life in general. A long disquisition about M. Hauchecorne’s unhappy early marriage or the unexpected death of his neighbor’s grandchild would probably have added nothing and subtracted much from the impact of the story.
H.G. Wells, who toward the end of the nineteenth century employed the medium of the short story to deal with the thematic matter of what we now call science fiction—and did it so well that his stories still can hold their own with the best SF of later generations—refined Poe’s “single effect” concept with special application to the fantastic:
The thing that makes such imaginations [i.e., SF themes] interesting is their translation into commonplace terms and a rigid exclusion of other marvels from the story. Then it becomes human. “How would you feel and what might not happen to you?” is the typical question, if for instance pigs could fly and one came rocketing over a bridge at you. How would you feel and what might not happen to you if suddenly you were changed into an ass and couldn’t tell anyone about it? Or if you suddenly became invisible? But no one would think twice about the answer if hedges and houses also began to fly, or if people changed into lions, tigers, cats, and dogs left and right, or if anyone could vanish anyhow. Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.
Right on the mark. Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen. The science fiction story is at its best when it deals with the consequences, however ramifying and multifarious, of a single fantastic assumption. What will happen the first time our spaceships meet those of another intelligent species? Suppose there were so many suns in the sky that the stars were visible only one night every two thousand years: what would that night be like? What if a twentieth-century doctor suddenly found himself in possession of a medical kit of the far future? What about toys from the far future falling into the hands of a couple of twentieth-century kids? One single wild assumption; one significant thing has happened, and it’s a very strange one. And from each hypothesis has come great science fiction: each of these four is a one-sentence summary of a story included in the definitive 1970 anthology of classics of our field, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
I think it’s an effective way to construct a story, though not necessarily the only effective way, and in general I’ve kept the one-thing-happens precept in mind through more than fifty years of writing them. The stories collected [in the not-yet-published seventh volume of my Collected Short Stories series] were written between August of 1987 and May of 1990 and demonstrate that I still believe in the classical unities. Of course, what seems to us a unity now might not have appeared that way when H.G. Wells was writing his wonderful stories in the nineteenth century. Wells might have argued that my “To the Promised Land” is built around two speculative fantastic assumptions, one that the Biblical Exodus from Egypt never happened, the other that it is possible to send rocketships to other worlds. But in fact we’ve sent plenty of rocketships to other worlds by now, so only my story’s alternative-world speculation remains fantasy today. Technically speaking, the space-travel element of the plot has become part of the given; it’s the other big assumption that forms the central matter of the story.
Three of the stories in the book, “In Another Country,” “We Are for the Dark,” and “Lion Time in Timbuctoo,” are actually not short stories at all, but novellas—a considerably different form, running three to five times as long as the traditional short story. The novella form is one of which I’m particularly fond, and one that I think lends itself particularly well to science fiction use. But it too is bound by the single-effect/single-assumption Poe/ Wells prescriptions. A novel may sprawl; it may jump freely from character to character, from subplot to subplot, even from theme to countertheme. A short story, as I’ve already shown, is best held under rigid technical discipline. But the novella is an intermediate form, partaking of some of the discursiveness of the novel yet benefiting from the discipline of the short story. A single startling assumption; the rigorous exploration of the consequences of that assumption; a resolution, eventually, of the problems that those consequences have engendered: the schema works as well for a novella as it does for a short story. The difference lies in texture, in detail, in breadth. In a novella the writer is free to construct a richly imagined background and to develop extensive insight into character as it manifests itself within a complex plot. In a short story those things, however virtuous, may blur and even ruin the effect the story strives to attain.
One story in the collection is neither fish nor fowl, and I point that out for whatever light it may cast on these problems of definition. “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another” may be considered either a very short novella or a very long short story, but in my mind it verges on being a novella without quite attaining a novella’s full complexity, while at the same time being too intricate to be considered a short story. Its primary structure is that of a short science fiction story: one speculation is put forth. (“What if computers were capable of creating artificial-intelligence replications of famous figures of history?”) But because Pizarro and Socrates are such powerful characters, they launch into an extensive dialog that carries the story far beyond the conventional limits of short fiction—without, however, leading it into the complexities of plot that a novella might develop.
And yet I think the story, whatever it may be, is a success—an opinion backed by the readers who voted it a Hugo for best novelette the year after it was published. The credit, I think, should go to Socrates and Pizarro, who carry it all along. As a rule, I think it’s ordinarily better to stick to the rules as I understand them. But, as this story shows, there are occasions when they can safely be abandoned.
Writing novels is an exhausting proposition: months and months of living with the same group of characters, the same background situation, the same narrative voice, trying to keep everything consistent day after day until the distant finish line is reached. When writing a novel, I always yearned for the brevity and simplicity of short-story writing. But then I would find myself writing a short story, and I felt myself in the iron clamp of the disciplines that govern that remorseless form, and longed for the range and expansiveness of novel-writing. I have spent many decades now moving from one extreme of feeling to the other, and the only conclusion I can draw from it is that writing is tough work.
So is reading, sometimes. But we go on doing it. In this collection of mine are ten stories long and short that illustrate some of my notions of what science fiction ought to have been attempting in the later years of the twentieth century. Whether they’ll last as long as those of Poe and Wells is a question I’d just as soon not spend much time contemplating; but I can say quite certainly that they would not have been constructed as they were but for the work of those two early masters. Even in a field as supposedly revolutionary as science fiction, the hand of tradition still governs what we do.
