It being the very eve of Eastercon, I’d been thinking about writing a blog post on the six stories that are up for this year’s BSFA Award, because awards shortlists are always interesting (if not always for the right reasons) but then I thought again. As it happens I’ve either met, corresponded with or been published alongside pretty much everyone on that list, and so for me to undertake any kind of detailed public analysis of their work would make me deeply uncomfortable and anything approaching an objective judgement would most likely prove impossible in any case. Luckily for us all, both Niall Alexander and Martin Lewis have blogged the shortlist with their usual high level of informed insight, and I commend their postings with enthusiasm. But travelling up to town yesterday, I found myself reading some stories that for me threw all the problems we inevitably find with such shortlists into stark relief, and so I thought I might say something more general about short fiction awards instead.
The stories I was reading were by Scott Bradfield, from his 1988 short fiction collection The Secret Life of Houses. I’d heard of Bradfield – who was published alongside Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard in early issues of Interzone – but not yet read him, and so this was my first encounter with his fiction. I very quickly found him to be one of those very special writers whose first effect is to make you question pretty much every word you’ve written until now. Reading his ‘The Flash! Kid’ made me laugh out loud with satisfaction at having stumbled across such a wonderfully original and raucously alive SF story (because yes, this is science fiction – one of the five BSFA Award nominees for 1984, no less) and reading ‘The Dream of the Wolf’ made me want to rip up everything I’ve written to date and do better from tomorrow.
Canis lupus youngi, canis lupus crassodon, canis niger rufus, Larry thought, and boarded the RTD at Beverly and Fairfax. The wolf, he thought. The wolf of the dream, the wolf of the world. He showed the driver his pass. Wolves in Utah, Northern Mexico, Baffin Island, even Hollywood. Wolves secretly everywhere, Larry thought, and moved down the crowded aisle. Elderly women jostled fitfully in their seats like birds on a wire. (TSLOH p3)
Every page of Bradfield’s prose turns up wonderful stuff like this – a constant awareness of the beauty of words, an intellect that clearly delights in juxtaposing the mundane with the fantastic, the recognisable with the totally out there. When you discover a writer who is so clearly his own person, who doesn’t give a toss about what others in his ‘peer group’ might be writing or what he ‘should’ be writing about, I feel like stopping whatever less important thing I happen to be doing and just celebrating to myself, and then later on, perhaps, celebrating here.
Because my God aren’t these the kind of stories we want to see more of?
The way Bradfield constructs his stories is deliriously idiosyncratic, and again one senses that he doesn’t have much time for the kind of rules that say a short story should have a clearly defined message or theme, that it should consist of an easily identifiable beginning and middle and end, that it should ideally be 3-6,000 words long. Rather, his stories enact themselves upon you, and they go on as long as Bradfield feels they should, opening new internal mini-chapters on fresh incident just when you think another, less brave writer might have wrapped things up. Of course in reality these stories are as artfully constructed as any tale by Chekhov – the reappearance of the instigatory termites in the final paragraph of ‘The Flash! Kid’, for example, is a sweetly ironical proof of that – but the hugely overriding impression on reading Bradfield is of freedom, of space, and of waywardness.
Of course, one of the big problems with choosing which works to nominate for short fiction awards is the vast quantity of eligible material to be considered. No reader, writer or fan can subscribe to every magazine, or even hope to read more than a select proportion of the often very fine material that is increasingly available online. The other problem – and it’s a more subtle one – is that all too often and all too early a consensus begins to emerge for which stories are ‘the’ stories in any given year. The ‘Year’s Bests’ come out, the readers’ polls are drawn up, and from the moment those lists are published there’s a subtle kind of background pressure not to bother looking beyond these, because all the necessary reading and considering has already been done for us by others. I’ve felt such a pressure myself – and of course as a writer I may even have benefited from it. I’m not saying that Year’s Bests are a bad thing – I enjoy them very much, find them useful as a reader and have felt extremely honoured to be selected for them as a writer – just that we shouldn’t forget to look and think beyond them and argue the cause of overlooked material where we feel that’s necessary.
How, for example, can all the major ‘Best of 2012’ anthologies have overlooked M. John Harrison’s ‘In Autotelia’? And if I don’t see some of Helen Marshall’s stories turning up on the F/H shortlists I will count it as a serious oversight.
I applaud Abigail Nussbaum’s ‘Short Fiction Snapshot’ initiative at Strange Horizons, which should at the very least do something to help develop the critical apparatus around short fiction, to bring more stories into the spotlight and – equally importantly – make us as readers and reviewers sample a wider variety of short fiction and think about it at a deeper level.
And when the time comes to start thinking about next year’s awards (which I for one am looking forward to particularly as I’ll have Hugo voting rights for the first time) perhaps it would be a good idea for all of us to take up the cause of some of our own particular favourites in the field of short fiction, to write about them at our blogs and in the zines, to spread the word, to look beyond the usual publications, to encourage and celebrate not just the familiar but the radical and the excellent and the truly noteworthy, the stories that make you angry with yourself for not yet writing as well as you think you one day might.