How do you judge the quality of a short story?  There are many ways, and you can judge a number of things, but I just finished two short stories, and this occurred to me. Be internally consistent. The first story I read was a time travel piece that opens a soon to be published anthology. It’s fine, not a bad story at all, but … it has two lead characters. They are both travelling in time. At one point character A travels back in time to effect a change to the timestream, while character B remains behind. Character B manages to notice and comment upon how character A must have been successful, because the present had changed. But, how could character B know? After all, character B was now part of the changed timestream where the original event had never occurred. It didn’t make sense, and seemed very sloppy to me. It was a  pity, because the rest of the story had much to recommend it.

Altogether more assured is John Langan’s novelette from the September F&SF, “Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers”. It’s your usual post-apocalyptic running from a pack of terrible demon creatures while possibly morphing into some kind of dark hero story – we’ve all read those – but it’s very well written. I was slightly put off at first by some typographical stuff in the story, but Langan draws you very steadily and definitely through the story, building his world, and keeping his characters focussed and believable. I need to think about it a bit more – part of me wanted a bigger payoff at the the end of the story – but I liked it great deal and will definitely be keeping an eye out for his new story collection next year.  BTW, you subscribe to F&SF, right? This issue comes with Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, so you know you need to. It’s really very, very good.