The nice folk, the web elf I suspect, at Neil Gaiman’s website have posted all sorts of stuff to do with his story “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” You can read the story, or download a recording of Neil reading it. There are also links to the other Hugo nominees for Best Short Story. You should read them all.

I have a real soft spot for “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”. Neil kindly and generously wrote it for my book The Starry Rift. When it first appeared in my email inbox I was struck by all of the things that make a good Neil Gaiman story a good Neil Gaiman story: his writing voice, the smoothness and confidence of the telling, the deft skill of it all. I was also struck by how dark it was. However, time and circumstance meant that it didn’t end up in The Starry Rift. Instead, in sterling fashion, it filled the role of original story in his excellent collection Fragile Things (which came out last year), and was reprinted in my The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 1. Neil kindly wrote a replacement story for The Starry Rift, “Orange”, which you’ll have to wait till next February to read, and “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” is on the Hugo ballot, which fills me with all kinds of pleasure. If I could vote for it, I would. And, who knows, maybe I’ll get to bring you another Neil story in some other book some time in the future. If I do, I know it’ll be a delight.

A little linkage this morning:

• John Clute talks clearly as always about the Jonathan Lethem-edited Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 60s over at scifi.com. He talks about everything except whether Dick, who must be admired and understood, can still actually be read, now that we are living in his world – something that Gary Wolfe touches on in Locus next month (not online). You need to read both articles, and perhaps glance at Graham Sleight’s related Locus article. I’d also draw your attention, when discussing Dick, to this new Gollancz book, Human Is?: A Philip K. Dick Reader, which collects some of his best short fiction.
• Lou Anders has been discussing a number of interesting things over a Bowing to the Future. He’s written several suprisingly interesting pieces on SF and literary respectability: I say surprising, not because it’s surprising that Lou’s opinions are interesting, but because the subject is so deadly dull. I am constantly astonished that anyone still cares whether sf achieves literary respectabilty or not. Yes, it was nice that Stephen King won his big award, and it’s lovely that Bradbury got his Pulitzer. Good stuff. But, we live in a science fictional world. Whether or not the literary mainstream acknowledge it or not, we are living and breathing science fiction ever single minute of our 21st Century First World Western European lives. And Lou, in two quite elegant posts, seems pretty much headed to that point of view too, though I think he’d like the respect anyhow, which I can understand.
• And via Lou, a pretty good review by David Soyka over at Strange Horizons, that looks at Lou’s Fast Forward and George Mann’s The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. The review is fine, and both books are worth checking out. I think I like Lou’s better of the two, but that may just be my taste. Anyhow, Soyka says of anthologies that these days “You can’t just put together a bunch of stories you think are really cool”, and goes on to say that you need themes and such. I think you can. I think I have. And I think that’s what Lou and George have done. I do sometimes wonder if I’m slipping further and further out of touch…

My pal Russell has a new anthology heading towards the presses at Chez Ticonderoga. This time it’s Worker’s Paradise, a collection of stories by Simon Brown and a whole bunch of other neat folks, inspired by the Howard government’s recent IR laws, Russ has co-edited with Nick Evans. They’re both pretty savvy guys, so you should definitely check it out. It’s also nice to see that Russ is going to publish an expanded edition of Lew Shiner’s collection Love in Vain. It’s basically a ‘best of Shiner’ collection originally printed in a very small edition a few year’s back. A larger, and more affordable, edition is a very cool thing indeed. If you like the idea of reading great short stories by one of the field’s best short fiction writers, then this too should be on your ‘must buy’ list.

A quick one: all reviewers of science fiction should be banned from using the phrase ‘what it means to be human’. If they were, then they might explain what it is they think they see in an SF novel without dropping into safe cliche.  I’ll never forget when I was maybe fifteen years old, an English teacher of mine said it wasn’t enough to say that something in a book was evocative, you had to say what it evoked and what that meant. This phrase, which I’ve used often myself, is SF’s equivalent of ‘the imagery is evocative’.  Surely we can be smarter than that?

I’m curious. Greg Johnson over at SF Site doesn’t deserve to be singled out, but in his review for Al Reynolds’ Zima Blue he says ‘Hard science fiction, and space opera, are styles of SF that tend to work better at lengths longer than short stories’. I’ve just edited a volume of space opera stories, and have another that contains some hard sf and space opera stories coming shortly, and they’re all short stories pretty much, and I’ve heard this view before, but is it true?  I do think the novella may be the best length for science fiction, but wasn’t science fiction founded on the short story? If you run through Bob Silverberg’s The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, isn’t it filled with short stories? And, aren’t a lot of them hard SF or space opera?  When did it become popular wisdom that sf works better at longer lengths? And why? Is there something that we were doing, back in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, that we’re not doing here in the Oughties?