We are always casting around for inspiration. After getting ChatGPT to provide a new introduction for the podcast, Gary and Jonathan kick off a discussion about the health of the short fiction field, the scope and variety of short story collections due to be published in 2023, and share some (okay, many) thoughts on the history of short fiction collections in the science fiction field.
As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast. We’ll see you again in two weeks.
Congratulations on a very focused episode!
In terms of a single short story collection creating & cementing a writer’s reputation, Jorge Luis Borges’s *Ficciones* has to be right near the top of the list.
As to the question of “complete” story collections that start off weak, Fantagraphic Books has a clever solution to that when they started their Carl Barks library. Barks was the most talented of the many creators of Disney comic books in the 1940s through 1960s and created, among many other characters, Uncle Scrooge McDuck. He’s deeply revered among comics cognoscenti and his work *mostly* holds up today–but some of the earliest comics aren’t up to the standards of the later work. So Fantagraphics simply started the Complete Barks Library in the middle of his career, releasing the volumes out of order to get some of the best work in front of the new audience rather than the weakest.