Recommended Reading: The Best Short SFF

Over on vox.com, Todd VanDerWerff has an interesting article (more of a listicle) entitled 10 of the best science fiction and fantasy short stories ever, in which he interviews Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams about, as the title implies, their opinions on the best short SFF ever.

The interview contains a number of interesting remarks about what makes these stories great, as well as what makes great short SFF. I would be interested to hear from people on whether they think these stories are significantly different (less literary? more plot driven?) that what the current short SFF magazines publish (this was alleged by some commentators who I quote here). Based on the ones I have read, I suspect they are not that different at all. But perhaps Hill and Adams, as modern editors, have tastes that differ from the puppies.

The list, along with some brief remarks by Hill and Adams, is:

1. "The Jewbird," by Bernard Malamud. Says Hill:

   A great example of how a fantasy can be one thing on the surface but can also be a perfect way to grapple with big questions and big subjects like, why do human beings have to be so tribal? Why do they feel drawn to say, "Our tribe good. Your tribe bad"? That's an uncomfortable question, but in the realm of fantasy, it's one we can tackle.

2. "Flowers for Algernon," by Daniel Keyes. Says Adams:

   One of the things that I think is so amazing about the story is how Keyes is able to really have the prose style tell the story all the way through it. It starts off with Charlie being very unintelligent. He gets the drug that boosts his intelligence, and the writing improves as Charlie improves. That's such a hard thing to pull off, and yet all of it just works wonderfully together. Of course, the story has the tragic end where Charlie loses the intelligence that he got to have only briefly, so he's returned to the same sort of writing style from the start. It packs such an emotional wallop.
   
   A lot of [science fiction and fantasy] in the early days didn't have really great writing. It was very pedestrian prose, and some of the greatest practitioners of genre fiction weren't really prose stylists. Isaac Asimov wrote perfectly well, but his prose itself wasn't particularly notable.

   Says Joe Hill:

   In the early days of American science fiction, these dudes — they were mostly dudes; there were some women writing — were getting paid by the word. There was no incentive to really do anything except lay in as many adjectives as you could get into a single sentence, because every one was worth another penny and a half.

   And John Joseph Adams again:

   People paint the genre with this one brush [of being poorly written] because they read one example somewhere and they thought it wasn't very well-written. Then they think all science fiction is written like that. Of course there are brilliant examples that are counterpoints, like the stories that Joe and I selected here and in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.
   
   In my intro [to Best American], I talk about Alfred Bester and how The Stars My Destination [a breakthrough science fiction novel] really woke me up to what genre fiction was capable of. Bester was one of the genre's great prose stylists. It's not to say that he didn't have great ideas, because he did. But he had the wonderful, beautiful prose as well. We can't separate these two things. Now the best science fiction/fantasy prose is on par with whatever you find in mainstream fiction.

3. "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain," by James Tiptree Jr. 
4. "The Deathbird," by Harlan Ellison
5. "The Specialist's Hat," by Kelly Link. 
6. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," by Ursula K. Le Guin.
7. "The Library of Babel," by Jorge Luis Borges. 
8. "Speech Sounds," by Octavia Butler.
9. "Harrison Bergeron," by Kurt Vonnegut. 
10. "There Will Come Soft Rains," by Ray Bradbury.

I recommend the whole article to you, which also contains links to most of the stories.