Table of Contents for the Perfect Short Fiction Anthology (Part 2)

by Steven H Silver

Mind Meld was a feature on the website SF Signal, curated by Paul Weimer. For each Mind Meld, Weimer would send a question to several authors and fans, asking for their answers, which would then be published together. This page provides my answer to one of the Mind Melds I participated in, along with a listing of the other authors who responded to that particular question.

Question: Very rarely does a short fiction anthology score a home run with every single story it contains. Tastes differ from reader to reader. We asked this week's participants to play the role of Editor:

Q: If you could publish a short fiction anthology containing up to 25 previously-published sf/f/h stories, which stories would it include and why?

Here's what they said:

Participants: Jason Sanford, Genevieve Valentine, Nancy Jane Moore, Rick Klaw, Kelley Eskridge, Sanford Allen, and Scott A. Cupp

Steven H Silver is the editor of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus, the publisher of ISFiC Press, editor of three anthologies for DAW Books, and the author of several short stories, the next, "In the Night," appearing in Love and Rockets in December. He recently edited a two volume collection of Lester del Rey's short fiction for NESFA Press.

In creating this list, I set certain guidelines for myself, with the intention of breaking them whenever I wanted to. I wanted stories that weren't award winners, although you'll note that one of them recent won the Nebula Award and others have been nominated for various awards. I wanted stories that haven't been reprinted too many times, although some of the stories are easily found. I wanted to avoid including too many alternate history stories, but as a judge of the Sidewise Award, I've read a lot of those over the last fifteen years. I didn't want to include more than one story by an individual author, and I managed to keep to that rule, although some of the authors have multiple stories I enjoy. Some of the stories are influential on the field, some have an important point to make, and some I just enjoyed and would like to see known by a broader audience.

1. Murray Leinster, "Sidewise in Time," Astounding, 6/34. I named the Sidewise Awards after this story, so clearly I enjoyed it. In fact, although Leinster presents several alternative worlds in the story, it is more a multiple universe story with each of those universes encroaching on parts of our own world and his characters trying to move through their own world as it is dotted with groups from other timelines.
2. "Fane of the Black Pharoah" by Robert Bloch, Weird Tales, 12/37. Bloch's rather straightforward tale within the Cthulhu mythos doesn't employ any of the horrific monsters that populate so much of the mythos, but does use history to build an ancient wonder that only becomes horrifying as the story plays out.
3. "The Wheels of If" by L. Sprague de Camp, Unknown, 10/40. de Camp uses the idea of multiple worlds before he settles into a timeline in which North America is settled by the Norse. Once there, he mixes the discovery of the alternate setting with a police procedural and a mystery as his protagonist tries to live the life of the person he replaced.
4. "It Didn't Happen" by Fredric Brown, Playboy, 10/63. An existential story in which Brown looks at where someone gets their morality in a world in which other people literally don't matter. A wonderful bit of paranoia and self importance.
5. "The Horror Out of Time" by Randall Garrett, F&SF, 3/78. Garrett's take on the Cthulhu mythos, although with a twist ending that makes it horrific satire rather than the simply horrific. To say more would ruin the ending.
6. "The Fundamental Right" by Doug Larsen, Analog, 5/92. Larsen looks at the quadrennial presidential election and tries to figure out how to make issues take a front seat to personality. The story stayed with me, although I couldn't remember who wrote it. Asking Stan Schmidt didn't help because he didn't remember it. Eventually, I managed to rediscover it in my collection.
7. "Must and Shall" by Harry Turtledove, Asimov's, 11/95. I finished reading this short story of New Orleans occupied by Federal forces long after the end of the Civil War and later found myself wanting to return to find out what happened next, only to remember it was a short story, not a novel.
8. "The Ladies of Grace Adieu" by Susanna Clarke, Starlight, 1996. Not necessarily the best of Clarke's short fiction, but representative and it served as her introduction, providing hints of what to expect in her eventual masterpiece debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
9. "Abandon in Place" by Jerry Oltion, Analog, 12/96. Oltion would turn this story into a novel, but the full impact of the space age ghost story is presented in this shorter form, undiluted by the additional plotlines necessary for the novel. 1
10. "The Babe, the Iron Horse and Mr. McGillicuddy" by Ben Bova & Rick Wilber, Asimov's, 3/97. The story of two all-star teams of baseball's greatest at their prime against each other in a story which is an odd blend of W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe and the musical Damn Yankees.
11. "Billy Mitchell's Overt Act" by William Sanders, Alternate Generals, 1998. Billy Mitchell, who had incurred the enmity of the armed forces, has the opportunity to put his version of the air corps into reality at Pearl Harbor. Sanders gives his fictional version of the general the same types of problems to overcome as the real world did.
12. "Kaddish for the Last Survivor" by Michael A. Burstein, Analog, 11/00. Specifically about the death of the last survivor of the Holocaust and the way it effects his granddaughter, Burstein's story is also about the death of customs and cultures and the fact that their extinction can be caused by the choice of a culture's practitioners as well as imposed by outsiders.
13. "Seventy Two Letters" Ted Chiang, Vanishing Acts, 2000. Winner of the Sidewise Award, this is a story in which Jewish mysticism functions as science and a look at the social conscience needed to apply scientific principles and extrapolate morality.
14. "A Book, By Its Cover" by P.D. Cacek, Shelf Life, 2002. Originally published in a small press edition, it was picked up for David Hartwell's Year's Best anthology. It looks at the tie between people and their favorite books set against the backdrop of Kristallnacht in Germany in the 1930s.
15. "Somewhere in My Mind There Is a Painting Box" by Charles de Lint, The Green Man, 2002. Magic permeates de Lint's worlds, but in an almost naturalistic manner. This story presents a missing persons problem, the creative process, and, of course, de Lint's magic.
16. "The Héloïse Archive" by L. Timmel Duchamp, Love's Body, Dancing in Time, 2004. A retelling of the story of Abelard and Heloise from Heloise's point of view. An excellent (and rare) example of an alternate history that does not rely on warfare to change the world or to tell its story.
17. "A Key to the Illuminated Heretic" by A.M. Dellamonica, Alternate Generals 2, 2005. The story of a Joan of Arc who wasn't burned at the stake, but simply imprisoned, and the difficulties she has dealing with those who she helped establish in a world where they have to deal with her as a troublesome person rather than as an honored martyr.
18. "Recovering Apollo 8" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Asimov's, 2/07. Another Sidewise Award winner and non-military alternate history which serves up the nostalgia of the space age. In this case, the failure of an early Apollo manned mission and the way that even its failure could capture the imagination of the world in a way that the current space program no longer can.
19. "Quaestiones Super Caelo et Mundo" by Michael F. Flynn, Analog, 7/07. Tying for the Sidewise Award with Rusch's story is Flynn's recreation of the Medieval style of teaching through questioning which successfully manages to recreate the period and tell a story about the advancement of science.
20. "The Cambist & Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham, Loggorhea, 2007. This is a clever fable which uses exchange rates to tell the story of a cambist, one who trades money, who must provide advice to a tyrant. Abraham uses traditional tropes of fairy tales to tell his story of using one's own wits to overcome hardship.
21. "A Buyer's Guide to Maps of Antarctica" by Catherynne Valente, Clarkesworld 5/08. Not really a short story, Valente's work uses descriptions of maps to form an almost epistolary story of the feud between two rival cartographers and explorers.
22. The Women of Nell Gwynne's by Kage Baker, Subterranean Press, 2009. This one won this year's Nebula Award and was nominated for a Hugo, so it isn't exactly forgotten, but it was originally published in a very limited edition that sold out quickly. It tells the story of a select group of female spies in London.

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