Bookpost: Musing about shorts

I haven't bookposted about most of what I've read during the second half of the year. This is because I read all of Elemental Logic and Machineries of Empire in July and August, and I'm mildly intimidated by the task of saying something interesting about them. They're both incredible series that meant a lot to me, so I don't want to just post a dumb one-liner! Well, I will if I have to, but for now I'll let those marinate a little longer, maybe plink away at them over the holiday break.

In the meantime, here's a small handful:

Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh (colors JN Wiedle & Rachel Cohen) — Barbarous, ch. 1 and 2 (comics)

Nov 10

This ongoing webcomic is once again updating (with chapter... 5? I think), and also they're running a Kickstarter to print ch. 3, so I went back and read through my print copies of ch. 1 and 2.

This comic is excellent and I highly recommend it. Chapter 1 is admittedly a little odd; I remember thinking a lot of the interpersonal drama seemed unreasonably bombastic, and that it kind of came out of nowhere. But re-reading it with knowledge of what comes later, I feel like the conflicts actually make sense and are correctly proportioned. Just gotta have faith!! And/or not be reading it at two pages per week.

Man, these print editions are some gorgeous books. They're these massively oversized perfect-bound things, but super skinny, a format that reminds me of some French comics. I don't really know how well these sell; the Kickstarters always blast through their number, but woof, they're certainly priced like there's zero economy of scale.

I'll be buying the whole series anyway, despite wincing at the price; the art just fuckin' sings at this size. But if you're not as devoted to these authors as I am, you might want to just read the webcomic and/or wait for the inevitable one-volume edition.

Vandana Singh — Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories

Sept. 6

This short story collection was excellent. I hardly know what to say about it. Whatever, you should totally read these. Here, try the title story.

TBH tho, I rarely know what to say about short stories in general. I realized while reading this that while my taste in shorts is extremely particular, I have a very difficult time expressing what it actually is:

• Something to do with elegance, and economy of motion. Well, I mean, that one's obvious. But I don't mean just lapidary prose or whatever, it's more about choosing and cutting.
• Something to do with the largeness of the story's idea and the openness or closure of its boundaries. I think maybe a truly good story almost has to be about something that's impossible to know, or has to fail to encompass some crucial part of its premise. Otherwise it's just a really short and boring novel.
• Something to do with... well, I'm already kind of lost in the weeds here, no need to push it to three. The way that middle bullet point crashed and burned pretty much says it all.

Wow, what a singularly unsatisfying digression! 🌻

Martha Wells — Stories of the Raksura vol. 2: The Dead City and The Dark Earth Below

Oct 13

Speaking of short stories! So, I consider Wells to be a supremely novelistic writer (her small-scale structures are very simple, but she's a master of layering them to create magnificent large-scale structures), and tbh I think her short stories often aren't quite good. By my incalculable and inarticulable standards, cf. above! If I step aside from myself a bit, I think they're probably solid stories in the vein of the old SF and adventure magazines; it's just that I have no particular interest in that, and am looking for something entirely else whenever I wade into some shorts.

But, I generally enjoyed these anyway, because for the most part they're not precisely short stories; they're shrapnel and fragments flaking off a larger novelistic edifice that I'm already familiar with and invested in. The hypertext halo around a good novel. I don't think they stand alone very well, but they don't have to.

More evidence of that effect: The one non-Raksura story in here happens to be the second story I've read about that group of characters, and it retroactively improved that other story. I suspect she's got about a short novel worth of story for these people and it just hasn't really made sense to tie it together yet. A writer with a higher natural density level might be able to show that depth holographically; use subchannels and interference patterns to give the impression that you're reading book-sized people in a short. But Wells maybe needs more space, and sure enough, once she doubles these characters' page-time and gives them a wider variety of situations to deal with, they start to round out a bit.

Still though, the best one of this bunch is the longest one, "The Dead Earth Below." Which is unsurprising, since Wells is very good at novella scales, cf. Murderbot.