Abstract
Edgar Allan Poe wrote that at the heart of the short story was ‘a certain unique or single effect’ (Poe, 1950: 450). He himself can be seen as one of the originators of the science fiction (SF) short story (as well as the detective and horror stories), but while studies of the short story naturally include Poe, science fiction and its relatives seem to have got short shrift. Charles May’s The Short Story: the Reality of Artifice (2002) mentions Poe, but no other SF writer—if we exclude Kipling and a tangential comment on Wells—other than Ray Bradbury. Yet few genres have helped to keep the short story alive as much as science fiction which is par excellence an example of ‘effect’.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works Cited
Aldiss, Brian W. Trillion Year Spree. London: Gollancz, 1986.
Ashley, Mike. The Time Machines: the Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from the Beginning to 1950. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
Ashley, Mike. Transformations: the Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1950. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.
Ashley, Mike. The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines 1880–1950. London: British Library, 2006.
Ashley, Mike. Gateways to Forever: the Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1980. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.
Asimov, Isaac. The Complete Robot. London: HarperCollins, 1983.
Asimov, Isaac. Foundation. London: HarperCollins, 1994.
Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. New York: Bantam, 2004.
Attebery, Brian. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Benford, Gregory. ‘Effing the ineffable’. Foundation 38 (winter 1986/87): 49–57.
Bradbury, Ray. A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
Budrys, Algis. ‘Paradise Charted’. Visions of Wonder: the Science Fiction Research Association Anthology edited by David G. Hartwell and Milton T. Wolf. New York: Tor, 1996: 292–338.
Chapdelaine, Perry A., Tony Chapdelaine and George Hay (eds). The John W. Campbell Letters, vol. 1. Franklin, TN: AC Projects, 1985.
Chesney, George. The Battle of Dorking. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
Clarke, Arthur C. The Collected Stories. New York: Tor, 2001.
Clute, John and Peter Nicholls. The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction. London: Orbit, 1993.
Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Lost World & Other Stories. Herts: Wordsworth, 1995.
Crowley, John. ‘Great Work of Time’ in John Crowley (ed.) Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction. HarperCollins: New York, 2004.
Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977. London: Gollancz, 1999. eFanzines.com. http://www.efanzines.com.
Ellis, Edward S. The Huge Hunter or The Steam Man of the Prairies. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
Ellison, Harlan, (ed.) Dangerous Visions [1967]. London: Gollancz, 1987.
Fowler, Karen Joy. ‘What I Didn’t See’ in The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1, ed. Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffrey D. Smith. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2005: 191–210.
Gernsback, Hugo. ‘A New Sort of Magazine’. Amazing Stories, 1 (April, 1926): 3.
Gibson, William. ‘The Gernsback Continuum’. The Norton Book of Science Fiction, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery. New York: Norton, 1993: 457–66.
Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
Godwin, Tom. The Cold Equations and Other Stories. New York: Baen, 2003.
Gunn, James. ‘The Readers of Hard Science Fiction’, in Hard Science Fiction, ed. George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986: 70–81.
Hartwell, David G. The Science Fiction Century. New York: Tor, 1997.
Heinlein, Robert A. The Best of Robert Heinlein. London: Sigwick & Jackson, 1973.
Heinlein, Robert A. ‘By His Bootstraps’ in Robert A. Heinlein, The Menace From Earth. London: Corgi, 1973. 40–87.
Huntington, John. Rationalising Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Short Story. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
James, Edward and Mendlesohn, Farah. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Kessel, John. ‘Why SF is not Welcome in the Parlor’ http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Parlor.html. (Originally published in Short Form, vol. 2, no. 2, August 1989).
Kessel, John. ‘The Brother from Another Planet’. New York Review of Science Fiction 55 (March 1993) 1: 8–11.
Keyes, Daniel. Flowers for Algernon. London: Orion, 2006.
Kincaid, Paul. ‘What is it we do when we read science fiction?’ Foundation 78 (spring 2000): 72–82.
Le Corbusier. The City of Tomorrow and its Planning. London: Architectural Press, 1987.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. London: MacDonald, 1969.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Birthday of the World. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
May, Charles E. (ed.) The New Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994.
May, Charles E. The Short Story: the Reality of Artifice. London: Routledge, 2002.
Miller, Walter M. A Canticle for Leibowitz. London: Orbit 1993.
Moorcock, Michael. ‘The March of the Whiteshirts’. Interzone 211 (July/August): 5–6.
Poe, Edgar Allan. ‘Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales’. Selected Prose, Poetry and Eureka. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950: 447–55.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. ‘The Lucky Strike’ in Vinland the Dream and Other Stories. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.
Russ, Joanna. ‘When It Changed’. http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/russ/russ1.html. First published 1972 in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions.
Stross, Charles. Accelerando. London: Orbit, 2006.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Tiptree Jr, James. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’. Warm Worlds and Otherwise. New York: Ballantine, 1975. 131–64.
van Vogt, A. E. The Voyage of the Space Beagle. London: HarperCollins, 1973.
Weinbaum, Stanley. A Martian Odyssey and Other Stories. London: Sphere, 1977.
Wells, H. G. ‘Introduction’. The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells. London: Gollancz, 1933.
Wells, H. G. The Complete Short Stories. London: Phoenix Press, 1998.
Wells, H. G. The War of the Worlds. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.
Westfahl, Gary. Cosmic Engineers. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Westfahl, Gary. The Mechanics of Wonder: the Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2011 Andy Sawyer
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sawyer, A. (2011). The Science Fiction Short Story. In: Cox, A. (eds) Teaching the Short Story. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316591_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316591_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-57370-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-31659-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)