Science Fiction SHORT Short Short Stories.

When I was 10 or 11 one my favorite books to check out of the public library was an anthology put together by Isaac Azimov called 100 great science fiction short short stories ISBN: 9780385130448. It was a variety of very short (often just a couple of pages or even just a single paragraph) stories. I loved it. I could breeze through a dozen or so really cool ideas, themes, plots in little more than an hour.

It started my life-long love of short stories. I still love them however there doesn't seem to be as much of a public outlet for short stories now-a-days. Go to any book store or, what the heck, maybe a library and you will see shelf after shelf of never-ending multiple volume series. I hate most multiple volume novels series. I usually find them bloated, meandering and in bad need of good editing. What ever happened to less is more? A good short story has to be well written; when you have fewer words to choose from, you have to choose them far more carefully.

But this is the sort of thing that people will come back to over and over again. The industry follows the money and it's getting harder and harder to find anthologies and anthology magazines. This is a far cry from the way it was a century ago when many to most novels were published in serial form in newspapers and magazine publications.

A few years ago Wired Magazine decided to ask some of the biggest writers in the field to tackle the very, very short story; just 6 words. Here are the results.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html