Introduction
Hello, and welcome to
Wireless.
This is not a novel.
This is a short-story collection. This is not a short story. This
is the introduction to a short-story collection. This is not
fiction. This is a sequence of concepts that I am transferring into
your conscious awareness via the medium of words, some of which may
be false. Danger: here be epistemological
dragons . . .
I’m Charlie Stross,
and I have a vice I indulge in from time to time: I write short
fiction. I’ve been writing short stories (in various length
factors) and getting them published in magazines for a long time—my
first short story in the British SF magazine Interzone came out in 1986—and although I don’t
make much money at it, I still keep doing it, even though these
days I write full-time for my living.
Short stories are a
famously dead format in most genres of written fiction. Back in the
1950s, there was a plethora of fiction magazines on the shelves of
every newsagent: but changes in the structure of the
magazine-publishing business killed the fiction markets, and what
had once been a major source of income for many writers turned into
a desert. Even science fiction—which has a long tradition of short
stories as a major subfield, going back to the 1920s and the pages
of Astounding Science Fiction, and
which has fared better than other genres in terms of the survival
of the monthly magazines—isn’t a terribly fertile field to plow.
Because of the way the publishing industry has evolved, if you want
to earn a living, you really need to write novels: short-fiction
outlets, with a very few exceptions, pay abysmally.
It wasn’t always
thus. The science fiction novel was itself something of a novelty
until the 1950s; the famous names of the early-SF literary
canon—Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and
less-well-remembered names such as Fredric Brown and Cyril
Kornbluth and Alfred Bester—were primarily short-fiction writers.
With dozens of monthly newsstand pulp-fiction magazines demanding
to be fed, and a public not yet weaned to the glass teat of
television, the field was huge. Video didn’t so much kill the radio
star as it did for the short-fiction markets, providing an
alternative distraction on demand for tired workers to chill out
with.
But the SF
short-story field survives to this day. It’s in much better shape,
paradoxically, than other genres, where the form has all but died.
It would be hard to describe it as thriving, at least compared to
the golden age of pulps—but science fiction readers are
traditionalists, and those of us who write short fiction aren’t
primarily in it for the money: we’ve got other, less obvious,
incentives.
(Actually, I’m not
sure I know anyone who writes fiction at any length solely for money. If you’ve got the
skill to string words into sentences, there are any number of ways
to earn a living, most of which are far less precarious than the
life of a freelance fiction writer. At the risk of
overgeneralizing, it’s one of those occupations you go into because
you can’t not do it, and any attempts
to justify it by pointing to commercial success are, at best,
special pleading. If Stephen King had failed to get his big break
with Carrie, if J. K. Rowl ing’s first
Harry Potter book had sold out its first thousand-copy print run
and thereafter gone out of print, I’m willing to bet that they’d
have kept on writing regardless.)
Speaking for myself,
I’m an obsessive fiction writer. I write because I’ve got a cloud
of really neat ideas buzzing around my brain, and I need to let
them out lest my head explode. But having ideas is only part of the
reason I write—otherwise, I could just keep a private journal. The
other monkey riding my back is the urge to communicate, to reach
out and touch someone. (Or to lift the lid on their brainpan,
sprinkle some cognitive dissonance inside, stir briskly, then
tiptoe away with a deranged titter.) Everyone I know who does this
job has got the same monkey on their shoulders, urging them on,
inciting them to publish or be damned, communicate or
die.
If you’re a
compulsive communicator, nothing gets your attention like feedback
from the public—a signal saying “message received.” To many
writers, money is one kind of feedback; nothing says “message
received” quite like the first royalty check after your book earns
out the advance. It tells you that people actually went out and
bought it. (And it pays the grocery
bills.) Then there are the reviews, be they brilliant or misguided,
or occasionally brilliant and
misguided, which tell you a little bit about how the message was
received or misunderstood. They don’t pay the grocery bills, but
they still matter to us.
But the feedback from
a novel is slow to arrive, and thin beer indeed after the amount of
effort that went into fermenting the brew.
Imagine you’ve got an
office job. You go to work every day, and there’s a perk: the
office is about ten feet from your bedroom door. (No lengthy
commute!) You sit in that office—alone, for the most part—and
write, hopefully without interruption or human companionship.
Sometimes you get bored and take a day or two off, or go do the
housework, or go shopping. And sometimes you find yourself working
there at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night because you took Friday off,
and Thursday before it, and your demon conscience is whispering in
your ear, reminding you to put in the hours. You’re almost always
on your own.
You’ll find it
generally takes somewhere between a month and a year to write a
novel—sometimes more, sometimes less. And once it’s written, you
deliver it to your agent or editor, and it disappears for a couple
of months. Then it reappears as a job in the publisher’s production
queue, moving in lockstep through a series of well-defined
processes on its way to being turned into cartons of finished
books. There’s a little wiggle room, but in general if you turn in
a book, it will take a year to show up in hardcover (and then
another year before it’s reprinted in paperback).
So: once a year, you
get the fanfare and fireworks show of a new book coming into print.
And then the reviews and reader comments trickle in, usually over a
period of a couple of months. Then the long silence resumes,
punctuated by the odd piece of fan mail (a surprising proportion of
which is concerned with pointing out the same hugely significant
typo on page seven—that escaped both you and your editors—as the
previous sixteen e-mails) . . .
Short stories are
different: they push the reward-feedback button much more
frequently than novels. (And that’s why a lot of us start out
writing short stories before we tackle novels.) There’s an
addictive quality to writing short stories, like being a rat in a
behavioral-science experiment that rewards correct performance of
some complex task with a little electric shock to the medial
forebrain bundle. Not only do they not take months or years to
write (when things are going well, it’s more like hours or days),
but you can send them out to a magazine or anthology editor with
some hope of hearing back within a couple of months. Better still,
if a magazine decides to buy your story, it can be in print in a
couple of months. Push the button harder, rat! It’s great training
for acquiring the motivation to engage with the bigger, slower job
of writing a novel.
The speed of the
short-story publication cycle brings me to the second reason I
write them: I get to play with new ideas in a way I can’t manage at
novel length. Novels are huge, cumbersome projects that take a long
time to bolt together; in contrast, short stories are a quick
vehicle for trying out something new, the fiction writer’s
experimental workbench. I can focus on a particular idea or
technique to the exclusion of everything else—which brings it into
focus and lets me explore it to the full without worrying about
whether it unbalances the plot development or fits with the
protagonist’s motivations or whatever.
The lack of money
also means there’s less at stake. If I’m working on a novel, I
can’t afford to try out an untested new writing technique in it. At
worst, I might end up having to throw six months’ writing in the
trash when it proves unfixable: a mess in any situation, and
potentially catastrophic if you’re self-employed and working to
deadline. But I can take a day or two off to write a short story
and see if it works: throw it at a magazine, put it out in public,
and see if my readers throw rotten tomatoes or gold sovereigns. Or,
for a bigger idea—a new stylistic experiment, for example—I can
treat it as a pilot project for a novel: take a month, write a
couple of novelettes or a novella, find a home for them in an
anthology or a magazine.
Anyway: here’s
Wireless.
I wrote the stories
in this collection between 1998 and 2008. Some of them were
purportedly written for money—at least, an editor approached me,
and said, “Would you like to write me a story about Subject X? I’ll
pay!”—but none of them was cost-effective; the money was just the
excuse. They span the spectrum from the short-short “MAXOS” all the
way up to “Palimpsest” and “Missile Gap,” novellas that bump up
close to the complexity and depth associated with novels. Some of
them were written in response to a specific challenge from an
editor (“Unwirer,” for example, had to fit a theme anthology’s
remit—tales in which the developmental history of science and
technology had followed a different path) while some were written
in response to challenges from within (“Snowball’s Chance” because
an imp of the perverse taunted me to write a traditional Pact with
the Devil story). Some were stylistic experiments (“Trunk and
Disorderly” might, had things gone differently, become the opening
of a novel; instead, I settled for the easier technique of
Saturn’s Children) while others were
exercises in a familiar key (“Down on the Farm,” for example, is
one of a piece with my other Laundry stories, collected in
The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue).
What they’ve all got
in common, however, is that they’re a communication channel. Hello,
are you receiving? Over.