About the very stuff that black box is made of.Īnd we are talking about short stories, in this case collections by Kij Johnson, who's been crackling and popping on the short-story scene for years now Christopher Barzak, perhaps better known nowadays as a novelist ( One for Sorrow, The Love We Share Without Knowing) but a veteran of Asimov's, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and yes, George Saunders. Several stories in his recent collection Tenth of December, in fact, stories like 'Escape from Spiderhead' and 'The Semplica Girl Diaries,' might easily find a home in this magazine.īecause we're talking here about imagination, right? Step into any writing class, any literature class, any writing workshop or seminar, and you'll hear hour upon hour of talk about structure and motivation and character development-and very little about imagination. Saunders is resolutely a short-story writer, of course, a builder of trim black boxes rather than freight cars or those massive transports called novels. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to 'real life'-he can put whatever he wants in there. And the shape of the black box really doesn't matter. This is the only thing, he says, that fiction must do. GEORGE Saunders has written that stories are black boxes where the reader enters in one state of mind and exits in another. Tenth of December, by George Saunders, 2013, Random House, $26.

Index of Title, Month and Page sorted by AuthorĪt the Mouth of the River of Bees, by Kij Johnson, 2012, Small Beer Press, $16.īefore and Afterlives, by Christopher Barzak, 2013, Lethe Press, $15. Fantasy and Science Fiction: Book Reviews by James Sallis

What are sgs in tenth of december