FOREWORD
A good humor story is hard to find.
Don’t get me wrong—there are many outstanding humor books out there. Throughout the history of speculative fiction, humor has always played an important role within the genre. There are the clever flash fiction stories of Fredric Brown, the dry wit of Douglas Adams, the satire of Harry Harrison, the puns of Robert Asprin, and the comedy of Terry Pratchett, among countless others.
And yet, such works are but a tiny fraction of the quality genre fiction out there, especially when it comes to short stories. Top science fiction and fantasy magazines will occasionally publish a humorous story, but not in every issue. You may also find an odd humor piece relegated to the back of some anthologies as a nice way to close out those books. Yet when was the last time you held an entire collection of contemporary SF/F humor in a single volume?
When the idea to create a humor anthology first occurred to me, I researched online and was surprised to learn that no such books have been published in the last decade, at least not any that could be easily found. There were occasional humor collections with a very specific narrow theme (such as Deals with the Devil) but nothing that attempted to represent the full scope of speculative humor.
For many readers, Unidentified Funny Objects will be the first such book. The associate editors and I have labored to put together the best possible collection of humorous stories. We read well over nine hundred submissions to select the twenty-nine tales presented here.
My goal was to feature the widest possible variety of genres and styles. Within this book you’ll find tales ranging from a 350 word flash piece to a 10,000-plus word novella. Stories vary from gently humorous to laugh-out-loud funny, from absurdist to zany, from family friendly to edgy and pushing beyond PG-13 limits.
We’ve included fiction from masters of speculative humor such as Mike Resnick and Jody Lynn Nye as well as brand-new names you will undoubtedly hear more about in coming years, such as James Beamon and Zach Shephard. There’s also a translated story from Russia’s most popular fantasist Sergey Lukyanenko. Although his Night Watch novels are extremely popular around the world, this is his first short story professionally published in the United States.
I hope there’s enough interest in Unidentified Funny Objects for it to become an annual anthology. I also see it as an ongoing project, with additional free content published monthly on our web site. Please visit www.ufopub.com to read several more stories I enjoyed but couldn’t fit into the book as well as bios of all the authors.
Good speculative humor may have been hard to find, but you have 320 pages of it in front of you. I hope you will enjoy the tales collected therein as much as I have.
—Alex Shvartsman