Preface
The opening sentence of the preface I wrote for my first collection of short fiction was this one:
“As an author, I’m almost a pure novelist.”
Nothing has really changed in that self-assessment. The first anthology was titled Worlds—hence the title of this succeeding volume, Worlds II—and it was published in February of 2009. Eight years have gone by since then, a period of time in which I have published:
21 novels
5 novellas or short novels
1 novelette
5 short stories
1 comic book script
1 video script
Twenty-one novels and thirteen of everything else put together. If I wanted to be really fussy about it, I could even claim I’d published twenty-four novels and only two novellas, because three of pieces in that category—the stories “Four Days on the Danube,” “Sanctuary” and “Scarface”—were technically also novels. Officially, anything over 40,000 words is a “novel.” In the real world, though, that’s preposterous. To get a story published as a stand-alone novel in today’s F&SF market, it needs to be at least 70,000 words unless it’s YA (young adult)—and a lot of publishers insist on an 80,000 or even 90,000 word minimum.
A novelist I was, I novelist I am, and it seems pretty safe to assume that a novelist I will remain.
That said…
Three short novels, two novellas, one novelette and five short stories—we’ll leave the two scripts out of it—is actually a pretty respectable output in and of itself, for an author. If you add them all up, the word count comes to around 225,000 words, which is about twice the length of an average novel.
Oh, happy day. That meant I had enough material to do another anthology of short fiction, even if I am a grubby novelist. Of course, I had to persuade my publisher that the project was worth doing, but she was amenable. The first anthology didn’t sell as well as my novels—anthologies of short fiction rarely do in today’s market—but its sales were at least respectable.
So, here we are. Worlds II. Never let it be said that authors can’t be just as unimaginative as anyone else.
But if the title is a bit pedestrian, I don’t believe the same is true of the stories themselves. I like each and every one of them. I liked them when I wrote them—in a few cases, as far back as thirty years ago, thereabouts—and I still did them when I assembled them for this volume.
I hope you will as well.
Eric Flint
March 2018