A little while ago, Jeff VanderMeer asked the important question: what do you look for in an anthology?

I meant to answer at the time, but I had been mulling over a blog entry on a similar topic for some time, and it was all just too big in my head to condense down to a comment. And, you know, I didn’t get around to it. I recommend checking out the comments on that post, though, there’s a wealth of reader response there!

Part of the reason I’ve been thinking about this is a conversation I had on Twitter between several friends, about the role of introductions and other supporting materials in fiction anthologies. While we did get a little bogged down in definitions when discussing the difference between, say, forewords, introductions, story-specific supporting materials like author notes/afterwords and critical essays, the discussion still raised a few questions:

Is it better that supporting text to be as minimal as possible to allow more space for stories?
Are extended introductions useful, or just patronising to the audience?

Personally, while I like the minimalist approach to supporting material for an original anthology of new stories, for anything beyond that I tend to think that more is better when it comes to supporting text. Reprint anthologies, whether they are reprinting work of the last year or from fifty years ago, are a contribution to our history, and as such they need to do more that merely archive stories.

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Galactic Suburbia Episode 7 is now live! (that is, you can play it on the website and it’s up on iTunes, the download should be available by tonight our time) In this episode we welcome our first special guest to the show, editor and anthologist Jonathan Strahan. Jonathan is the Locus Reviews Editor. He is a three time Hugo Award nominee and Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, Peter McNamara, and William J Atheling Jr award winning editor of nearly fifty books. His most recent books include Legends of Australian Fantasy and Swords and Dark Magic. Coming up are Godlike Machines and Engineering Infinity.

Check out our show notes below!

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I’ve been seeing the table of contents for upcoming Twelfth Planet Press anthology Sprawl pop up on various author blogs. I feel particularly invested in this anthology, not just because I’m in it (with the only short story I’ve written since Jem was born!) but because GJ was staying with us as she sifted through the stories, finding the ones that would fit together to form the anthology (or something like it) that she had in her head. And yes, I managed to peek at some of the other stories as she considered them, and talked about them.

The question that GJ seemed to chew over most often – and it was a question I had about my own story, back when I was writing it – was “is it suburban enough?” The idea of an Australian genre anthology that focuses on suburbia rather than the more often-seen country/bush/outback and even urban settings of Australian spec fic was an important one, worthy of being embraced rather than skirted around as a theme. We ended up having many conversations about Australian identity, and suburbia, as well as the kind of fantasy people are writing in Australia and internationally. The most interesting thing is that there is no single universal experience about suburbia – some are more urban, some more rural, some are stories about drugs and sharehouses, some are stories about families and maternity. Suburban fantasy, in other words, is not something that can be summed up in a single story, but the anthology is the perfect medium for it – building the idea through many stories, many characters, and many settings.

Australia is just so damned big – and so different, from place to place. There may be common themes in stories told about Brisbane suburbs, or Perth suburbs, or Hobart suburbs, but there’s a lot different too. It seems to me that one of the best ways to talk about cultural identity in a wider sense than just an individual’s experience is to gather a variety of stories and hope that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

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I’ve really been enjoying Rachel Swirsky’s guest posts over at Ecstatic Days, Jeff VanderMeer’s blog. Her latest piece is a review of Cat Rambo’s collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Midnight (Paper Golem Press, 2009) which engages directly with another review of the collection from Publisher’s Weekly. Swirsky moves fluidly between defending Rambo from the scathing remarks of the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer to agreeing with aspects of what they say, and it makes for a very dynamic review.

One of the points Swirsky makes is that a collection can be weakened by extra material. Or, to be perhaps more accurate, a collection can be made stronger by leaving out some of the material. Her belief is that Rambo’s collection would have benefited from containing the twelve stories she considers excellent, and not the other eight stories she sees as less-excellent padding.

This is something that I’ve been harping on about for some time, whenever I can pin people down long enough to listen. There’s a tendency in small press (and not only in small press, it has to be said) to try to offer “value” for money through sheer quantity of words, or number of stories. But the older I get and the higher my reading pile teeters, the less interested I am in books that feel the need to be completionist, to pack in lots of material at the expense of the overall vibe.

I’ve read a lot of anthologies over the course of the last few years, thanks to Last Short Story as well as my own interest in short fiction. Apart from ‘best ofs’ which are another thing again, it’s hard to think of any that couldn’t have been improved by having fewer stories. This is particularly the case of theme anthologies, where 8-10 excellent stories exploring variations on a theme works much better than 20 stories that do the same. Even if the second 10 are *almost* as excellent as the best 10, the theme becomes diluted and well and can easily wear out its welcome.

I love it when publishers big and small go with a small, intense selection rather than an overpadded one. The Twelfth Planet Press books tend to do this. I also like the X6 novella anthology (yes I hear the book is huge, but it’s only 6 actual stories, which is a really good number of stopping and starting points). I’ve also been enjoying several anthos-packaged-for teens which include between three and six long-short stories from very recognisable name authors, and come in as slender volumes.

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