Shared Universe Reviews: Short Story Sunday

It’s time for a new project here at Shared Universe Reviews. Spurred on by the success I’ve had with The Blog Fantastic project, I wanted to do something that was related to science fiction, another genre I love but I feel I haven’t explored deeply enough. Heck, I’m well aware that I’ve only scratched the surface. As much as I’d like to give science fiction its due by discover some of the classic and contemporary works by authors new and familiar to me, I just don’t have the time. While my output has slowly gone down since I first started SUR, I’ve stabilized it to a regular schedule of one post a week. The problem is that I’m not fully satisfied with that. It doesn’t feel like enough but it might already be too much since some weeks I struggle to hit my self-imposed deadline.

All of this led to an idea. Writing smaller posts on short stories and uploading them once a week. This way I can combined my goal of posting more frequently while exploring more science fiction authors. That the goal is also for writing smaller posts, I figured short stories are perfect for this. Additionally, short story is a form of writing very closely linked to science fiction publications in the last hundred years, it makes sense to combine these ideas together. Short Story Sunday might not always be exclusively made up of science fiction reviews, but I’m pretty happy letting that be the main focus. With each post I’ll include where I found and read the story (online publication, best of anthology, magazine, etc.) and give the story one of the following rankings:

1 star – Bad (bland ideas and poor execution)

2 stars – OK (unoriginal or overly familiar ideas and/or poor execution)

3 stars – Good (good ideas and/or good execution)

4 stars – Very Good (original ideas executed with skill and style)

5 stars – Excellent (a classic of the short story form, highly recommended)

Short Story Sunday 001, featuring Joe Haldeman and Kay Kenyon

Short Story Sunday 002, Robert A. Heinlein Edition, featuring Heinlein and Spider Robinson

Short Story Sunday 003, featuring Benjamin Crowell, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and Vernor Vinge

Short Story Sunday 004, featuring Terry Bisson, Spider Robinson, and David Drake

Short Story Sunday 005, Halloween Edition featuring George R. R. Martin and Stephen King

Short Story Sunday 006, featuring Vandana Singh and Malka Older

Short Story Sunday 007, "The Scarlet Citadel" by Robert E. Howard (Reading Conan 02)
Short Story Sunday 008, "The Tower of the Elephant by Robert E. Howard (Reading Conan 03)
Short Story Sunday 009. "Black Colossus" by Robert E. Howard (Reading Conan 04)
Short Story Sunday 010, "The Slithering Shadow" by Robert E. Howard (Reading Conan 05)
Short Story Sunday 011, "The Pool of the Black One" by Robert E. Howard (Reading Conan 06)