An introduction

Some of my earliest memories are of speculative fiction. Whether it was Star Trek, The Wizard of Oz, or Space Quest, I was surrounded by, and surrounded myself in, genre fiction.

The art of the short story really came to my attention as an adolescent at the local library. I borrowed a cassette tape with short stories by Ray Bradbury, which was probably a part of the Bradbury 13 series. “Dark They Were, and Golden-eyed” and “The Veldt” are the stories I remember from the collection, probably because it was a 60-minute tape with a story on each side, but also because the stories were imaginative, inventive, and revolutionary for my young mind. These stories may have just been 30 minutes of listening, but they contained volumes. There were worlds to explore here and implications to unravel.

My first experience with one of the major periodicals was as a teenager, probably with an issue of Analog or Asimov’s. Not every story was pure gold, but that didn’t sway my desire to read more. There’s a certain element of discovery: When you find a story you really love, you learn something about yourself. That’s what I’ve felt repeatedly over the years, whether it’s reading an anthology from the last year, a new issue of a magazine, or stumbling on some short fiction online.

I reached a point in the last two years in which I wanted to be more serious about my short fiction reading. I’d been going through some classic publications, like If and Galaxy, and I started a podcast in which I read stories that are in the public domain. There are a lot of hidden gems, and the idea that they might otherwise be lost to time gave me some inspiration. I started Vintage Sci-Fi Shorts to highlight those stories. Along the way, I discovered that an old adage I’d been constantly told — that women simply didn’t write much science fiction until the ‘70s or ‘80s" — was demonstrably untrue. I stumbled across writers like Zenna Henderson, Lyn Venable, and Mari Wolf, whose science fiction captured me in a way I hadn’t expected.

This newsletter, or at least the germ of the idea, follows from that. My intention is to share some of the stories I’ve read over the last month, and that’s where we’ll start. Where we’ll end up remains to be seen.