The Death of the Short Story
I've just read a couple anthologies, and I was puzzling over why speculative fiction short stories have come pretty close to extinction. At one time, a short story around a single concept existed and was popular among several media. There were radio shows with short story readings as recently as 1978 (hmm, maybe there still are, but I'm no longer
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People talk about what TV they watch as if it says something about them. Short stories are non-committal
(Or they talk about how they don't watch TV as if it says something about them. :)
Perhaps there is a feedback loop here: The TV you watch says something about you only because TV shows are more widely known. Saying "I like West Wing" says a lot more to the average listener than saying "I like this thing you've never heard of". But I remember 20 years ago when the short stories (or at least the authors and genres of short stories) you read also said something about you, at least to a larger number of other people than today. People would talk about how they enjoyed reading cyberpunk or steampunk or horror or mystery or slipstream or magic realism or whatever kind of stories, and there were magazines that served these different niches, and you would run into other people who shared the same interest and had read some of the same stories. But now there is less of a sense that you are likely to meet other fans of particular short stories, in the way that many people at a party will start enthusiastically talking about a TV show they like. So people who consume media partly with a desire to make a statement about themselves or fit in will be less likely to read short stories, which leads to lower demand for short stories, which leads to there being even fewer published, which leads to them being even less appealing to people who want their reading to make a statement about themselves...
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I like the way you think.
So, since you live in the city of the instant tradition (if somebody did it once in Austin, people will get together to do it every year, and twice as many people will do it the following year), I challenge you or a friend to do the following:
Start a short-story reading group. Have people rate stories that they read, set up a spot to exchange copies of the stories, and have an lj community to rate the stories and summarize them.
At the end of, say, a year, make a pirate anthology of the stories that were the most widely read and/or loved. Write the authors to tell them that they were chosen, and solicit their responses.
Betcha if three or four college towns like Austin did that, it would become a phenomenon that people write about. Betcha.
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BTW, the idea of new traditions related to books and reading reminds me of bookcrossing.com ... I know someone in Wrocław who wishes that fad would catch on here.
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I can think of one current example. McSweeney's has done a couple anthologies called "Thrilling Tales" that were short stories that were all across the map, genre-wise. The editor, Michael Chabon, said he was looking for short stories that were plot-driven, so there's a kind of uniting theme, but it wasn't based on the presence or absence of space ships, magic or people getting shot.
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John Collier is a clearer cut case. With most John Collier stories I've read, I could easily believe that they were written by Ray Bradbury.
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