There is no single book that changed my life. I never had that experience of finding that one book – on my parents’ shelves, in the library, in that semester of English Lit. – that mesmerized me, blew open my mind and changed everything.
I’ve read plenty of good books, mind you, and some great ones – the ones that teach you something, that leave you with that wonderful feeling of expansion – that your world and who you are and what you know have become just a little bit broader. But what shaped me as a reader – and a writer – wasn’t one particular book – however great – but a whole species of writing; not one author, but a crowd of them.
What changed my life were short story anthologies.
Short stories swarmed me when I was a kid. Back then, anthologies were everywhere – Year’s Best, Hugo Award Winners, Nebula Award Winners, New Dimensions, New Worlds, Asimov’s Choice – and I couldn’t get enough of them. Sci-fi, fantasy, horror, mystery – I went through them all, but it was classic sci-fi that enthralled me. Bradbury. Asimov. Ellison. Silverberg. These were the voices, in five- and ten-page epistles, that taught me the power of the imagination and the power of the written word.
There is a special art to those stories. Every word counts, and the best writers make them count. Scenes are painted, with a single sentence, which would chew up an entire page in a novel. Plots are built with a few turns of phrase. A great short story hones the mechanics of story-telling to its finest edge, makes the reader see more than a few pages of words could ever actually describe. A short story writer freely plays with voice, perspective, time and expectation, and does it with fewer words than are cut from most novels.
There are no rules – the structure can be as mundane or as surreal as the writer needs to tell the tale. James Joyce’s Ulysses is famous (or infamous) for its bizarre, stream-of-consciousness writing, but the bizarre is run-of-the-mill in short fiction - check out Harlan Ellison’s “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” or Edwin Abbot’s “Flatland” or Robert Heinlein’s “- All You Zombies -”. Writers of short fiction rush in, where other authors fear to tread.
But what I love most is this: that all of that special, streamlined artistry is just a suit for an idea to dress up in, because short stories - especially those classic sci-fi stories - aren't about what actually happens in the story. The little snippets of life they show, however familiar or alien, is just a pathway to a question.
A question about morality. Ethics. Religion. Truth. The most fundamental aspects of human nature. A short story is a parable. Like Aesop's Fables (the first anthology) its true purpose is to lay out that question, whatever it is, and leave you wrestling with it . . . quite possibly for the rest of your life.
One of my best examples is also one of my favorite stories - Ursula K. Le Guin's “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, published in 1974 (first in the anthology New Dimensions 3). If you've never read it - Stop. Reading. This. Diary. Go find it somewhere, right now. The rest of us will wait.
OK. Now that we've all read it . . .
The story of the city of Omelas, and its dark secret, and the moral questions around the bargaining that secret required, changed how I see society, how I see politics . . . how I see everything. “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” isn't just a story about a fictional utopia or its happy citizens or its one, unfortunate, scapegoat child. Like Ellison's "Whimper of Whipped Dogs" or Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations", it's an artfully-dressed question about how we know the greater good - and how we weigh the sacrifices we make for it.
It wasn’t long after I read it for the first time that I was first exposed to an over-simplified explanation of the “Phillips’ Curve” (the supposed inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment) and the “Natural Rate of Unemployment”. In my limited understanding, it meant it was economic necessity to keep unemployment at a certain rate to stave off runaway inflation.
Other people just saw the numbers of it, but I . . . I saw with the eyes Le Guin gave me. I saw people in those numbers - people who would suffer, so the rest of us would not.
The hidden children of Omelas.
The Phillips’ Curve has since fallen out of favor, but that story has stayed with me.
All who suffer for the markets' sake, all the dead of war . . .
Omelas floats just beneath the surface of my thoughts whenever I talk about health care, or tax policy, or foreign policy (because sometimes those children are hidden half a world away). In just about any debate about society and how we manage it, the great question of Le Guin’s short story is never far from my mind.
One short story did that. Now imagine fourteen, fifteen, twenty more like it, bound in a single volume. A good anthology is a Book of Worlds.
Now that is the power to change a life.