Reflections
One Thing Happens
by Robert Silverberg
This column is based on the introduction to a collection of my short stories that was published some fifteen years ago. I was looking at it yesterday and, since my ideas of what makes a satisfactory short story (especially a science fiction short story) have not changed in those years, and the book itself may be unfamiliar to modern SF readers, I have adapted it to use as a column, thinking it might be useful to would-be writers, whose number, as always, is legion. (I was one of them myself, only about seventy-five years ago.) And so:
I offer herewith a couple of working definitions:
- A short story is a piece of prose fiction in which just one significant thing happens.
- A science fiction short story is a piece of prose fiction in which just one extraordinary thing happens.
These are not definitions of my devising, nor are they especially recent ones. The first of them was formulated by Edgar Allan Poe more than a century and a half ago, and the second by H.G. Wells about fifty years after that. Neither one is an absolute commandment: it’s quite possible to violate one or both of these definitions and still produce a story that will fascinate its readers. But they’re good working rules, and I’ve tried to keep them in mind throughout my writing career.
What Poe spoke of, actually, was the “single effect” that every story should create. Each word in the story, he said, should work toward that effect. That might be interpreted to be as much a stylistic rule as a structural one: the “effect” could be construed as eldritch horror, farce, philosophical contemplation, whatever. But in fact Poe, both in theory and in practice, understood virtually in the hour of the birth of the short story that it must be constructed around one central point and only one. Like a painting, a short story must be capable of being taken in at a single glance, although close inspection or repeated viewings would reveal complexities and subtleties not immediately perceptible.
Thus Poe, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” say, builds his story around the strange bond linking Roderick Usher and his sister, Lady Madeline. The baroque details of the story, rich and vivid, serve entirely to tell us that the Ushers are very odd people and something extremely peculiar has been going on in their house, and ultimately the truth is revealed. There are no subplots, but if there had been (Roderick Usher’s dispute with the local vicar, or Lady Madeline’s affair with the gardener, or the narrator’s anxiety over a stock-market maneuver), they would have had to be integrated with the main theme or the story’s power would have been diluted.
Similarly, in Guy de Maupassant’s classic “The Piece of String,” one significant thing happens: Maitre Hauchecorne sees a piece of string on the ground, picks it up, and puts it in his pocket. As a result he is suspected of having found and kept a lost wallet full of cash, and he is driven to madness and an early death by the scorn of his fellow villagers. A simple enough situation, with no side-paths, but Maupassant manages, within a few thousand words that concentrate entirely on M. Hauchecorne’s unfortunate entanglement, to tell us a great many things about French village life, peasant thrift, the ferocity of bourgeois morality, and the ironies of life in general. A long disquisition about M. Hauchecorne’s unhappy early marriage or the unexpected death of his neighbor’s grandchild would probably have added nothing and subtracted much from the impact of the story.
H.G. Wells, who toward the end of the nineteenth century employed the medium of the short story to deal with the thematic matter of what we now call science fiction—and did it so well that his stories still can hold their own with the best SF of later generations—refined Poe’s “single effect” concept with special application to the fantastic: “The thing that makes such imaginations [i.e., S themes] interesting is their translation into commonplace terms and a rigid exclusion of other marvels from the story. Then it becomes human. ‘How would you feel and what might not happen to you?’ is the typical question, if for instance pigs could fly and one came rocketing over a bridge at you. How would you feel and what might not happen to you if suddenly you were changed into an ass and couldn’t tell anyone about it? Or if you suddenly became invisible? But no one would think twice about the answer if hedges and houses also began to fly, or if people changed into lions, tigers, cats, and dogs left and right, or if anyone could vanish anyhow. Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.”
Keep that axiom in mind. Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen. Limits are necessary to create plausibility. The science-fiction story is at its best when it deals with the consequences, however ramifying and multifarious they may be, of a single fantastic assumption.
A few examples—
What will happen the first time our spaceships meet those of another intelligent species?
Suppose there were so many suns in the sky that the stars were visible only one night every two thousand years: what would that night be like?
What if a twentieth-century doctor suddenly found himself in possession of a medical kit of the far future?
What about toys from the far future falling into the hands of a couple of twentieth-century kids?
One single wild assumption; one significant thing has happened, and it’s a very strange one. The writer then proceeds to explore the consequences of that hypothetical assumption. And from each hypothesis has come great science fiction: each of these four is a one-sentence summary of a story included in the definitive 1970 anthology of classics of our field, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame—unforgettable stories by Murray Leinster, Isaac Asimov, C.M. Kornbluth, and Henry Kuttner.
I think it’s an effective way to construct a story, though not necessarily the only effective way, and in general I kept the one-thing-happens precept in mind through more than sixty years of writing them. My own stories demonstrate that I still believe in the classical unities.
Of course, what seems to us a unity now might not have appeared that way when H.G. Wells was writing his wonderful stories in the nineteenth century. Wells might have argued that my “To the Promised Land,” for example, is built around two speculative fantastic assumptions, one that the Biblical Exodus from Egypt never happened, the other that it is possible to send rocket ships to other worlds. But in fact we’ve sent plenty of rocket ships to other worlds by now, so only my story’s alternative-world speculation remains fantasy today. Technically speaking the space-travel element of the plot has become part of the given; it’s the other big assumption that forms the central matter of the story.
As I’ve indicated, though, this is not an absolute rule. There are very few absolute rules; most of them are meant to be broken now and then, though I have my doubts about whether that applies to the law of gravity or the Einsteinian belief in the speed of light as a limiting velocity. One famous exception to Poe’s single-effect notion—A.E. van Vogt’s stated technique of introducing “something new” every eight hundred words, either a plot twist or an unexpected revelation or a resolution of a plot problem that leads to a new complication—is just that, a famous exception. It worked for van Vogt, who was a law unto himself. In a 1947 essay called “Complication in the Science Fiction Story” he wrote, in direct contradiction of Poe’s dictum, “A short story has to at least two threads of ‘plot.’ . . . They sharpen the characterization and add richness to the story.” The idea was to keep the reader interested and a little off balance, and eager to see what would come next. Such stories of his as The World of Null-A or “Far Centaurus,” to cite just two, are good examples: “Far Centaurus” has several significant plot twists, and the classic novel The World of Null-A is a dizzying series of story transformations that has led critics to say that the book makes no sense, but others believe it is its very hecticity that is the whole point of the book.
Van Vogt’s technique of writing in eight-hundred-word action scenes worked very well for van Vogt. The tactic never allows the pace to slow, as immediately following upon some excitement is the transitory “clean up” that sees the characters, aliens, et al shuffled into new positions, with new implications and tensions, requiring a new action scene, and so on goes the reshuffling. With the palette of SF tropes always at hand, van Vogt is not averse to throwing everything but the kitchen sink into these complexly plotted stories. Time travel, tentacled aliens, interstellar wars, super prime numbers, time warps, ancient alien civilizations, super-special ray guns—seemingly anything goes to make a story as dynamic as possible. The simple premises upon which all the stories seem to begin end up a great distance away. His “The Weapon Shop,” for example, while starting innocuously enough by a conversation between two friends in a seemingly normal small town, escalates to galaxy-sized proportions by the end of its thirty-odd pages. “Everything must be epic” was his mantra. Regardless of what one thinks of van Vogt, it’s impossible to say he didn’t try to push the boundaries of science fiction as entertainment.
Well, what worked for van Vogt did not necessarily work for anyone else, as stories by his imitators demonstrated: often they came out as incomprehensible hodgepodges of incompatible ideas, lacking van Vogt’s remarkable command of narrative structure. Rudyard Kipling famously said, “There are nine and ninety ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.” Perhaps so—I hesitate to argue the point with Kipling—but I continue to believe that the power of a good science fiction story depends on the rigorous exploration of a single extrapolative concept, as illustrated by the four Hall of Fame stories I mention above, and any number of others—unless the author happens to be A.E. van Vogt.