Friday short fiction #7: two memorable flash fictions and a perfect drabble

[peteryoung]

Usman Ali  The Dark Side  2011
Stuart Carter, 'Tell Stephen Baxter Not To Worry'  (FOCUS #40, NOVEMBER 2001)
Still makes me go Wow every time I read it. I also published this in Zoo Nation #7 and IMHO it can't be improved upon.

H.P. Lovecraft, 'What the Moon Brings'  (THE NATIONAL AMATEUR, MAY 1923)
Another vivid story based on one of Lovecraft's dreams, and far shorter than most of his output.

Bruce Holland Rogers, 'Reconstruction Work'  (FLASH FICTION ONLINE, DECEMBER 2007)
This won the inaugural Micro Award for flash fiction in 2008, probably because it covers a lot of ground in such a short space and yet also neatly extends beyond its tightly composed boundaries, if you get my meaning.

Favourite short story of the week: Fredric Brown, 'The Weapon'  (ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, APRIL 1951)
This has a memorable knockout resolution, and deserves to be much better known than it is. Scroll a little way down the comment thread to read the whole story.

Comments

[the-maenad.livejournal.com]

Fred Brown was always the master of the short-short with a zinger at the end. It's not fashionable to approve of that form of storytelling these days, but the works of writers such as Brown and Robert Sheckley will no doubt survive despite.

The zinger in "The Weapon" reminded me a little of an old E C Tubb short-short, "The Knife". (I say old because it first appeared in a fanzine back in the 1950s, but it was later brushed off and sold professionally to a George Hay anthology). Tubb produced too much hackwork, of course, but some of his shorts pack a punch too.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I see from ISFDb that Pulsar 2 was the only place it was collected in book form and that was as late as 1979 (the only Tubb collection I have is A Scatter of Stardust which was 1972). A good thing Reading's Oxfam Bookshop is actually the best SF store in town, and the Pulsars are another series I've long been keeping an eye out for.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I love "Tell Stephen Baxter Not To Worry". As you say, perfect.