But what does it take to make a collection that you can read cover to cover?

To me, the voice of the author has to be strong and engaging enough that I don't want to read anything else until I've read every story in the collection. Now, not every story collection is going to meet this standard and I don't even necessarily think it should. But the thing about short stories is that it's easy to read one or two, put down the book and be distracted by something else flitting by. Just like any other book, the contents have to be compelling enough that whatever else if flitting doesn't lure me away. Where short story collections perhaps have it harder in this respect is that novels have the ongoing promise of the same world and story, whereas a good story collection constantly reinvents, or at least consistently invents, both.

I'd add to the listing of brilliant SF story collections KJF's Black Glass. Oh and Maureen's collection. Returning thematic concerns are always a good thing for story collections too. Gives them a sense of unity and it's interesting to watch an author explore similar concepts and ideas in very different ways close enough together for you to contrast them.

For me, the arrangement of the stories is one of the most important thing. To take Joe Hill's book, I think putting 'Best New Horror' first is a brilliant move, because it works so well as a manifesto: it says, this is exactly what I'm not about, and why. Similarly putting 'The Faery Handbag' first in Magic for Beginners works well because it's about (in a sense) creeping up on the fantastic without actually yet crossing the threshold.

There seems to be a habit of saving the longest, or at least the most intense, stories for the end of the book, and I think that's probably a sound strategy as well; it lets you finish with something meaty and satisfying. Black Juice, as brilliant as all the individual stories are, is actually a book I think is slightly hurt by the ordering--firstly because 'Singing My Sister Down' tends to overshadow everything else, and secondly because 'House of the Many' feels like a hump in the middle of the book that you have to get across.

Ordering the stories so that connections between them become more obvious is also good. This can be as blatant as Bruce Sterling's new book, which divides about a dozen stories up into about eight categories ('science fiction', 'fiction about science', 'fiction for scientists', 'design fiction', 'architecture fiction', etc etc). In general I'm a little sceptical about author notes, but they can also be used for this purpose. Or the connections can be more subtle.

Basically, I think the important quality is synthesis. The stories can still be very varied in tone and theme, but they have to feel like they belong between covers together; it helps you to get a sense of where the author's coming from.

But I'm sure everyone already knows all this, so I'll stop rambling now.

The list was meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive. Niall, I think your point about synthesis is a good one (a lot of anthologies have a problem with that, I think), but Gwenda’s point about contrast is equally important — if a story doesn’t do something different from all the others, there’s not much point in including it.

I've heard it argued that the first and last stories in a collection (or an anthology) should be the strongest, which makes sense -- but also leads to that hump or sag in the middle if you're not careful.

When I've put together anthologies I've tried to think about the TOC like a set list -- you want your opener and your last encore to be real crowd-pleasers, and you want to manage the crowd's energy by separating your slow ballads with catchy dance numbers.

But if you only play slow ballads, you could be in trouble.

Actually, a collection I loved last year that maybe suffered a bit from there not being quite enough contrast between some of the stories is Carol Emshwiller's I Live With You. There are a few stories in there that feel sort of samey and don't stand up in the way that others do when put next to each other. And for the most part, the issue is that the themes are explored in very similar ways.

Honestly, I think they're all good stories, but that substituting some of her other stories that weren't included would have made _the collection_ a stronger reading experience. But mileage may vary, and, as I said, I loved it anyway.

My first collection was a real kitchen-sink affair, including everything I'd done up until that point that didn't suck. I basically put the collection together because I really really wanted to have a book out. And, I mean, the reviews were pretty good, and it worked out okay. But there's no cohesion to the book, and it doesn't really work as a whole -- it's jumbled. For my second collection, I had more stuff to choose from, and put a lot of thought into order, balance, and even thematic issues. The new collection is all about love and responsibility, basically, though I think the stories explore those issues in sufficiently different ways to avoid homogenity.

In my own reading habits, I tend to read stories in collections out of order and intermittently, mixed in with reading stuff from other books, so I had to think about collections in a way alien to my own reading experience when it came time to put my collection together.

To add to the list of all-time fave collections: Orsinian Tales and The Compass Rose.

I'm in a similar spot, Mr. M... when I run the collection spreadsheet, it comes to 55677 total words published, 72188 total words sold, 94314 total words in finished stories I'd be willing to see out there.

But if your problem (you say) is an excess of homogeneity, I feel like my problem is a dearth -- do those stories really belong together? The real-sf ones (droplet, start the clock), the wacky-sf ones (zeppelins, woodpecker), the Borgesian whimsy (orange, duck, Other Cities), the erotica (one for the road, duet), the lit'ry wankin' about (fig, orphans)...?

Feels a little like a mess. Feels like I might want to wait until some coherence becomes obvious....

Different types of coherence for different collections. They can be held together by theme, by setting, by author style, by viewpoint: as long as whatever connects them is something that interests me, and as long as the stories aren't too homogenous, you've got a balance of variety and coherence that makes a short story collection satisfying. Some examples that spring to mind:

In Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, they're all stories about the writer's life in Paris in the 1920s. He covers lots of different scenes and subjects within that setting, but there's this sense of what life was like for his circle of friends there that comes through each story and keeps me fascinated, because all the disparate pieces work together as facets of a whole picture.

Joanna Russ has a few collections of wildly different types and even genres of stories. She's got everything in there from experimental surrealism to futuristic science fiction, sword-and-sorcery fantasy to non-fiction essay. But the books hold together thematically for me because one way or another, it's all Russ playing with ideas about gender and power in society. The individual pieces might not all succeed for me on their own merits, but in a collection they all become interesting and fun experiments in approaching her themes from various angles.

Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others is a really strong collection in which each story seems to have a life of its own. What makes it work for me as a book is that each story is so distinct and self-contained and flat-out good that I want to keep reading to find out what he's going to touch on next. I guess what I see as holding that collection together is the author's voice, which carries a sense of intelligence, sincerity and, more than anything, a *curiousity* about the subjects it explores. The stories are each entirely different, but the quiet, thoughtful perspective in how each subject is delved into makes me want to come along on the exploration, because I like the particular ways it provokes me to think.

I haven't read Dora's second collection yet but her chapbook is a treasure. I liked some pieces more than others, but with every story or poem I felt as though the author presented a view of the world through a kind of magical window that made everything strangely delicate and passionate and angry and beautiful. I loved the experience of seeing the world that way, so I loved reading the collection.

I think the single-author story collection is more of an artform that is generally realised. There are best ofs, retrospectives, completes, thematic groupings, and story-suites. All of them have their different requirements.

In the case of the first collection, I think the keys are quality and variety. How many terrific and well known stories do you have? There's no rule how much of your bibliography can go into your collection - Ted Chiang's collection assembled pretty much all of his stories - but I'd have thought you'd probably want enough stories to fill at least one and half books before you try to get one book out of them.

If you have enough stories, then you need to look at them critically. How many terrific stories do you have? How many good ones? How many that you could get away with? If you don't have at least two or three terrific stories, you're probably not ready for a collection.

Sequencing the collection can be tough. I normally use a rule of thumb for anthologies that you pick your three best stories, which will go at the beginning, the middle and the end. The most accessible goes at the front, the longest at the back, and the other one in the middle. You then arrange the remaining stories to hopefully give you a felicity of theme etc, but that can be very hard to achieve. And, as has been said, many people read out of order anyhow.

There is one thing I'd urge writers not to do, though. Don't be overeager to do a collection. Don't sell one just because you can. For whatever reason, debut collections get more attention than other single-author collections. If you hurry to get a book done, adding stories that are less-accomplished to fill it out, you lose the chance to make the best book possible and hence make the best impression possible. I'd say it'd be better to wait another year or so, cherry pick your bibliography and have one truly terrific book. The attention it'll get as a result will repay the patience. And, if it works out, you'll have to live with it a long time.

Irrational Histories (memo to self: write some more of those at some point)

Note to David: Yeah, write some more of those!

Re collections:

I think for me the key may be variation in tone. I have two or three collections on my shelf right now, by authors whose work I adore, that I haven't finished reading because -- even though each story is brilliant -- my perception of similarity of tone among the stories makes me restless. When I actually sit down and read a story in one of those collections, I love the story, but I have a hard time reading more than two or three of them without a break.

(Sometimes that's also related to my perception of the density of the stories; sometimes even brilliant stories feel like hard work to read.)

At SH, I'm often tempted to put together theme months, running four or five stories in a row on similar themes. When I don't repress that impulse, I usually regret it -- I often end up with the impression (from reviews and reader comments) that the readers are getting impatient with having multiple stories in a row that are too similar in some particular way. Maybe the key there is to make the stories as different as possible within the theme.... Not sure.

Hi, David. This is Andrew from the SLF Online Workshop. I just have to say that I think this is such a fascinating topic. In many ways, while I like getting those "omnibus collections" that gather all or at least most of an author's short fiction (say, Thomas Ligotti's The Nightmare Factory), I do realize that simply doing that is no guarantee that it will turn out to be a strong collection.

Your analogy of a setlist (or a mixed tape, for that matter) is quite apt. While I still have a tendency to dip into a story from one collection and then another, I find that several of the collections I recently read work so well that it pays to read them cover to cover, even in order.

These include Caitlin R. Kiernan's To Charles Fort, with Love, Poppy Z. Brite's Wormwood, Dennis Etchison's The Death Artist, Ramsey Campbell's Ghosts and Grisly Things, and Iain M. Banks's The State of the Art.

While the first four of those, particularly the middle three more than the first, are more on the "horror" side of the equation, if you get the chance to pick those up and go through them, I think you may like them as much as I do, not just for the individual stories but for "the sum is greater than its parts" quality that makes for a good collection.

I hope you don't think me presumptuous for those recommendations, but you mentioned Burning Chrome and Stranger Things Happen, both of which I consider exemplars of what a good collection can be, if it's going to be more than simply a gathering of stories here and there.

Hey, Andrew, glad to see you stop by. I read The State of the Art several years ago and was underwhelmed by it, mainly because I thought Banks’s short work didn’t hold up as well as his novels. But there are new editions out, so maybe I’ll give it another try one of these days. And I’ll check the others out — thanks!