The Intergalactic Medicine Show

Time for a shameless plug – Issue three of Intergalactic Medicine Show is out, and everyone should buy it.

This is a short fiction internet magazine e-zine published by Orson Scott Card, one of my favourite authors and occasional correspondence sparring partner. Like many people (including me) Card grew up reading short fiction, but the medium has died something of a death in recent times, with only literary magazines and women’s weekly-type publications really bothering to publish short fiction. For the science fiction and fantasy community, the pickings have become slim indeed, as stalwarts of the scene have one by one disappeared from the newsagents shelves.

Some time ago, Card decided to put his money where his mouth was, to stop complaining about this situation and actually try to do something about the lack of decent outlets for short fiction in the science fiction and fantasy genre. The Intergalactic Medicine Show was born.

Card wanted to provide a medium for writers to work in the short fiction medium. As blog readers here will know, I travelled to the US earlier this year to attend a working school taught by Card, and at the core of that experience was the writing of a short story, something I had never actually done before attending the course. Frankly, I never saw the point, because my cynical, capitalist mejia-warped brain thought purely in terms of book length storytelling.

However, I learned a huge amount from writing the short story and have done a few since – it’s an excellent medium and it provides writers with an opportunity to practice their craft in terms of story formation and character creation while also keeping the end in sight. Writing books is a long and lonely business, and writing short stories is much more satisfying, at least creatively if not financially.

So I think Card is fighting the good fight in this matter (his politics are a different matter, but even there, he’s always game for a reasoned discussion, unlike a lot of people who seem to share his end of the geopolitical spectrum.) Of course, the goal of writing is creating stories that real people want to read, at least it is for most writers. So writing short stories has to be of interest to the general public, or it’s just a self indulgent exercise for the writer.

Sadly, as a medium, the short has dropped off the radar over the last ten to twenty years. People’s appetite for bite sized entertainment seems to have been satisfied by soap operas, magazines and the like, and in the world of science fiction and fantasy, by the proliferation of successful TV shows like Star Trek and all it’s offshoots, Battlestar Galactica, Lost and multiple other successful serial stories.

However, I think there is still a fine position for short fiction in our modern world, and the web is the place for it. How many people commute to work every morning and evening, and how many of them are carrying portable devices with them that are capable of displaying text? How many people sit in front of PCs all day?

The first two editions of IMS were excellent, but I would also like people to pick up the third edition, because it contains a story written at Boot Camp by Jose Mojica called Fat Town. It’s a great story and I’m happy to see him get published in this way. So there you go, that’s my shameless plug for the day.

Get the latest edition here: http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com