Big Questions in Small Packages 1997 Foreword by Jeff Carlson, Series Editor

I also wanted to dig into some longer works in order to kick myself out of the short story vein I had been absorbed in. After reading a tall stack of short fiction for this year's eSCENE, I was looking forward to curling up with prose that didn't feel obligated to wrap up after 15 or 20 pages. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy reading the best short stories published online; but reading a lot of short fiction can be a taxing endeavor. There's often an added layer of anxiety and perspiration wrapped into shorter works, an extra sense that every word has been re-evaluated several times over; it's a layer that novelists can afford to gradually fold into their narratives. The best stories I read this year managed to capture and funnel that layer effectively.

So it came as no surprise when, after a few weeks of immersing myself in lengthy tales of deep space, I found myself thinking bigger thoughts than usual. Amid the maelstrom of my daily schedule, I would lose track of time and drift from HTML coding or article editing to some of the Big Questions: How large is the universe? Are we really as insignificant as it would appear? Will I ever get the chance to leave my planet and view the stars, unfiltered by smog and haze?

When I was a kid, questions like these came quickly and easily to my young imagination, boosted in no small measure by images of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo blowing away Tie Fighters from the gun turrets of the Millennium Falcon. Of course, I didn't have any answers then, but it was easier to tumble the ideas around in my head when they weren't colliding with thoughts of bills, deadlines, and schedules.

I still don't have those answers, but while I was lost in space with my books, it came as a surprise when my thoughts began drifting back to short fiction. Many stories touch on those Big Questions, while some ignore them altogether. But in all cases, at least on some level, short stories are expressions of our attempts to answer those questions.

Consider the nature of short stories: they are limited in length, and therefore often (but not always) limited in scope. For many writers, short stories are harder to write well than longer works. Once written, finding a market to publish them can be immensely difficult. Once published, there isn't much money available for payment, so basing a career on short fiction borders on the impossible.

Daunting, isn't it? And yet, millions of people are writing short stories all the time, some intended for publication, others written solely because some itch in the author's gut compels him or her to start organizing words into narrative form. There are so many things that could be accomplished in the time it takes to write and read short stories, but you'll never convince a writer, reader, or editor to drop their pile of fiction to go do them.

This, to me, speaks of a connection between written words and those Big Questions. The voice that asks, "Where am I in the universe?" is almost always the same voice that says, "Write down the experience of this sunset; you'll need it for a story someday."

I have been extremely pleased to be able to assemble this year's eSCENE, despite the long delay in getting it to the pixels you're reading now. The stories selected for this edition all touch on things larger than can be encompassed in their words: Tom's knowledge and frustration that great things are just beyond his grasp in Lucy Harrison's Just Another Night and Day; Loretta's peculiar vision of her world in Robert Olen Butler's Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband; that intimate twilight period just before a first child is born, changing everything, in Darrin Navarro's Atlas' Hips.

Now, energized again by the possibilities offered by short fiction, it's time to put away those long books with their extended narratives and sink my teeth into more short stories (after I go pick up the next book in the Hitchhiker series, of course).