A detective cat narrating like Raymond Chandler. The fall of Constantinople. A vampire in therapy. A chicken that outsmarts God.
Forty stories covering more territory than most bookstores have sections, back to back, with no apology for the whiplash.
Why forty genres?
Because I plan to write a novel in each one.
The reason is more practical than it appears. A novel is a year of your life at minimum. Committing that to a genre you’ve never worked in is an expensive way to find out whether you can do it, and there’s no shortcut available except writing something shorter in the same form first.
So this was dipping my toe into the water. Forty times.
I could only do it this way because my own books are mostly proof that I can write.
Writing and publishing them is close to a hobby I love, and once ghostwriting took over I stopped running promotions for them. That takes the pressure off. A collection that doesn’t have to hit a market can spend forty stories finding out what each form feels like from the inside, and I loved having that room.
Has it worked? Only in the sense that I got the chance to try.
I’m not going to claim a tidy outcome, that story eleven became a novel or that story twenty-six warned me off a genre for good. What it gave me was the experience of having written in each of those forms once, a different thing entirely from having read in them.
One consequence of the plan is that this book will keep meaning something as the novels arrive.
If a reader finds a story here in a form I later write at length, the short version becomes the first attempt at a thing that took several years to do properly. That’s a relationship most collections don’t have with the rest of a bibliography, and it exists because the collection was built as a starting point instead of a summing up.
Why does each story come with a note?
Because I like that as a reader, and I always have.
It’s the same instinct behind this series. Knowing where something came from changes how you read it. Detective Biscuit is better if you know I was watching a neighbor’s cat stalk a squirrel with intense methodical focus, like a tiny furry detective working a case, and thought: what if a cat believed it was solving crimes.
The noir voice followed from there without much effort, because every cat already believes it’s the smartest thing in the room. Biscuit simply narrates like he’s in a Chandler novel. If you’ve watched a cat assess a situation from a windowsill, that isn’t far off.
None of that is necessary to enjoy the story. It costs a paragraph and it gives a reader the thing behind the thing, and I’d rather have it than not.
What’s different about writing short?
A bad paragraph in a novel is a speed bump. A bad paragraph in a short story is a wall.
When you write short you write tight. There’s barely a word to spare, and anything that fails is immediately visible because there’s nothing around it to absorb the failure.
Novels are forgiving in a way people underestimate.
I’ve read plenty with sections that were strange, or unbelievable, or simply not good, and I went past them. Ringworld has a whole set of those. Things that don’t hold up under any inspection at all, and I read the book anyway and enjoyed it, because a novel gives you enough elsewhere that you can skip the junk.
I could name dozens of others where the same is true.
There’s a limit. Too much junk and a novel gets abandoned like anything else. But the tolerance is enormous compared to a short story, where a reader has committed twenty minutes and a bad paragraph is a meaningful fraction of the whole experience.
Forty stories is forty separate opportunities to hit that wall. Useful, and unpleasant, in the same motion. There’s a second thing the short form exposes, and it took several stories before I noticed it.
A novel lets you postpone your decisions. You can introduce a character without knowing what they’re for, write toward a scene you haven’t worked out, and fix it in revision because there are three hundred pages of room to maneuver. Plenty of good novels are built that way.
A short story gives you none of that. Every decision has to be made before you write it, because a wrong turn on page two has nowhere to go by page nine. You end up planning far more than the length suggests. Beginners expect the opposite. Forty of them in sequence teaches that lesson forty times, and it transfers directly back into longer work.
| Aspect | Novel | Short story |
|---|---|---|
| A bad paragraph | A speed bump. | A wall. |
| Tolerance for weak sections | Enormous, though too much junk gets a novel abandoned. | Small. Nothing around it absorbs the failure. |
| Decisions | Can be postponed and fixed in revision. | Must be made before you write. |
| Planning | Room to write toward a scene you haven’t worked out. | Far more planning than the length suggests. |
Which genre was hardest?
Humor, and I’ve thought about why.
Humor is more difficult to write than people assume, and it requires a naturally humorous side. Mine tends toward being a smart ass. That works in a room and dies in print. Tone carries sarcasm. A page doesn’t.
So I have a real challenge with it, and my response has been to keep writing it. Humor appears across a great deal of my work because I find it hard, on the theory that the way past a weakness is through it.
Detective Biscuit was hard for that reason. So was the chicken. Whether either succeeds is a reader’s call. A joke that works for the writer and nobody else is the most common failure in comic fiction, and it’s invisible from the inside. I had more fun with the chicken than with almost anything else in the book, and that’s exactly why I don’t trust my own read on it.
Where does the format of Forty Worlds come from?
The collections I grew up on. The fifty best horror stories. The fifty best science fiction stories. Those doorstop anthologies with a dozen writers in them and no consistency of tone from one page to the next. I read a lot of them and they were enormous fun, and I wanted to write my own version. The difference is that mine has one author across all forty, and that changes the experience. An anthology gives you range because it collected many writers. This gives you range from one. Stranger proposition, and closer to what I wanted to find out.
Including so many genres came out of being eclectic as a reader. I’ve read across most of these forms for decades. Writing in them was the obvious next question.
What’s in Forty Worlds?
A sample, since a list of forty titles tells you less than a handful of them does.
Detective Biscuit narrating a neighborhood dispute in full Chandler.
The Last Candle in Constantinople. The Quantum Widow. AI Alzheimer. The House That Cared Too Much. Murder at the Monastery Gate. The Pianist of Titan. Dead Letter Office, 1923. A Bullet for the President’s Ghost. The Fisherman’s War. The Zero-gravity Circus. A Garden in Hiroshima. The Dentist of Mars. Tango in a War Zone. The Prophet of Broken Clocks. Silence in the Vatican Library. The Cab Driver of Oz. When Atlantis Drowned Again. Starlight Armada. The Chicken Who Outsmarted God.
You can see the range from the titles alone, and I chose them partly for that. A reader scanning a table of contents should be able to work out within a few seconds whether this book is for them. I’m sick of collections that hide behind vague literary titles and make you read three stories before you know what you’ve bought.
The manuscript also contains two stories in two versions each, written as alternate takes on the same premise. Keeping both was deliberate. Seeing the same idea handled twice is the closest a reader gets to watching the decisions happen.
What does a multi-genre short story collection ask of a reader?
Attention, in a way most collections don’t demand.
I’m sick of collections that hide behind vague literary titles and make you read three stories before you know what you’ve bought.
A single-genre anthology lets a reader settle. You know what you’re getting for four hundred pages and you adjust once. Here the adjustment happens forty times, and each new story asks you to arrive with a different set of expectations. Some readers find that exhilarating and some find it exhausting, and I have no argument with the second group. The book announces the whiplash on the sales page for exactly that reason. Anybody who wants a consistent experience across a long book should read a novel, and I’ve written plenty.
What a reader gets in exchange is discovery. Forty chances to encounter a form they’d never have picked off a shelf, at a cost of twenty minutes each. A person who has never read magical realism will read one here without having decided to.
Do you have to read a short story collection in order?
No, and the book says so. Read them in order or don’t. Start with whichever title interests you, skip anything that doesn’t, come back later.
The whiplash between stories is deliberate and unapologized for. Science fiction into horror into historical fiction into comedy, back to back. Somebody who wants a consistent reading experience across four hundred pages should read a novel, and I’ve written several. The content warning is accurate and covers the range: horror, erotica, and graphic violence appear across various stories. Forty genres includes the ones that come with warnings attached.
My take
Test a genre short before you commit a year to it. Forty stories across forty genres were my reconnaissance, and humor was the hardest of them. My smart-ass streak doesn’t survive contact with the page. Read the collection in any order and skip whatever doesn’t grab you. Mind the content warnings, because some of those genres come with them for good reason.
What did forty attempts teach you?
That the genres are less separate than the shelving suggests, and more separate than a writer wants them to be.
Less separate, because the underlying work is the same everywhere. A character wants something and can’t have it. A reader needs a reason to continue. The mechanics don’t change when you move from magical realism to hardboiled crime.
More separate, because each form has expectations built into it that a reader brings without being asked, and violating them by accident produces a story nobody enjoys. A mystery reader is doing something specific with the information you give them.
A horror reader is waiting for a particular kind of turn. Working in a genre you’ve only read means discovering how much of that you absorbed and how much you didn’t.
Forty of them in a row makes the comparison unavoidable, and that was the point.
You can’t fool yourself about which forms come easily when the evidence sits side by side in one volume. I’m proud of this book for that reason more than any other. It’s where I stopped guessing which genres I could handle and found out, and I loved finding out even when the answer wasn’t flattering.
Forty Worlds holds forty stories in forty genres, from a detective cat to a chicken that outsmarts God. Each story comes with a short note on where it came from.
