Talk:List of science fiction short stories

Ringworld

Ringworld is significative, but its a novel, not a short story

Categories

How about categories for space travel and science fiction mysteries?

Article concept needs serious reconsideration

This is a very problematic and nebulous article. Heinlein's All You Zombies was preceded by his own By His Bootstraps which is at least equally intricately plotted. (1959 vs. 1941) To drive the point home, I think the whole concept of this page needs quite a bit of critical thought. --Cimon avaro

Strong agreement. If we're going to have this page at all (and I'm not convinced that it's a good idea), then at the very least, the page should be retitled to something like "List of science fiction stories of major importance to the field" or "List of extremely influential science fiction stories." By the criteria currently listed at the top of the page, there should be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stories on the page, so for this page to be useful at all, we need to narrow the criteria. (Among other things, simply having won an award should not qualify a story for this page; that's what the Hugo and Nebula pages are for.) The categories listed on this page should also be categories of major importance to the field; "Intelligent animals" (no matter how enjoyable or interesting an idea it is) is not one of the major themes or tropes or categories of science fiction. Also, the description given for each story should explain why it deserves to be on the list; several of the current descriptions simply describe the story, with no indication of why it's significant. --Elysdir 22:04, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

"Orbitsville" is a novel, I read it. If I may I'm going to change this some. Concentrating on stories that didn't win awards.--T. Anthony 03:49, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

On the contrary, this is an excellent article embryo, but it needs work. I suggest that the page is centered around only two of the items from the introduction:

1. Defined a sub-genre of science fiction.
2. Been the first to introduce a science fiction concept.

This would create a list of stories/novels that introduce concepts and ideas (perhaps one or two per concept) that would be really useful. The title of the page needs to be updated to reflect this change, of course. There is no need in include awards here, since they have pages of their own.

It could be a good idea to not arrange the page thematically, but instead chronologically to allow it to show the evolution of the genre while still functioning as a reference. To find a specific theme, it is always possible to search within the page using browser functions. --Hans Persson (talk) 18:50, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

This article has been around for about five years now. It still has the same misleading title and the same overbroad set of criteria. It lists only twenty-two stories, out of the hundreds of extremely influential sf stories that have been published over the last century, and it lists only seven themes, of which at least one is not terribly significant. I'm not seeing much value in this page; I think if nobody's going to expand it into a really useful list of extremely influential stories, then it's not worth keeping. If anyone does want to expand it, I recommend starting with a perusal of one of the science fiction encyclopedias; look up major themes, and write down stories listed for those themes. --Elysdir (talk) 06:17, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

I think this article would be helped by the criteria "seminal" and "unique". Unfortunately I cannot remember (or Google) who suggested these criteria for criticism of important works. I believe it was in the Preface to a novel, which makes e-searching particularly difficult. According to this critic, a literary work of agreed contemporary or historical importance is either "seminal" or "unique". I shall not attempt to reproduce his argument here -- the meaning of the terms is fairly self-evident. D Anthony Patriarche (talk) 06:14, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

The article had this editorial comment, which is moved here for reference: "(Note: This list may be more appropriate as a list of Significant Science Fiction Themes)". Hu (talk) 03:30, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

What about Nightfall

I agree with the person who said this page has problems, but it has some potential. For example, Nightfall is one of the most famous and important SF short stories ever written, but it did not win a Nebula or Hugo. There is a need for some sort of list beyond the Hugo/Nebula lists but how we determine what's on that list I can't really say. I do think that the categorization of stories doesn't seem too important -- and I don't think it seems feasible to try to create a complicated set of explicit criteria for qualification of a story for the list. There's no way around the fact that any sort of judging like this will always be subjective.

See Also

This would be greatly improved by a link to a forum that routinely IDs classic stories. I know such pages have problems with short life, reliability, but how else does an aging brain track down a seminal or unique story that belongs here when it cannot remember either the author or the exact title? D Anthony Patriarche (talk) 05:32, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

@D A Patriarche: My suggestions are the subreddits r/whatsthatbook and r/tipofmytongue, the Concellation 2021 Facebook group, and https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/, though if allowed (unlikely) they would be in the "External links" section. —DocWatson42 (talk) 14:22, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Prior to my making major changes...

Greetings and felicitations. I intend to make major changes to this list, specifically adding Template:Sort so that leading "The"s and "A"s in stories and sources's titles are ignored, and authors are sorted by their last names. I also want to put the stories' titles in quotations, and italicize the books' and magazines' titles. Before I do that, I'm wondering—I've found at least one novelette and three collections in the list. Is it okay if I delete them? And what about the rest of my plans? Comments, anyone? —DocWatson42 (talk) 12:56, 7 November 2024 (UTC)