Magazine talk:Asimov's Science Fiction
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Martin Gardner
Oh for the vignette story type and another one for brief unsigned essays! I have toyed with the idea of leaving such items as shortfiction but such a designation is very likely to perceived as an error by someone else and likely changed.--swfritter 16:27, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
- The fictional gloss on these is so shallow that i would prefer to list them as essays, myself. -DES Talk 18:30, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
- I'm not sure what you mean by "fictional gloss", perhaps it's a reference to lack of plot, but that would rule out half the stories in the later years of Damon Knight's Orbit anthologies. :) IMHO, "essay" means explicitly non-fiction, and these vignettes were never that. MHHutchins 01:08, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
- Lack of plot, lack of character, lack of conflict, lack of significant setting. If these were storys, then so are most "word problems" in 5th-grade math texts. They are simply puzzles -- mostly good ones -- with very lightly fictionalized settings. MG did write fiction: "The No-sided Professor" for example. I would even be willing to count the various "Dr. Matrix" episodes as fiction. But these are generally under 1,000 words, and usually less than 100 of those are spent on the fictional aspect. If we added a "Puzzle" type that would be perfect. Of the types we have now, essay is IMO still better than "story".
- All that said, if the consensus is to treat these as shortfiction i'll go along. -DES Talk 01:24, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
- I'm not sure what you mean by "fictional gloss", perhaps it's a reference to lack of plot, but that would rule out half the stories in the later years of Damon Knight's Orbit anthologies. :) IMHO, "essay" means explicitly non-fiction, and these vignettes were never that. MHHutchins 01:08, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
On Books Series
A definite yes. A look at the essay part of Damon Knight's biblio page shows the value.--swfritter 16:33, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
- Yes, it helps the author's summary page, but this randomly chosen pub's page looks a bit redundant. I wish there were a way to have a cleaner look to the pub's page. MHHutchins 01:17, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
V1 N1
A couple of stories are still classified as shortfiction.--swfritter 16:36, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
- Now fixed. They've been assigned a length designation based on page count, as the TOC shows no designation. MHHutchins 01:13, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
Mooney's Module
Each episode of Mooney's Module had a specific title, and I see no reason why these shouldn't be entered, as we enter cartoon captioons. I think a series might be a good idea, be we can alsys see after entry is a bit more complete. -DES Talk 18:32, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
- I just checked out a few of 1982 issues with Mooney's Modules, and several of them were more than just captioned. But, as you suggest, we can make that decision later, since the series was relatively short-lived. MHHutchins 01:25, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
- The decision on whether to put these is a series can be deferred, because that can always be done from a title search. The decision on whether to enter the specific titles, if deferred, will require revisiting every pub if we decide to include them later. Therefore, deferring this decision will tend to weight the balance toward no-title in future. -DES Talk 01:28, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
