Over the past several years, I’ve embarked on a series of year-long review cycles at Black Gate. In 2018, I reviewed a story-a-day to coincide with an author whose birthday it was. In 2022, I selected stories completely at random from my collection to review. In both of those cases, the projects served to find forgotten and minor works of science fiction that spanned a range of years. They also served to make me read stories and authors who I haven’t read before, even if they were in my collection.

For this year’s project, I’ve compiled a list of all the stories and novels in my collection. I then identified the first and last works for each letter of the alphabet and over the next twelve months, I’ll be looking at those works of fiction, starting with Vance Aandahl’s “Bad Luck” and ending with David Lee Zweifler’s “Wasted Potential.” Looking at the 52 works (two for each letter), I find that I’ve only reviewed one of the works previously. Interestingly, given the random nature of the works, only three novels made the list, while four anthologies have multiple stories on the list. The works range in publication date from 1911’s “The Hump,” by Fernan Caballero to Zweifler’s story from last year.

The first story in my collection by an author whose name begins with an U is Sara L. Uckelman’s “The Curious Child & the Covetous Dragon,” which is the second story in this series to originally appear in Wyrms, edited by Eric Fomley. Wyrms is a collection of drabbles, a literary format of exactly 100 words. In the interest of transparency, I’ll note my story “Best Policy” also appears in Wyrms. Finally, the last word of this sentence (including the introductory paragraphs) is the 300th word of this article.

Uckelman takes the concept of the deal with the devil, along with an adaptation of the story of One Thousand and One Nights to create the tale of a young child and a dragon. The child discovers the dragon and the two make a deal. The dragon will allow the child to spend a day with it in return for which the child will provide the dragon with its greatest treasure.

The drabble form doesn’t allow Uckelman to provide details about what the two characters did on their day together, but those details aren’t important. What is important is that when the dragon demands its payment, Uckelman’s story points out that different people value different things and the child’s treasure may not match up with what the dragon was expecting or desiring. What makes this story work is the fact that the dragon is dealing with a young child, who can be presented as guileless and naive. The child doesn’t set out to deceive to trick the dragon, but merely presents an alternative worldview.

As noted in my review of the other drabble from this anthology, Alex Azar’s “Fire in the Dark,” on February 19, a good drabble allows the reader to fill in their own details. In one version of the story the dragon is so taken in by the child’s response that it is accepted, but there can also be a darker version of the story in which the dragon views itself as cheated and takes its vengeance against the child.

 

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference six times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.