“Watts: For sure. It’s a tired cliche that science fiction is “the literature of ideas,” and a lot of science fictional ideas for all their coolness don’t have the strength to carry a whole novel. Short stories serve an essential purpose as the one-line jokes of science fiction.
They’re also a valuable proving ground for novels-in-progress. I frequently play around with ideas at shorter, proof-of-principle lengths to figure out whether they justify longer treatment; if those practise sprints net me a few bucks on their own merits, so much the better. Starfish started out as a short story. You can see the ghosts of a couple of my shorter works poking their heads up here and there throughout Blindsight. And sometimes, a perfectly coherent novel can be built by bolting together standalone shorts pretty much as-is. Bradbury did it with The Martian Chronicles. Stross did it with Accelerando. I’m trying to do the same thing with Sunflowers, of which “The Island” is only one chapter.”
4 out of 5
