Why I Edited... Grapeshot and Guillotines
- cepmurphywrites
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Gary Oswald
Philip K Dick is, in my humble opinion, possibly the greatest writer of speculative fiction short stories to have ever existed. He was a genius at them, at coming up with great clever concepts of worlds or situations and drip feeding that worldbuilding to the audience in a short story so that it repeatedly surprises you. He also, in my view, never wrote a full novel worth reading. The two forms require very different skills.
When asked about the difference between writing a science fiction novel and a science fiction short, Dick said that a short story is about an idea (you introduce the audience to a sci-fi concept and then you reveal the complication to that) whereas a novel, with that greater length, cannot be supported on just an idea, it must be about a person (you introduce the audience to your main character and the sci-fi concept provides the challenge that that person must grapple with). I agree with him and ultimately I bounce off Dick's longer work because I don't really like his characters, I just love his concepts.
Alternate History is a genre which thrives on ideas and as such, I think it's a genre that suits the short story format, where the ideas can carry you a bit more than in longer works. SLP has produced sixteen anthologies of short stories so far and honestly, they're probably the SLP books I reread the most. Five of those anthologies have a short story by me in them, my only published AH work, and three of them were my idea.
Emerald Isles, about Irish AH, If We'd Just Got That Penalty, about Sports AH, and Grapeshot and Guillotines, about revolutions, were all anthologies that I pitched to the authors, that I decided which stories would go into, and that I edited. I enjoyed doing all three, they were all themes that gave huge room for variety in the stories produced and as such I worked with dozens of authors, many of whom had never previously been published, to produce stories in a wild variety of settings. I was so pleased that Mark Ciccone got nominated for the Sidewise Award for his story in If We'd Just Got That Penalty and I think that was a just reward for the quality of stories that get submitted to these anthologies.
The first of those three projects, and probably the one that I am most proud of, was Grapeshot and Guillotines. Like all great stories, it began when I was drunk in a pub. I was with Paul Hynes, a fantastic writer who focuses primarily on WW2, and we were talking about the narrative possibilities of revolutions and how many good AH short stories have been written about the subject (there'd been a recent vignette challenge on that theme in the forums where Alex Langer had written a wonderful story about revolution in El Salvador that I wanted to see reach a larger audience). And by the end of it, I’d agreed to pitch an anthology about it.
I have certainly made worse choices while drunk. Honestly, editing the anthology was an absolute pleasure thanks to the quality of stories sent to me and I was very pleased that Alex agreed to submit his story when asked. The only bad thing about it is that I had to reject a handful of stories that didn’t fit the themes or the tone, and that’s hard. It’s not nice to have to tell someone that you’re rejecting them, especially when the stories were all good, just not what I was looking for.
A revolution is a classic setting in fiction and understandably so. Revolutions are a rich source of drama and moral uncertainty. A revolution is a failure of a state, essentially. It’s when the current status quo is deemed so unsatisfactory that reform must happen and then it doesn’t. And so, violence happens and the status quo collapses.
Violence is always something that shouldn’t be celebrated but it’s dramatic when things fail and morally, both sides, the state and the rebels, are often violent. Both sides are often flawed. Do you support the status quo out of fear of something worse replacing it or do you support the rebels in hope of building something better?
The great thing about counter-factual possibilities is you can put that drama into familiar circumstances. Would you view a revolution differently if it happened in Birmingham rather than Bloemfontein?
That drama, that contrast between revolutions being needed and revolutions bringing the worst people into power, and both of those things sometimes being true at the same time, is something the writers who submitted stories made much of. While I am biased, I think there’s some fantastic stories in there and ones that aren't just about the same five European countries you'd expect. There’s a wide range of revolutions covered by the book from Canada and the USA to China and Japan with stop-offs at the Ottoman Empire, Haiti, Italy, and El Salvador among the way.
In terms of the writers, Tom Anderson, of Look to the West, is one of the great names of online AH writing and it was a genuine privilege to have a story from him. Likewise Brent A Harris and Jared Kavanagh have a proud pedigree as writers, as does the aforementioned Paul Hynes.
But some of the new writers were also revelations. J. Concagh had never had a story published before but his tale, about a rebellion in Trinidad and Tobago led by the Marxist historian CLR James, was one of the best AH stories I’ve ever read. Something I think elevated by the fact that he comes from an Afro-Caribbean family and had personal connections to the events he wrote about.
It's that sort of pleasant surprise that makes that kind of open call 'I want an anthology of stories about this, what have you all got?' so rewarding. And ultimately that is why I edited Grapeshot and Guillotines.