ozarque's Journal

Writing science fiction; non-standard formats...
As a comment to one of the fictional interviews I posted, Someone Anonymous wrote:
"This is at least the second example to appear here, after the glossary story. What other exotic forms of fiction are people aware of?"

Responses so far...

1. Glossary story; posts in this journal about this format are indexed at http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=ozarque&keyword=Writin g+science+fiction%3B+glossary+story&filter=all .

2. From

rozasharn:
"In a collection of Spider-man short stories, I found a story in the form of a museum catalog: the museum held objects Spider-man and the Joker had used in their intrigues, catalogued in order of use, with brief explanations of how they'd been used."

3. From

houseboatonstyx:
"I haven't read this, but I think it may be online somewhere. I've heard it praised: people call it a story though apparently it's written as a conventional "Frequently Asked Questions" document" -- followed up by

aquaeri writing that "It's at: http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html . It's by David Langford, and first appeared in Nature in 1999."

Several comments have mentioned the "epistolary" story or novel -- a narrative made up entirely of fictional letters -- and that's certainly an example of non-standard format. I think, however, that it has been around so long that it no longer qualifies as exotic. The same thing would be true for sf narratives in the form of scholarly papers.

I can add to this two suggested formats that I'm not certain were science fiction (and for which I can't give you the references) but that I'm quite sure would work well as science fiction:

4. Story told entirely in e-mails. [This one has been done very successfully, by subscription, with the e-mail episodes going out just like ordinary e-mails.]

5. A volume of book reviews for books that have never been written and that exist only in the imagination of the book's author.