Score

A story collection is a book with stories by one author or (more rarely) one authorial team. An anthology is a book with stories by various authors. I note this otherwise great list of short story collections has too many anthologies.

Dan wrote: "A story collection is a book with stories by one author or (more rarely) one authorial team. An anthology is a book with stories by various authors. I note this otherwise great list of short story ..."

Agreed! I originally created this list in the spirit of your definition. I'll make the definition in the description more clear and link to a similar list for anthologies. Do you know of one (to save me some searching)?

Also, I'll work on cleaning this list up, but it might take some time.

There is a GoodReads list of SF anthologies already: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/7....

An SF anthology to my mind is little different than an SF magazine, most any SF magazine. The only two differences I can think of is that book SF anthologies have 1) a paperback cover or a hardback cover rather than just a paper magazine cover, and 2) most anthologies are organized on the basis of a theme that's slightly more specific than magazines. For example, Orbit 8 has the best stories of a particular year an editor could get permission to publish. An issue of Astounding just has some hard SF stories (in general). There have been hundreds probably thousands of SF magazine issues to have come out. Therefore, listing SF anthologies, if one includes individual magazine issues, is not much different than trying to list SF novels. The list of anthologies (that included magazine issues) would be about equally long.

Your list here, which is designed to list only SF short story collections, has more value in my opinion because it's drawing from a shorter list of potential candidates. Even then there are many SF short story collections. I don't know if a comprehensive list of them has ever been attempted, but I guarantee it would be woefully incomplete if so.

For example, take one SF author, Ben Bova. You can go to isfdb.org and pull up his page: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?184 There, you will observe he has thirteen short story collections. I recently read one of them, Challenges, which was quite good actually.

Anyhow, you can do this for hundreds of authors, and if you do you will soon have thousands of short story collections. Most of their collections will contain short stories the author previously published in SF magazines, or in anthologies if more recent, a distinction I don't make. Some authors include a few new stories in their collection. Most just reprint already published ones.

I would love to be on this list! As Dan stated: "it's drawing from a shorter list of potential candidates. Even then there are many SF short story collections. '

As an indie science fiction author, I think that short stories will always be a niche market. I would like to offer up my book The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories for consideration. If anyone would like to receive a free review copy, let me know.

I would love to be in the company of these other fine writers.

I, Robot (#62) is a short story?

Short story collection (SSC), technically, which is what this list is supposed to be. This particular SSC is a bunch of short stories about robots by Isaac Asimov, his best SSC at that.

What should not be on this list are anthologies, collections of short stories by a bunch of different authors, like #8: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Anthology. It's right there in the title. But it probably asks too much to expect cyberpunk enthusiasts to understand such distinctions, or any others for that matter.

#18, Borders of Infinity, is an omnibus, a collection of novels, which also is NOT a short story collection.

I could go on, but I'd rather continue to snicker privately. Over ninety percent of these listed books are actual SSCs, some really great ones by the looks of them. So the list serves its function. People should just beware that some of the listed books don't belong and to do their own research before acting on the listed book if it's truly a SSC they want to consider.