Our Purpose and Our Dream
Andrew Marini—the founder of Startling Visions Publications—has created and launched Startling Visions Books with four main goals:
1) To Promote Startling Vision Fiction as a Legitimate and Important Fiction Type
2) To Champion the Short Story Form
3) To Encourage and Further the Concept of Inexpensive Quality Entertainment
4) To Counter the Notion of Ephemeral Media
1) To promote the kind of stories that comprise Startling Vision Fiction as a legitimate and valuable Literature
Exploring, explaining, and venerating the gamut of storytelling which we call Startling Vision Fiction, as defined in Andrew Marini's own words here, is the most important function of this magazine.
2) To Champion the Short Story Form
The short story form—once one of the most common forms of all published fiction—has for the last several decades been increasingly undervalued and overshadowed by the dominance of the novel. This is true for all types of literature, but especially so with so-called "genre fiction", such as Startling Vision Fiction.
We believe it is time to help re-establish the importance of the short prose format's place in the field of literature by devoting this magazine exclusively to short stories of Startling Vision Fiction.
In this way we hope to emphasize the strengths which the short form offers:
A) A short story need be no longer than is necessary to relate the important events in an effective manner. One does not have to stretch a small story out to accommodate the word and page count that a novel demands.
B) A group of short works can fit into the same amount of space that a single novel occupies, allowing for a greater variety of talent to be showcased in a single volume.
C) Short stories are often easier to write than fully-developed novels, and therefore may be completed in less time—contributing to the possibility of successfully meeting printing deadlines.
D) Short stories are sometimes more powerful than longer ones, because the action happens quicker, in a more "concentrated form", as it were, giving more forcefulness to the climax than might be possible from a longer, drawn-out story.
E) Short stories take less time to read, usually in no more than a few hours, allowing readers the joy of experiencing a tale from start to finish in the span of a single sitting.
At various times there have been a number of outlets which would often or almost exclusively feature fiction of this kind (magazines like The Argosy, Weird Tales, The Strand Magazine, Astounding Stories, etc.), they would also occasionally appear in newspapers and more conventional periodicals (such as The Pall Mall Magazine, Longman's Magazine, Harper's Monthly Magazine, The New York Daily Sun, The London Illustrated News, Pearson's Magazine, etc.); some particularly interesting short prose tales have even appeared in comic book publications of the past.
In recent decades, however, the novel has eclipsed the significance of the short story. As a result, the general market for short fiction has dwindled dramatically, and for tales of a Startling Vision Fiction nature many leaders in the industry appear to think that such a story should be at least of minimum novel length to be worthy of printing—at times it seems they always believe it's better if a Startling Vision Fiction story is a trilogy of no less than 300 pages per volume.
This narrow view has left the short story market in a sorry state, but a state that could be recovered from if enough publishers devote themselves to cultivating greater interest in short fiction forms by presenting more avenues for short stories as well as providing more opportunities for short story writers.
We at Startling Vision Publications are certainly not "anti-novel" by any means—some of the greatest works of Startling Vision Fiction are novels—but the novel is well looked after by the industry at present, and we want to see the short story forms as equally well represented in the literary field once more, and hope to inspire others to join us in this pursuit.
3) To Encourage and Further the Concept of Inexpensive Quality Entertainment
It seems likely most people would agree that good, inexpensive entertainment is not easy to come by today. Though complaints about the high costs of living are certainly common to every generation, there's little doubt that the prices of entertainment forms haven risen exorbitantly in the last twenty-five years, such that even small paperback books from large commercial publishers have become prohibitively expensive. With Startling Visions Publications, we are trying to buck this trend and provide quality, entertaining fiction at below-industry prices.
4) To Fight Against the Notion of Ephemeral Media
Despite the fact that there are people who always throw a magazine or book away once they've read it, who never watch a movie or television program more than once, or who won't listen to the same audio play twice, the old concept of "disposable media" has been proven to be a falsehood. The value of beloved entertainments of the past has never been more keenly realized than now, and by helping to keep older stories accessible to a modern audience, Startling Visions Publications is just one more source for the preservation of our literary heritage.
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