“Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so,” writes Joss Whedon. And that’s the whole story. In the spirit of Hemingway’s classic six-word story, Wired asked 33 sc-fi writers to take a stab at the very short story, and then had designers, the likes of which include Chip Kidd, visually represent them. Awesome stuff. Via Brian Ford.
001 // Adam Spooner // 10.27.2006 // 8:14 AM
Some very good stuff. I’m loving Maeda’s representations - “I can’t believe she’d shoot me.”
002 // Brian Ford // 10.27.2006 // 10:36 AM
I actually like Hemingways the best as I think some of the new stories tend to try and tell a story that begins and ends with those six words.
Hemingway leaves it up to the reader to create the story based on his six words, which are obviously the climax of some mysterious larger story.
“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”
Automatically paints a picture and makes you go backward in time to think what lead this person to write this note. Was it written by a woman? What happened to her baby? Did she have an abortion? Did she miscarry? Who got her pregnant and how does he feel about this? Is he even in the story at this point?
Was it written by a guy? Did he have hopes of being a dad to a baby and if so why isn’t he? Did the mother and unborn child die somehow and he is now selling a painful memory?
It says so much with so little.
Some of the others settle for being witty one liners.
(Though, some of them are quite good.)