Reading through some online short fiction, I found myself naturally placing the stories in certain categories, regardless of genre. When I was done I came up with 7 different story types that pretty much all the stories I read could fit into. I present them here, not as a perfect an inarguable ordering, but as an observation open to discussion.
Most of these stories are from the latest or next to latest edition of these periodicals, with a couple recent Hugo nominees thrown in to get a hint of what the field thinks is the best. I tried to get a good selection of different sources whose stories are available free on the Internet for anyone to read.
There were a number of stories I read that I didn't like, though they fit into these types. I'm not going to talk about those stories. All the fiction presented below I recommend reading.
Something else to consider: change "novum" to any disruption in a person's life, and change "fight the monster" to "fight the villain", and this taxonomy could, I think, work for pretty much any short story. Novels, on the other hand, are more likely to mix the types together since they have the room to do it, thus the monster is also the disruption that brings about character growth, or a modern fable might have elements of monster fighting, character growth, socio-political lens, etc. Indeed, in many ways these types could be seen as patterns that can be mixed and matched.
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Fight the Monster
By far the most popular form of story among those I read, this is any tale whose primary subject is a monster and the character who has to do battle with it. This was one of the main modes of story of the pulp era, but its rootes obviously go back to mythology and it's never really lacked for popularity.
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"Sinking Among Lilies" by Cory Skerry (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
A man who hires himself out to fight demons and monsters discovers a town where the humans are terrorizing the monsters instead. (This is obviously a subversion of this trope.)
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"Sic Him, Hellhound! Kill! Kill!" by Hal Duncan (Subterranean)
A werewolf and his human "keeper" hunt a vampire that has seduced a high school girl. (An excellent contra-Twilight story, like Karen Joy Fowler's Younger Women which I linked to a year ago.)
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"The Sympathy" by Eric Gregory (Lightspeed)
A woman leaves her longtime boyfriend and picks up a hitchhiking girl who is being chased by a monster.
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"The Ivy-Covered Palisade" by Mike Allan (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
A man must return to a house of witchcraft that he barely escaped from in order to stop an old wizard and his vicious demons. (Here both the wizard and the demons are "the monster".)
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"The Far Bank" by Bret Tallman (3 Lobed Burning Eye)
A man travels to the land of the dead to find his dead son and ask him to identify his murderer. But first he must fight a creature that tracks down and destroys living people who enter the land of the dead.
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Novum as Socio-Political Lens
"Novum" is a term first proposed by academic Darko Suvin as a name for the invention, discovery or other speculative concept in a science fiction story that causes a drastic disruption in the current order of things. Usually in a short story, there is one primary novum, the consequences of which form the content of the tale. For more information on this idea, see the excellent entry at The Encylopedia of Science Fiction.
One of the original types of story that marked the shift of science fiction as pulp genre to science fiction as a serious form in the 40s and 50s was the story that used the novum as a lens to focus on a contemporary social issue (rather than simply using it as a means to create an adventure, as in the pulp era). It is easily the most familiar form for serious science fiction and is still used to great effect by writers like Paolo Bacigalupi.
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"Heart of the Gyre" by Matthew Bey (Fusion Fragment)
In a near future where the US is embroiled in a new civil war, a Canadian stealth ship rescues a group of environmentalists stranded in the middle of the Pacific who have discovered a new organism that could change the tide of the war.
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"The Womb Factory" by Peter M. Ferenczi (Clarkesworld)
In China, a collection of girls are sold into sweatshops where they are used to breed cheap knock-off biological toys in their wombs.
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Novum Brings About Personal Growth
Unlike the former story type, here the novum's effects are turned inward, bringing characters or usually one character through a story arc as he or she grapples with the effect of the invention or discovery on his or her life.
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"Movement" by Nancy Fulda (Asimov's Science Fiction)
A girl with autism that alters her perception of time considers an experimental procedure to make her normal.
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Romance
By "romance" here I simply mean any story where the primary subject is the course of a romantic relationship and the growth of the characters within it.
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"Six Months, Three Days" by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com)
Two psychics date, one who can see a fixed and immovable future and one who sees a network of possible futures. They try to cope with a relationship where they both know everything that's going to happen before it begins.
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Modern Fable/Fairy Tale
This is a story that takes the form of a fable or fairy tale, though typically updating it from the Brothers Grimm or Aesop model to reflect contemporary writing styles and ideas.
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"Nameless" by Mari Ness (Daily Science Fiction)
Girl whose very name has been stolen (no one can remember it) visits strange temples, each for a different element, trying to recover it.
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"Cartagrapher Wasps and Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld)
A colony of bees are subjugated by more civilized, map-making wasps, and revolution begins to foment. (You could easily argue that this is also novum as socio-political lens.)
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Mystery
By mystery I mean any story whose primary subject is a mystery that the characters must unravel.
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"Journey to the Center of the Flat Earth" by William Highsmith (Flurb)
Descendants of the characters from Journey to the Center of the Earth retrace their ancestors steps to prove their theory that the world is really flat after all.
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The Plotless Story
A style pioneered by modernist writers in Europe in the early 20th century and brought into sf during the New Wave in the 60s and 70s by writers like Carol Emshwiller and JG Ballard. These stories are not really stories at all in the traditional sense, but rather portraits of certain people in a time and place. These pieces rely on style (typically gorgeous) and structured revelations of character and setting for their effect.
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"Love is a Parasite Meme" by Lavie Tidhar (Apex)
Ballardian portrait of an urbane, dysfunctional couple in a world in which humans are nearly extinct.
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"The Steam Dancer (1896)" by Caitlin R Kiernan (Lightspeed)
Portrait of a steampunk cyborg who looses herself in exotic dancing.
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The Non-Story Story
This is any story that is presented as something typically non-narrative, like a test or a laundry list or recipe and so on.
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"Final Exam" by Megan Arkenberg (Asimov's Science Fiction)
A multiple-choice quiz unfolds the story of a failing marriage against the backdrop of an invasion of sea monsters
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