When your story spans the years

I don't like a lot of back-story (or too much world building) in short stories (especially at the beginning). When writers do it, I feel like they're dragging me through that muddy swamp from The Neverending Story. Typically, the only writers that can get away with this are well-established writers where you know you're going to get something good at the end, so you suffer through it. Even then, it's not all that fun to read (in my opinion).

The general rule of short story telling is to start the story as close to the end as possible. If you really believe you have to start in the 1800s when the story actually takes place in 2015, then it's not really a short story.

Short story: a story with a fully developed theme but significantly shorter and --->less elaborate<--- than a novel.

A lot of people forget that you don't really have to build and entire world when writing science fiction or fantasy. You simply have convey just enough information to let the reader know they aren't supposed to think of it as their world. Short stories are supposed to be quick entertainment, so adding a bunch of back-story and world building doesn't usually help with that.

Most of the time when I see short stories with world building, the whole thing can be summed into one succinct paragraph or, better yet, peppered cleverly throughout the story. Writers have to think about the story and less about how cool an idea is and how much they want the reader to experience it. Any writer that can do that can survive a science fiction or fantasy short story with ease.

So, how do you pepper it throughout? By making absolutely every word count. Showing how something is different without telling the reader it’s different. People live on Earth. Here. They know how our world works. This means they know when you’re twisting what they know and turning it into a different world. They often don’t need to know why something is different, only be convinced that it is a difference. Mad props to any clever writer than can bamboozle the reader into thinking they know a world without having actually read anything about it. One that created the world, and then the narrator makes the reader feel like a part of the story, as if they’d been living in that world this whole time but never wrote anything about it.

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I think the best way to learn to do that is to write a bunch of 500 word short stories, and force yourself to relay information to the readers without doing any back-story. Write 10 or 20 or 50 pages of back story and world-building. Then, start writing little independent stories (force yourself to do them no bigger than 500 words) that draw from that back-story, but can be understood without the reader reading your back-story. Practice that and learn the difference between info-dumping and carefully selected prose. I guarantee that after a couple of months of daily 500-word SF/F stories, you’ll be able craft amazing SF/F shorts in 2,000 words like a pro.

Of course, this is all just my opinion... I could be completely wrong. *shrug*