The Less is More Rule: Why We Love SF/F Novellas

But if a book isn’t quite long enough to be a novel, what is it? There’s a confusing lack of consensus here. Some “short novels” are shorter than novellas, and many works are alternately described as short stories or novellas, depending on who you ask. This has resulted in a few padded novels, extended to fit the expectations of consumers—John Scalzi admitted that the codas at the end of Redshirts were included because the final manuscript was just 55,000 words, and his publisher thought it needed more heft so it would look good on a shelf.
This all means that one of the best forms of prose, novellas (and its ridiculously named cousin, the shorter “novelette”) have historically been difficult to publish outside of monthly magazines and anthologies, and are often ignored in general, at least by mainstream readers. Which is a shame, because novellas are often the perfect format for a SF/F story, and in the digital age, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be seeing more of them. And in fact, the form is undergoing a renaissance of sorts.

Ode to the Novella
This isn’t to say there haven’t been a lot of truly great novellas throughout SF/F history—there’s a Hugo Award for the category, after all, and some of the true classics of the form have even made it to the top of the pop culture heap: H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is one of the most influential SF stories of all time, yet it barely exceeds 30,000 words. Fahrenheit 451 is usually considered a novel, but it falls short of 50,000 words, usually considered the shallow end of the novel-length pool. And there are plenty of other famous novella-length works: Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, and Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock, the latter later expanded into a novel.
Novellas are, in other words, a very successful category for writing—and with the economics of print stripped away, represent a unique opportunity for readers to try out a types of stories and writers they aren’t familiar with. You can read a novella in a day, and get a sense of the genre, a writer’s style, and some of the basic tropes. For writers there are also advantages: they can explore ideas and worlds without committing to a decade of writing the same characters.

Which is why we’re excited at the sudden surge in the popularity of the novella, as writers and publishers see the potential in both marketing terms and creative terms. Venerable genre house Tor Books has launched an entirely new imprint, Tor.com Publishing, dedicated solely to digital and print-on-demand publishing of novella-length works. Ironically, though the business model called for a focus on digital to make up for the fact that novellas would not support massive print runs, the first wave of Tor.com Publishing releases have proven so successful, they’ve had to abandon the POD model and print them en masse anyway.
Other publishers are getting into the game too. Brandon Sanderson has released a number of novella-length works via Subterranean Press, both in print and digital format (indeed, Subterranean has been a champion of the handsomely printed hardcover novella for years, even if the economics of the form have called for limited print runs). More recently, Stephen R. Donaldson, never known for the brevity of his works, announced he would be publishing two fantasy novellas in one volume, titled The King’s Justice. Combining two novellas also solves the economics problem of printing shorter books, of course; here’s hoping it’s a successful experiment, encouraging more established writers to think beyond the doorstopper series and appreciate the short and sweet.
What are your favorite short SF/F works?