Exploring the Novella (or Why the Short Novel Remains the Best) · 9:26pm Jan 13th, 2021
Rather than talk about real-world events here, or anything regarding my personal life, I've felt especially compelled recently to talk in a long and rambling way about a certain mode of fiction writing that I feel is often underappreciated.
As I've mentioned in one or two previous blog posts, I am an avid reader. Not so much of horse words, which I mostly stopped getting invested in a few years ago, but professionally published fiction. I read something like thirty novels a year and about twice as many short stories, but between the novel and the short story there lies what I consider to be my favorite mode of fiction: the novella. The novella, as defined by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), is a work of fiction ranging from 17,500 to 40,000 words in length; this is a range that SFWA sought to give a category of its own come awards season, for the Nebulas since the award's introduction in 1966 and the Hugos since not long after that. At least in the realm of speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy), the novella remains an industry staple.
Of course, novellas were being written long before they were being honored with their own category at sci-fi conventions. George Orwell's anti-Soviet allegory Animal Farm is about as classic an example of a novella as it gets, clocking in at roughly 100 breezy pages. Going back much farther than Orwell, we have H.G. Wells's cautionary tale of class struggle, The Time Machine, published in 1895 and written essentially as an extended monologue. Indeed, the last quarter of the 19th century saw some of the most talented authors from around the world taking the novella format and pumping out classic works of literature that range from 50 to 120 pages. Henry James, at a point in his career when his novels were getting lukewarm reception, wrote what is now regarded as his most (in)famous story, The Turn of the Screw, a novella that James claimed to have envisioned as a simple ghost story, a claim that practically nobody believes. Leo Tolstoy, following the mammoth Anna Karenina, along with his religious and political awakening, penned The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a fable of existential dread that Vladimir Nabokov would consider a late-career masterpiece. Then of course there's Joseph Conrad, who perhaps more than any one of his contemporaries capitalized on the potential of writing in the 17,500-40,000 word range, with too many examples to mention but with his most famous being Heart of Darkness.
This is all just the tip of the iceberg. Classic literature alone is filled to the brim with novellas which are now held in high esteem, if not as the very peak of their authors' artistry. If you ask someone what they think the best Franz Kafka story is there's a good chance they'll say The Metamorphosis, a sentiment I happen to agree with. The history and prestige of the format, I feel, is not up for debate; this is doubly true for science fiction, where novellas continue to be published regularly and received with great acclaim. Outside of science fiction, though, the virtues of the novella seem to be understated. I rarely ever see the word come up in conversations about the novella in literary fiction, and certainly not in how it relates to novels and short stories. Despite being often forced upon schoolchildren by virtue of their brevity (How many people had to read Animal Farm or The House on Mango Street in high school?), I don't recall the inherent qualities of the novella being discussed in an English lit classroom, at least from first-hand experience. I've gotten lessons about what makes a "good" short story, but never about what makes a "good" novella.
To be fair, it is a somewhat nebulous category. Even with the word count there is some wiggle room; I've seen short stories (or novelettes if you want to split hairs) counted as novellas, and the same goes for some novels. The Machine Stops, a prophetic sci-fi short story by E.M. Forster, is sometimes considered a novella, but I reckon its word count falls a bit short of the 17,500 word minimum. On the opposite end we have The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which is occasionally referred to as a novella despite clocking in at 150 pages, presumably a bit higher than the 40,000 word maximum. You could argue that these works are perhaps novellas in spirit, if not on the technical front, since (especially in the case of the latter) they are too long to be short stories but are still too linear and compact to be thought of as novels. Certainly a common quality among novellas is that they only ever seem to have one subplot at the most, if a subplot at all. While it is normal to find multiple subplots woven into the architecture of a novel, novellas are usually restrained to a single plot thread where we are given a small set of characters and a singular conflict. The Machine Stops gives us only a few characters of note and a straightforward conflict, and certainly it would be pushing the upper threshold of what constitutes a short story. Conversely, The Crying of Lot 49 gives us far more characters to keep track of than what would normally be called for in a novella, but the conflict never deviates far from a single focal point, and we follow a single character's perspective pretty much the whole time.
Thus, I think it's fair to say that a novella is generally a work of fiction ranging from 50 to 120 pages (with some leeway on either end) that focuses on a small cast of characters who must ultimately deal with a singular conflict, with little to no deviation from said conflict. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway is a textbook example of a story that fits such criteria. While a novella may not be more complicated in terms of events being mapped out than in a short story, the added length gives the author an opportunity to explore the material with more depth; I reckon this is why the format continues to thrive within science fiction and sometimes fantasy, because the length grants room for sufficient world-building while also confining the story to a neat little pocket. As a major fan of science fiction I've read too many excellent novellas to count, but here's a somewhat brief list of recommendations on top of the ones I've already mentioned:
The Persistence of Vision by John Varley
The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear
Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell
With Folded Hands by Jack Williamson
Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip José Farmer
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang
True Names by Vernor Vinge
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr.
Ship of Shadows by Fritz Leiber
A Song for Lya by George R.R. Martin
The Star Pit by Samuel R. Delany
Home is the Hangman by Roger Zelazny
I've talked a lot about this, but I've been itching to do a blog post or something like that for a minute now. I think the novella is a mode of writing that deserves more exploration and recognition, even coming from someone who as of yet has not been able to write one himself. I'll get there someday, maybe.
Neat :3
The last non Pony novel or novella I read was a Hundred Years of Solitude in senior year of high school so like what 12 years ago now? That's kind of sad. I really should probably read real novels . The vast majority of my reading these days is nonfiction and occasionally short pony stories