What are you reading in 2023?

[overgeeked]

Well, most of them are novellas. Mine are 152-172 pages. Network Effect is a novel, at 350 pages, and apparently the newest one is too. Can I read them in a short evening? Yes. Is it a really, really good evening? Also yes. Is it worth the cost of a McDonald's meal and a shake? IMO, yes.

YMMV. Pages/dollar isn't a totally crazy metric, but I buy a lot of used books in good condition so I can occasionally splurge and buy more Murderbot.

I haven't noticed a lot of novellas, but the ones I've seen are by established but not necessarily famous authors - Martha Wells & Tade Thompson are the two that come to mind. Not everyone wants an 800-page doorstop, so novellas attract a few new eyes; probably draw new readers in, and boost authors that can back it up once the new readers get intrigued. I already knew about Martha Wells, but I started reading Tade Thompson by way of The Murders of Molly Southbourne, a novella.

What’s weird to me is that the novella and short story haven’t taken off with ebooks and audio books. Seems to me the format, especially ebooks, are perfectly suited for shorter fiction.

Anything over 40,000 words is a novel according to the Hugo Awards. Novellas are 17,500-40,000 words.

Hugo Award - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Some examples are: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe ~38,500 words. A Game of Thrones ~300,000 words. The Hobbit ~95,000 words. Carrie ~61,500. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep 79,360. Fahrenheit 451 ~46,200. Time Machine ~32,200. Animal Farm ~29,200. Old Man and the Sea 26,601. Dune ~187,300.

Dune is a long novel at ~187,300 words but the paperback sells for $10-15 new. Round that up to 200,000 and divide by the price, you get 13,333-20,000 words per $1. A short story is up to 7,500 words so selling one for 50¢ doesn’t seem off. Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine buys shorts for 8-10¢ per word. Selling a 7,500 word short to them would net you $600-750. That’s 1200-1500 direct sales, if you’re making the full amount. Double the number of sales if you’re selling through Amazon or another sales site that takes ~50% off the top.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I haven't noticed a lot of novellas, but the ones I've seen are by established but not necessarily famous authors - Martha Wells & Tade Thompson are the two that come to mind. Not everyone wants an 800-page doorstop, so novellas attract a few new eyes; probably draw new readers in, and boost authors that can back it up once the new readers get intrigued. I already knew about Martha Wells, but I started reading Tade Thompson by way of The Murders of Molly Southbourne, a novella.

If you want some recs:
Wayward Children by Seanan McGuire
Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers
Binti by Nnedi Okafor
This is how you lose the Time War by Amal al-Mhotar and Max Gladstone
The Seep by Chana Porter

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Global recommendation for Becky Chambers.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished JRRT's The Return of the Shadow. Fascinating to see the story's earliest, roughest forms. Bilbo still the main character! But then it was Bingo Baggins, with a Frodo Took at his side. Strider named Trotter, and a hobbit! Not Sauron yet, but still the Necromancer. Seeing the revisions and notes, it's clear Tolkien was wrestling with his story, working through not just characters and plot points, but dates, times, distances. Creating one of the most beloved stories of all time was clearly not easy work.

Now I'm starting John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian Versus the Sorceress.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

What’s weird to me is that the novella and short story haven’t taken off with ebooks and audio books. Seems to me the format, especially ebooks, are perfectly suited for shorter fiction.

They haven't taken off for precisely the reason I'm describing.

You've got your 1 Audible credit per month.

What do you want to spend it on, this good space opera novella that will is 4 hours long, or this good epic space opera that is 29 hours long.

HMMM DIFFICULT CHOICE. If it all the longer books sucked or something maybe it would make sense, but that's just not the case. You buy one of Adrian Tchaikovsky's recent space opera series, and you're getting as much excitement and as good writing as Martha Wells' Murderbot series, you're just getting almost 10x as much for your buck.

And with Kindle or other ebooks, it's even more obvious - I could spend £7.99 on Murderbot #4 (163 pages) or I could spend £4.99 (LESS!!!!) on the Children of Time (608 pages). Again HMMM DIFFICULT CHOICE. There's no delta in quality, really. Murderbot isn't like, super-premium ultra-amazing - it's good but it's not like it's some cut above. But the price is exactly the same as full length or even very long novels, often higher than those, in fact. There's no relationship whatsoever between length and cost - you can see this with Murderbot #5, which is £6.99, but a much more respectable 342 pages, nearly twice the length of the £7.99 book by the same author with the same character and setting.

And a lot of novella pricing is like this.

Not all of it - you do see some novellas priced very low, and I've certainly bought those before. But an awful lot are priced higher than well-written full-length novels.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I quite liked the Alex Stern books, best take on the "Dark Academia" urban fantasy subgenre I think I've read. A lot of them can get a little bit too flowery and ungrounded. I was enjoying Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, as I'm a sucker for any kind of fantasy heist novel, but it just happened to blunder into one of my personal worldbuilding bugaboos and soured as a result.* I don't think that's really on Bardugo though, I care more about the issue than most readers, and it was sort of generally in the air in fantasy around when they were published.

Spoiler: *Worldbuilding Nitpicking

Specifically she presents a queer relationship as non-problematically normative in a society with strong enough patrilineal inheritance laws to make it an important question whether or not a given character is a bastard. You can't have normative queerness without constructing more of your society differently, and it rings false and hollow to me to see it, pasting a contemporary understanding, devoid of contemporary historical struggle, onto the world. Brian McClellan's Powder Mage series did something similar with an attempt to portray both a society unconstrained by gender roles, yet still somehow with gendered violence. Compare this to the work done in M.A. Carrey's Rook and Rose trilogy, which specifically covers how noble families might work with an established tradition of adoption, or Melissa Scott's Astreiant series, which specifically goes out of its way to imagine a feudal matriarchy.

I get the objection and I have similar ones to similar issues (especially to the very 2015 Tumblr notion that writers "shouldn't be allowed"* to write fantasy settings with homophobia as an issue, or racism or the like - luckily great authors like NK Jemisin have utterly ignored this idiot notion) but I feel like you're underestimating Bardugo and throwing her in with a lot of inferior writers simply because she didn't dwell on the realities of the issue in that particular society.

Spoiler

There have been real-world societies with strong - in fact stronger than Ketterdam - patrilineal inheritance which celebrated homosexual relationships and even put them above heterosexual ones to some extent - they just had the potential male inheritor have children with a woman whilst having a primary romantic relationship with a man (Athens, some subsets of Samurai culture in Japan and so on). I feel like, conversely, a lot of fantasy is unwilling to engage with historical stuff like that because it's not pretty enough for them, and it's too close to misogyny. We're primarily talking a specific single individual too - Wylan - there's no real evidence it's remotely normative (I cannot think of a single actual other Kerch who is homosexual) in the society, just that it's tolerated and non-illegal. I suspect the thinking Bardugo has is, as cruel, small-minded and unpleasant as Wylan's father is, he wouldn't give him the boot for being homosexual because that in no way prevents you from having a child (do we need to discuss the huge proportion of primarily or even virtually exclusively homosexual men, closeted and uncloseted, who have had children, historically?) and carrying on the line, but being so severely dyslexic (and they have no word for it even) that he's permanently illiterate does disqualify him from running the family business, because you'd need someone utterly permanently beyond reproach as your reader, because otherwise that person would be potentially scamming you (and people would put pressure on them to do so). And honestly - I don't think that Jesper - who I love - even is that guy. I don't think someone with a crippling gambling addiction can really, in the long-term, be trusted to manage the written side of Wylan's affairs, but that's a whole other story. I will say though that I found the "I'll just murder him" plan Jesper's father had seemed a little implausible on various levels- I feel like he'd have tried disinheritance seriously before that - a society like Kerch must have clear, legally-defined ways of disinheriting people, even if it's sending them to a monastery or something - a tried and true way in many Christian societies.

If you don't mean W+J I don't know what you're referring to though!

I do actually have a bugbear with Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom myself, which is all the characters are like, about 5 years too young to be believable in how they act, even in a rough 1700s-1910s-type society as they're in. They're just too wise, too calm, not hormonal enough and they understand the passage of time as 30-something or older adult does, and almost no 17-year-old does. But it's across the board and it honestly wouldn't meaningfully change anything beyond minor specifics if they were all more around 22 than 17. This is a common flaw in YA fiction and a lot of anime, so I can get over it, but it's there. I notice the portrayal of Alex Stern doesn't suffer in the same way so either it's part of the stylization of Six of Crows etc. or Bardugo has grown as a writer.

* = Let's be clear, that's not overstatement or hyperbole, if anything I'm playing down the rhetoric that was downright common at the time.

 

[Richards]

I had a business trip this week, so I did a bunch of reading. I finished up The Dragon Factory on Sunday and liked it enough to put all of the other books in the series on my Christmas list.

Next up was The Nameless Dead by Paul Johnston, which was interesting enough to hold my attention as I read through it, but it soon became apparent this was the third or fourth book in a continuing series of novels, of which I'd read none previously. It didn't make it harder to follow - I'll give the author credit that he filled in any missing backstory as we moved along with the plot (a crime writer who'd been brainwashed into attacking the US President (in the previous novel) is trying to find the ones responsible and bring them down, with the help of the FBI) - and the action was pretty good throughout, up until the very end, when a previous plot point (the death of some major "NPCs") that was the driving force behind the protagonist wanting revenge was undone when their deaths turned out to have just been a hoax, which was completely unbelievable. It's like the author decided he needed a happy ending despite the facts not fitting in (I'm pretty sure I'd be able to successfully tell if that was my wife on the morgue or someone made up to just look like her). It left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I'll be avoiding his books in future.

And then we got to the book I'm currently reading, having gobbled through the first 420 pages yesterday at various airports and on airplanes. This one is The Athena Factor by W. Michael Gear, and it's been very good thus far: various celebrities have been robbed/attacked and in each case, something seemingly worthless was stolen (Julia Roberts' bedsheets, Mel Gibson's razor) when much more valuable items were there for the taking. The reason behind it turns out to be an Arab billionaire and his crack team of (kidnapped) geneticists have perfected human cloning and are offering "designer babies" for sale. (For a mere $100,000, you too can have a perfect clone of Elvis Presley, taken from his DNA after a "retrieval team" broke into Graceland and drilled into Elvis's tomb and corpse, implanted into your womb or the womb of a willing surrogate mother and brought to term.) Now a disgraced ex-FBI agent is figuring out who's all behind this and how it can be stopped, when there are no laws expressly forbidding it. (The cloning company, Genesis Athena, is headquartered in Yemen where human cloning isn't illegal, and all procedures are performed on a superyacht in international waters.) It's been a really good read, and the technological explanations still seem plausible (to an admitted non-expert in human cloning techniques) despite the book having been written in 2005.

Johnathan

 

[Autumnal]

Novellas sell well in horror there’s long been an argument to the effect that much of the field’s best work is at that length, and it’s true. Some fantasy and sf novellas also sell well - Tor.com’s standalone novella programs have greatly expanded from their original plans because, well, people buy them, finding them reliably good in ways they want. And so on. In conclusion, novella sales are a land of many contrasts.

 

[Ryujin]

Novellas sell well in horror there’s long been an argument to the effect that much of the field’s best work is at that length, and it’s true. Some fantasy and sf novellas also sell well - Tor.com’s standalone novella programs have greatly expanded from their original plans because, well, people buy them, finding them reliably good in ways they want. And so on. In conclusion, novella sales are a land of many contrasts.

Seems to be the case with indie films, as well. If you want something relatively quick that will sell, make a horror film.

 

[Autumnal]

Yup. There are two sides to that in film:

Horror comes with loose enough expectations that without major studio management in the way, you can do a lot of interesting stuff creatively.

Also, as horror fans we’re used to sifting through sludge for good moments.