by Maria Haskins
For the last few months, Ruadán Books has been open to novel and novella submissions. (We’re still open for submissions until August 31st, and if you have a story for us, you can read our submission guidelines in Moksha.)
Reading submissions, and specifically novella submissions during this open call, is part of what inspired this What to Read column, and I’ll kick things off with the most basic question: what in blazes is a novella? The cheeky answer is that it’s a work of fiction that is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. For a more precise answer, I’ll quote the rules for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards: a novella is at least 17,500 words but fewer than 40,000 words.
Personally, I also like the Swedish terminology where a novella is referred to as a “kortroman”, AKA “short novel”. I like the term because it captures the nature of many, if not all, novellas quite well: a story that is structured and built almost exactly like a novel, just, well, shorter.
Novellas are not a new invention. According to the internet, several classic books are actually novellas: Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Animal Farm by George Orwell, and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, to mention a few.
The first novella I read knowing it was a novella was Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, a splendiferous, mind-bending book that went straight into my brain and veins like liquid lightning, reigniting my love for beautifully written and wonderfully strange speculative fiction. This was back in 2015, when I was getting back into writing after a long time away from the craft, and when I was also getting back into reading everything new and shiny that I could get my eager little hands on. This included novellas like Angela Slatter’s gorgeous, dark, and witchy Of Sorrow and Such (set in her Sourdough universe), E. Catherine Tobler’s magnificently strange The Kraken Sea (part of her Jackson’s Unreal Circus series), and also Nnedi Okorafor’s space-faring adventure Binti about a young Himba woman who leaves Earth to study at the famed, far-away Oomza university.
My love of novellas has only grown since then, and some of my favorites from the last few years are The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar by Indrapramit Das, a breathtaking, exquisitely written coming-of-age tale of memory and migration and dragons traveling across universes; the harrowing, reimagined fairytale world of KT Bryski’s Lovely Creatures; Sam Kyung Yoo’s Small Gods of Calamity about a spirit detective in Seoul who solves crimes with ties to ghosts, magic, and the supernatural; Rae Mariz’s dazzling climate change novella Weird Fishes; and R.B. Lemberg’s Yoke of Stars which involves (and I’m quoting the author) “assassins, linguistics, and FISH COMMUNISM”.
When you enter the world of speculative fiction novellas you might notice that Tor Publishing is the most visible publisher in this particular field. For example, all the (excellent) novellas on the final ballot for this year’s Hugo Awards were published by Tordotcom, except the one that was published by Nightfire, another Tor Publishing imprint. All of these novellas are excellent, including the winner, The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler, an eco-thriller about resurrected mammoths and the scientist whose digitized consciousness is uploaded into one of those mammoths. The other novellas on the ballot are also great reads: The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo, The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed, Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (one of the best science fiction books I’ve read in recent years), and What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher.
These books join a long list of Tor Publishing novellas that I have read and enjoyed, including The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle, Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark, Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather, Mapping The Interior by Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander, and Cassandra Khaw’s masterful horror tale Nothing But Blackened Teeth.
But there is a wealth of brilliant novellas beyond Tor Publishing, and I often wish they would get more eyes on them, at awards-time and elsewhere. I’m talking about novellas like A.D. Sui’s hard-hitting science fiction novella The Dragonfly Gambit, which recently won a Nebula Award; and E. Catherine Tobler’s The Necessity of Stars, a heartbreaking story of alien contact, fading memories, and love at the edge of the shadows – both from Neon Hemlock. Or the skin-shedding, skeleton-dancing beauty of From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos from Psychopomp; and Izzy Wasserstein’s very queer, very noir techno-thriller These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart from Tachyon.
Speculative fiction loves a series and there are several novella series out there well worth digging into. For a sharp and shatteringly beautiful take on the post-apocalypse, pick up Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds and its sequel We Speak Through the Mountain – soon to be followed by a third novella, The First Thousand Trees set for publication in September this year from ECW. Another great read is Malka Older’s cozy sci-fi/mystery/sapphic romance novella series about Mossa and Pleiti: The Mimicking of Known Successes, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, and The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses.
Another thing I’ve seen in recent years is authors writing novellas set in the same universe as their novels. For example, one of my most recent novella reads is Casthen Gain by Essa Hansen, set in the same dizzying multiverse as her Graven series. It’s likely the only book you’ll read where someone uses the varying conditions in various multiverse bubbles for culinary purposes. Another example of this trend is Livesuit by James S.A. Corey which takes place in the same universe as Corey’s new sci-fi series The Captive’s War that kicked off with the novel The Mercy of Gods last year. Livesuit has a dark, gritty vibe that I loved, and the novella approaches the world of the series from a different, and very intriguing, angle than the novel.
If you want to find novellas to read online, there is a lot of that too. Several of my favourite novellas in recent years have been published in Clarkesworld. This includes Submergence by Arula Ratnakar (a 2022 finalist for the Utopia Award for Best Utopian Novella), and R.S.A. Garcia’s hugely enjoyable and thoroughly gripping science fiction novellas Bishop’s Opening and Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma.
Another great place to find novellas online is Giganotosaurus. For example, take a look at Every Word a Play by Meridel Newton and On the English Approach to the Study of History by E. Saxey (which includes some prominent British historical figures reimagined in spectacular ways).
The world is full of wonderful novellas, and there are many more to come. This summer I’ve been lucky enough to get to read advance reading copies of three very different novellas that are coming out in the next few months:
Psychopomp and Circumstance by Eden Royce, a story of magic, grief, community, and resilience, set in a place where the dead have much to teach the living.
Summer in the House of the Departed by Josh Rountree which has shimmering echoes of Bradbury in its prose and is set in a house where everyday life is stitched together with magic.
No One to Hold the Distant Dead by K.L. Schroeder, a heart-rending science fiction novella about extinction, artificial life, death, and grief on a faraway exoplanet.
And while I haven’t read them (yet), I’m also very much looking forward to the horror novella The Cold House by A.G. Slatter, and the horror novella collection Issues with Authority by Nadia Bulkin.
Beyond that, I also can’t wait to share the novellas (and novels) that will eventually come out of Ruadán’s open call. We’re still reading those submissions and are hoping to have some publication news later this year.
