From richard.horton@sff.net Mon Mar 15 23:44:35 2004 Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 20:53:02 -0600 From: Rich Horton Newsgroups: sff.people.richard-horton, sff.discuss.short-fiction Subject: Re: Summary: Anthologies, 2003 On Mon, 05 Jan 2004 21:07:37 -0600, Rich Horton wrote: >4. Longer Stories > >Two books focussed on novelettes and novellas only. (Remember back in >the 70s when people like Silverberg routinely put out original >anthologies collecting 3 to 5 novellas?) > >The books: Imaginings, The Dragon Quintet > >Subtotals: 2 books, 15 stories (2 novellas, 13 novelettes), about >205,000 words. It is often noted that novellas are difficult to sell in the current short fiction market. Even the current spate of small press 'zines has not provided markets for longer stories -- these 'zines tend to publish stories no longer than 8000 words, often only 5000 words or less. (I think there are two reasons for this. One is obvious: space. If there are only 20,000 words in your 'zine, are you going to invest 18,000 in a single story? The other is, it seems to me, a desire to please as many writers as possible by accepting more stories -- and the shorter the stories you accept, the more you can accept.) Asimov's and Analog continue to be good markets for novellas (though Analog publishes fewer, presumably due to the space taken by serials). F&SF publishes only a few per year. Interzone only publishes them in serialization, and that rarely (none in 2003, one in 2002). Realms of Fantasy doesn't publish novellas at all. Of the smaller press full-size magazines, Black Gate, Absolute Magnitude, and Fantastic have all been willing to publish novellas -- but that only opens up a few more slots. Online, Strange Horizons has never published a story longer than about 12,000 words, and usually stops at 8000. Sci Fiction is a good market: usually there are about 3 published as month-long serials, and this year there were a couple more than Ellen fit into a single week. Other online sources, with the notable exception of Elysian Fiction, tend towards shorter stories (probably in part because people resist reading long stories online). In the anthology markets, there is room for the occasional novella, but not too many. (The DAW anthologies, for example, publish a fair quantity of novelettes, even substantial ones of 15,000 words or so, but only one novella this year.) There is one other, very welcome, source of novellas: the slim books (which I have called "chapbooks", though that may be stretching the definition of chapbook a bit) produced by PS Publishing for the past several years, and for the past year or two by Golden Gryphon. (However, these are fairly expensive.) I suppose to some extent novellas have always been hard sells relative to short stories. But, as I hinted above, there was one style of book, back in the 70s at least, that was fairly common for a while, and that was a great source for novellas. This was the all-novella original anthology, usually consisting of 3 novellas (though sometimes as many as 5), usually built around a theme. The theme could be pretty strict, as in Five Fates (edited by Keith Laumer), a set of 5 stories all continuing the story of a man after he dies, based on a brief opening segment. But the them could be much vaguer as well. I suppose the basic idea can be traced back to the Twayne Triplets of the 50s. Robert Silverberg and Terry Carr both did a few of these books back in the days of the 70s original anthology explosion (I don't recall Roger Elwood doing many or any such, however). I liked that format. But you don't see it much these days. Which is a longwinded way of introducing one of these books, The Dragon Quintet, edited by Marvin Kaye. This is a collection of 5 stories, themed only in all being about dragons. Kaye asked for longer stories, apparently, and he got 3 substantial novelettes and 2 novellas. Interestingly, this book is an SFBC exclusive -- it had no edition for wider distribution. The other book considered here is Imaginings, edited by Keith R. A. DeCandido. DeCandido didn't want novellas -- he wanted novelettes, specifically stories between 8000 and 15000 words. (And, true to his promise, the shortest story in the book came to exactly 8000 words by my count, and the longest to exactly 15000.) His introduction mentioned the paucity of markets for longer stories, though obviously his concern lay more with novelettes. Both books are pretty good. (Perhaps the relative difficulty of selling longer stories meant there were good ones out there going begging?) I thought the best stories in Imaginings were H. Courreges LeBlanc's "Amends", about a man with the power to both read and change people's minds, and how this power affects him; and Adam-Troy Castro's "Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs", a sort of "Omelas" story, about a lovely resort-like place and the payment required to stay there. The best story in The Dragon Quintet is probably Michael Swanwick's "King Dragon", a novelette about a mechanical dragon (like those in The Iron Dragon's Daughter, I take it) who crashes in a village and uses a boy to enforce his will on the villagers. But the other stories are decent as well. The two novellas are by Elizabeth Moon and Mercedes Lackey: the moon tells of a village corrupted by the finding of dragon's eggs, while the Lackey is about a young victim of war who is forced into service as a dragon groom of sorts, and who learns from a "good guy" dragon rider how to treat the beasts properly. Both fun fantasies, not particularly memorable but enjoyable. Tanith Lee's "Love in a Time of Dragons" is a harsher story, about a woman long mistreated, forced to prostitution and menial service, who encounters a dragon by chance with profound consequences. And Orson Scott Card's "In the Dragon's House" is about an orphan growing up in a house which perhaps secretly harbors a dragon.