Paul Di Filippo, "Karuna, Inc." (Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Spring 2001)
It has been argued that the novella is an ideal form for SF, largely
on the grounds that the additional wordcount relative to a short story
provides additional room for establishing details of the setting,
while still being short enough to focus on one thing, unlike a novel.
I'm not sure this argument really holds water -- a story's best length
is whatever is best for that given story, and using additional wordage
to describe details of a science fictional or fantastical setting is
more likely to slow a story down, to make it seem padded, if the
central point of the story is meant to occupy 5000 words. Still,
there are many SF stories that are best told at novella length,
however you define that (17,500 to 40,000 words is the current
definition used for both Hugo and Nebula purposes), and the novella
has always been one of my favorite forms.
The trouble is, it can be hard for a writer to get a novella
published. They take up such large chunk of a magazine or book that
many editors shy away from them. Anthologists typically seem to
prefer four mediocre short stories to one good novella: perhaps
because they perceive that four authors on the table of contents will
attract a wider range of book buyers, or perhaps because they feel
that the risk is less with a shorter story: if a reader doesn't like
it, oh well, that's only a few bad pages, but a bad novella might
waste a quarter of a book. Among the "big four" SF magazines, Analog
and Asimov's publish a good quantity of novellas, roughly one a month,
but Interzone and F&SF (smaller magazines in terms of words per issue)
publish them rarely. Realms of Fantasy seems never to publish
novellas. Many smaller press magazines have shockingly short word
count limits: 5000 words is common, others say 8000 words. On the
other hand, the new Scottish magazine Spectrum SF has been hospitable
to longer stories, and a couple of the DNA publications, particularly
Absolute Magnitude and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination (the magazine once known as Pirate Writings), also publish them. All told, I see
less than 40 SF/Fantasy novellas in a given year.
But there are other venues. One is stand-alone books. In the general
fiction field, novella-length books are very common. For example, the
past year has seen new "novels" from Muriel Spark (Aiding and
Abetting) and Don DeLillo (The Body Artist) that are well under
40,000 words in length. Somehow SF readers haven't historically
tended to buy such short books: even the halves of Ace Doubles were
usually at least 35,000 words long, and more typically 40,000-45,000
words. And later attempts to revise the "Double" concept (Dell's
Binary Star series, and the "Tor Doubles") were apparently commercial
failures. A better solution might be chapbooks: Pulphouse used to
publish occasional chapbook versions of novellas, and there is an
interesting project going on right now in England: an outfit called PS
Publishing is producing groups of 4 chapbooks consisting of novella
length stories by fine SF and horror writers, which are being republished as 4-story anthologies. I haven't seen any of the stories yet,
but some have received considerable praise.
And finally, there is the online or e-book route. Publishing
electronically solves to some extent the problem of limited space
(space is essentially unlimited, but editorial budgets aren't, so at a
fixed word rate a novella will still cost a venue more to publish).
The most prominent online source of SF just now is Ellen Datlow's Sci Fiction, which has published several novellas, including a fine
story by Linda Nagata, "Goddesses", that is on the current Nebula
Final Ballot.
A brand-new source of e-books is iPublish.com, a venture backed by
Time-Warner. Such prominent backing is hopefully reason for optimism
about its future. A visit to its website (which is yet to be
officially launched) shows a fairly impressive list of authors of all
genres offering what appear to be mostly reprints, but they are also
publishing new stories. Their SF line is, I believe, edited by the
fine writer Paul Witcover. At least one SF story is now available
from iPublish: "Spirit of the Place", a novella by Gregory Feeley. It
is currently available only through Amazon, but with a month or so it should be available from other online bookstores such as Powells, and from the iPublish site itself. (The price is $2.95, ISBN is
B00005B5HY.)
"Spirit of the Place" is an impressive fantasy novella based on an
historical incident, indeed, an incident which is still generating
controversy and political maneuvering to this day. The story is set
in Greece in 1802, as the ship Mentor, owned by the Scottish Lord
Elgin, takes on a number of crates containing marble friezes and
metopes removed from the Parthenon. These are the so-called "Elgin
marbles," which after much debate were sold to the British Museum by
Elgin, and which remain there today, despite many appeals that they be
returned to Greece.
This story is told through Elgin's personal secretary, William Richard
Hamilton. He is to accompany the marbles to England on the Mentor.
Once the ship is underway, there are murmurs among the crew of
whispers and strange noises from the hold. Hamilton ventures down,
and encounters something very strange indeed, a "spirit" resident
somehow in the ash planks which were just used to repair the Mentor.
The rest of the story recounts Hamilton's relationship with this
spirit.
The story is well-told, bolstered with careful historical details, and
with careful references to the literary and mythological history of
nymphs and dryads. Hamilton's relationship with this "person", as he
is compelled to call her, is ambiguous and somewhat painful. His
character and the spirit's character are well-depicted, and the
resolution takes part of the Mentor's actual history and portrays it
in a new light. The story itself is only indirectly about the Elgin
marbles, but its depiction of the pain of the nymph of the ash tree at
her uprooting is a fine metaphorical version of the cruel removal of
the great sculptures in the Parthenon from their rightful home. As
with much of Feeley's work, the action of his story becomes a sort of
metaphor for the thematic matter of the piece. This is excellent
work, and I hope it comes to the attention of SF readers.
I mentioned earlier that though many small press SF magazines shun
longer stories, some still do publish novellas. It would be a shame
if readers missed the long novella in the Spring 2001 issue of
Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, one of the DNA Publications stable of magazines. This
story is "Karuna, Inc.", by the always interesting Paul Di Filippo.
Di Filippo works well at the novella length, and much of his best
fiction is in that category, including the stories in The Steampunk
Trilogy as well as such fine works as "The Mill" and "Spondulix".
"Karuna, Inc." (like "Spondulix", actually) presents a rather utopian
view of economic activity. Shenda Moore is a brilliant young woman
who took a nice inheritance and founded the title corporation, with
the following mission: "the creation of environmentally responsible,
non-exploitive, domestic-based, maximally creative jobs ... the
primary goal of the subsidiaries shall always be the full employment
of all workers ... it is to be hoped that the delivery of high-quality
goods and services will be a byproduct ...". Without commenting on
the likelihood of such a plan working in the real world, I'll just say
that it would be nice if it would. But unfortunately, Shenda, though
she doesn't know it, has an enemy: a consortium of maximally evil
corporate types, led by the sinister Marmaduke Twigg.
The story is told alternately from the viewpoints of Shenda, Twigg,
and a damaged veteran named Thurman Swan. As Shenda brings Thurman
out of his shell of self-pity, Twigg comes to realize the existence of
"Karuna, Inc." and moves against it. Di Filippo alternates sunny
scenes of Thurman and Shenda with grotesque scenes of Twigg and his
fellow evildoers, each of whom have a special operation to make them
as evil as possible. The evil seems a bit over the top, and the good
has a large dose of wish-fulfillment intermixed, but the story
throughout is gripping, and the characters involving. It's a very fun
read, mixing tragedy and optimism, mysticism and business, with Di
Filippo's usual off-kilter imagination. Not a great story, but a
good, enjoyable, one.
Rich Horton has reviewed short SF and novels for Tangent, SF Site, Black Gate, Antipodes, and Maelstrom SF. By day he is a software engineer for a major aerospace firm.
