Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: "Novella Chapbooks", 2005
This year I saw 6 books that I would call single-story "chapbooks", though in general they aren't really chapbooks but slim trade paperbacks. Only two of these, oddly, was from PS Publishing (another PS Publishing book that I read, Jeffrey Ford's The Cosmology of the Wider World, is a full-length novel). Two were from Subterranean Press, one a mainstream book, and one from Tachyon. And
These six books are:
From PS Publishing:
The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass, by Vera Nazarian (about 38,000 words)
Christmas Inn, by Gene Wolfe (about 10,000 words -- and not a normal PS Publishing product but a special extra for Postscripts subscribers)
From Tachyon:
Burn, by James Patrick Kelly (just barely under 40,000 words)
From Subterranean:
Make a Joyful Noise, by Charles de Lint (about 12,000 words)
Questions for a Soldier, by John Scalzi (about 4500 words)
From Riverhead
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, by George Saunders (about 22,500 words)
Of these books my clear favorite is Kelly's "Burn", definitely a contender for a Best Novella nomination. It's about a colony planet which has limited technology along lines suggested by Thoreau's Walden, and about conflicts with the earlier colonists, who have taken to setting forest fires to try to stop the expansion of the newer group. It's a story in which both sides are wrong, but in which the actual characters are sympathetic. (It focuses on a young man who has volunteered to fight the forest fires, and who learns a bit more about the more tech-oriented part of the human galaxy as he is recovering from his injuries, especially once he accidently attracts the attention of an influential adolescent from another planet.) The story has both sociological and technological SF points of interest. Good stuff.
I quite liked Vera Nazarian's "The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass". Charles de Lint's introduction mentions Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, but I feel it's much more reminiscent of Clarke's The City and the Stars. It's set in a very far future, in which the Earth is almost completely dry. Most humans are nearly sexless, but every so often they mix up a throwback in order to reinvigorate the bloodlines. This story is about the latest such -- perhaps the last -- Liaei, and her upbringing, followed by her journey to another city to mate with the Clock King -- and her choice about what to do with her life after all.
The Saunders novella, on the other hand, didn't work for me at all. It's a terribly unsubtle and unconvincing satire.
Wolfe's novelette is pretty good, not quite Wolfe at his best but very characteristic, about a struggling Bed and Breakfast visited by four (or is it five?) odd guests one Christmas, guests who change the lives of each of the family and workers at the title inn profoundly. De Lint's novelette is a slight work, and also very characteristic of the writer, about a pair of crows (Indian trickster story crows) who are not quite sisters, who intervene in a guilt-ridden woman's life, as well as a ghost's afterlife, and help start things, possibly, back on track. As for Scalzi's short story, it's entirely negligible, and not really a story at all but a sort of intro/lecture about his Old Man's War universe.
