Novella Round-up 2019

[mtvessel]

As I have said before, I like the fact that e-readers make the short-form novel commercially viable, but having read a number of them this year, I can see that the format leads to a number of common problems. You can take as read the criticisms that all the books in this list were too short, with simplistic plots and characters that did not have the narrative space to become especially rich and memorable. However, I think it is important to acknowledge and encourage them, because they offer a mouthpiece for perspectives different from those of the white middle-class writers that have dominated SF and fantasy up to now.

The Tea Master and the Detective - Aliette de Bodard - JABberwocky Literary Agency, 2018
* * *
An interesting variation on the Holmes and Watson dynamic, featuring an icy drugged-up noblewoman and a living spaceship with PTSD investigating a corpse found in hyperspace. I enjoyed the Asian-inflected setting and the female-centric story-telling, but found the obtuseness of the characters and the lack of significant action a little annoying.

Penric and the Fox / Penric's Mission - Lois Mcmaster Bujold - Spectrum Literary Agency, Inc., 2017/2016
* * * / * * * *
The Penric and Desdemona series continues its entertaining way in these two novellas. The first reunites our body-sharing heroes with the Greyjay Oswyll and the shaman Inglis from Penric and the Shaman to investigate the murder of a sorceress and the disappearance of her demon. The characters were as enjoyable as ever but I don't remember a thing about the plot. Penric's Mission is rather better because Bujold remembers to make her characters suffer a bit. Penric is sent on a secret diplomatic mission to recruit a disaffected general to the service of a local duke, which goes horribly wrong in the first few pages. Desdemona gets much more to say for herself than in the previous books, Penric has noticeably matured as a character, and there is even a hint of a romance with the general's sister Nikys. With his powerful in-built chaos demon, Penric can't really lose, and the book ends rather abruptly as Bujold evidently reached her word count, but the scene where the main baddy gets his just desserts is worth the price of admission alone.

The Black God's Drums - P. Djeli Clark - Tor, 2018
* * * *
One of the great things that has happened in the SF genre in the last few years is that authors from non-Anglo Saxon backgrounds have been using its tropes to tell their distinctive stories, and are finally being listened to. Nnedi Okorafor brought a distinctively African spin to space opera, and now P. Djeli Clark has done the same for steampunk. In a gas-lit New Orleans surrounded by great metal walls and airship mooring masts, an orphan child called Creeper overhears something she shouldn't about a plot by Confederates to kidnap a Haitian scientist and his invention, the Black God's Drums. She takes the information to Ann-Marie St. Augustine, an airship captain, in the hope of being taken on as crew. Ann-Marie is indeed interested, as the Black God's Drums could bring disaster on the entire city.

The alternate history where the Confederates fought the North to a standstill and New Orleans became a free city is nicely woven into the action, and the characters are memorable, if a little one-dimensional. The plot goes exactly where you expect, but otherwise this is a fine tale.

All Systems Red - Martha Wells – Tor, 2017
* * *
To know Murderbot is to love it, according to many reviewers, but that wasn't quite the reaction that I had. A misanthropic security robot who likes watching soap operas is definitely a character, but seemed a step down from Marvin the Paranoid Android. Still, this is a fun short story, with a character sensibility similar to Becky Chambers but with more action. Though the latter would have been more effective if the setting had been more precisely described.

Imaro - Charles R. Saunders - Lulu.com, 2014
* * * *
This is a criminally underrated novel originally published in the 1980s that translates Conan the Barbarian to the plains, mountains, veldts and clan-based societies of an alternative Africa. The titular hero shares many of the traits of his muscle-bound predecessor including a Chosen One superiority and a hatred of magic and the evil priestly wizards who wield it, but has a more interesting backstory (I imagine - I haven't actually read Robert E. Howard's opus yet, having been put off by the overblown language). The structure is a little lacking - the book consists of what are clearly fix-ups of shorter stories and it just stops rather than coming to a satisfying end - but the worldbuilding is outstanding, with deftly sketched societies and the judicious use of Swahili terms adding to the atmosphere.

Sadly, Saunders' career as a writer was affected by racism, with an unfortunate and inaccurate cover quote comparing Imaro to Tarzan triggering a lawsuit from the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs that hurt the book's sales and prevented it from having a wider distribution. This is such a shame as I am pretty sure that I would have read and enjoyed it if it had been around when I was growing up in the eighties.

This is how You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - Jo Fletcher Books, 2019
* * * *
This novella is in the running for several awards this year, and rightly so (update: it's just won the Locus Award). It is a beautifully written love story between two time-travelling operatives known only as Red and Blue, who leave messages for each other at the sites of their operations to alter the course of history in favour of their respective factions. The story would have had more poignancy if the goals and motivations of the organisations they work for, Garden and Agency, had been more precisely delineated, and if the operations in which they are involved actually made any sort of sense, but the feelings and poetical language are well done.