Tuesday April 17 2007
[5] Comments | Posted by Jonathan | 06:21:am
I’m curious. Greg Johnson over at SF Site doesn’t deserve to be singled out, but in his review for Al Reynolds’ Zima Blue he says ‘Hard science fiction, and space opera, are styles of SF that tend to work better at lengths longer than short stories’. I’ve just edited a volume of space opera stories, and have another that contains some hard sf and space opera stories coming shortly, and they’re all short stories pretty much, and I’ve heard this view before, but is it true? I do think the novella may be the best length for science fiction, but wasn’t science fiction founded on the short story? If you run through Bob Silverberg’s The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, isn’t it filled with short stories? And, aren’t a lot of them hard SF or space opera? When did it become popular wisdom that sf works better at longer lengths? And why? Is there something that we were doing, back in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, that we’re not doing here in the Oughties?
April 17th, 2007 at 7:56 am
I disagree with him. I think the short lengths (up to novella) are fine for any kind of sf.
April 17th, 2007 at 8:18 am
I wondered at that assertion, too. I think I’ve actually heard the reverse — that hard sf works better at short-story length — more often.
April 17th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
I think he’s completely wrong. Some of the best SF ever written is novella length or shorter. If it wasn’t for SF the short-story would be all but deceased. If it wasn’t for the short-story SF would be… well, unhealthy.
April 18th, 2007 at 8:06 am
[...] In another week, I’d write a post about that. In fact, in another week I’d write posts about all sorts of things: about Drive and what I like about it, even though Abigail makes some good points; about Greg L. Johnson’s assertion, as noted by Jonathan Strahan, that “Hard science fiction, and space opera, are styles of SF that tend to work better at lengths longer than short stories”; about Ian R. Macleod’s novella in the May F&SF, “The Master Miller’s Tale”, and about Holly Phillips’ story in the June Asimov’s, “Three Days of Rain”; about Sunshine and why it was a disappointment (although fortunately Adam Roberts has written that one for me, and it’ll appear at Strange Horizons next week); about Alan DeNiro’s three Strange Horizons stories, none of which appear in his Litblog Co-Op-picked collection, Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead; about reading Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye and London Orbital by Iain Sinclair, except I haven’t got far enough in either; about The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay, which I finished weeks ago and haven’t had the time to organise my thoughts on; and about re-reading, and how we should do more of it, and what I most want to re-read (I’ve been meaning to go back to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge for, literally, years). [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Perry Rhodan disagrees with him rather strongly, as well, 3000 short space operas later.
Does that make Peter F. Hamilton his favorite author? ;-)