In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Dan Hartland is joined by the novelist and critic Redfern Jon Barrett and the reader and reviewer Nileena Sunil. They discuss those novels that feel too short or not long enough: what’s behind that feeling we have that a text is lacking something, or that it’s overstretched? And how can we meet works of fiction on their own ground?

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 16: Length and Breadth

[Musical intro]

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the novelist and critic Redfern Jon Barrett, and the reader and reviewer Nileena Sunil.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we insist on discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about length and breadth: those novels that feel too short or not long enough.

What’s behind that feeling we have that a text is lacking something, or that it’s overstretched? How can we read shorter and longer works on their own terms? And what the heck is a novella supposed to be, anyway?

We take in Margaret Atwood and P. Djèlí Clark, the perils of dragon riding and the loneliness of the deep space mission. And we’ll ask ourselves how we can meet works of fiction on their own ground. But also, how those works can help us get there.

We started our conversation with Redfern’s latest review for Strange Horizons.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Redfern, you recently reviewed If the Stars Are Lit for Strange Horizons and it was a really great review on a number of levels—

Redfern Jon Barrett: Thank you!

Dan Hartland: You’re welcome!—that I found to sort of really get under the skin of a book that kind of hadn’t impressed you, and you kind of felt bad about that, and you were checking yourself. You were like: “OK, why?” And, “Should I say so and if so, how?”

And I felt that tension really helped the review sort of expand itself and understand the book. But one of the primary criticisms I think you had in the book, and tell me if I’m wrong and go into more detail about it, is that I think you said it needed a … it would’ve benefited in your view from a good edit.

Like, there were a lot of elements in this book and they were kind of clashing. They were hitting against each other, they were working against each other, and kind of by the end of the book there had been so many things that nothing had sort of come through as the novel’s primary identity. It remained a confused book.

I just wonder whether you could talk through that with us a little bit. Like, what was it about reading that book that just felt so … uncontrolled, I guess?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of putting it. So I really feel quite a strong sense of disappointment when a book—I mean, it doesn’t have to even be a book, but any form of fiction—has this really, really compelling premise that it doesn’t quite unpack enough.

And this is the issue that I had with the novel. And this novel had some really, really great elements to it—which I think, you know, in a way adds to the disappointment when you really, really want it to get into the meat of what it’s proposing to do. And instead, it kind of glosses over that and doesn’t really know how to fully unpack it.

And in this case, with If The Stars Are Lit, I was really, really drawn into the idea of someone being trapped in deep space, alone, on a spaceship with a subconscious construction that looks like their ex-wife, you know? To me, that’s a really, really compelling premise—and part of what is compelling about that is imagining all of the psychology around that situation.

You know, everything from that sense of isolation to the fact that this … it’s called a gemel, this sort of artificial construction is, and it’s based on the protagonist’s subconscious, but looks like someone she was very close to—and yet is really neither, and I think that that is such a fascinating idea, and I think especially because the protagonist as well is queer. You know, it’s, that’s another element to it. And you know, I said in the review, I’m a huge fan of queer indie fiction. I think that it’s something that I really want to help elevate. So it was something that I was really excited to get into.

But unfortunately, the novel didn’t, as I said in the review, really get into that—only for about half of the book, really, it has this setting, maybe less, and we don’t really see the relationship develop between the protagonist and the gemel. We are told that they love each other, but we don’t really see how that unfolds between them.

And then it moves on, and then it’s no longer the two of them alone on the page—which really surprised me, because I was sort of waiting for more to happen from this scenario. And then it introduces the element that the protagonist is rescued by her real ex-wife.

And you know, that was kind of compensating: OK, well this isolated creepy premise is over. But now we have another potentially interesting premise. I mean, imagine if you rescued your ex to find that they’d fallen in love with essentially a hologram that looks like you! You know, that’s another fun thing that could be explored. But then that wasn’t really fully explored, either, and it sort of went into so many different directions that felt like they were explored only really on a surface level.

And yeah, ultimately that was just really disappointing. And it’s not the only novel to do that, you know—that’s quite a common thing, that something is sold on a particular idea, but then it doesn’t fully know what to do with that idea.

Dan Hartland: As you speak, I’m thinking, “Yeah. I’ve read novels of two halves like this as well.” Is it two novels here that have kind of been smooshed up against each other, do you think? It sounds as if the novel you were really interested in was that first half. Would you … in your head, would the more successful version of this book be a more in-depth treatment of that first half, with the second half either, you know, relegated to a sequel or just kind of pushed aside?

Or is there a way that this … smooshing … of the two ideas could have worked? What’s your preferred solution? Because one of the things we do when we read a book and think, “Ah, this hasn’t quite worked”—even if, you know, we know that it’s not for necessarily the critic to say, “This is what the book should have been”—in the back of our heads, just as readers, we’re thinking, “I wish it had been X.” Did you have that?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. I mean, I think when reviewing it’s really important to understand the difference between what you wanted to read and what the novel is, you know? And I think that part of reviewing professionally is understanding that a book might not be for you, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not for someone.

So that is something really, really important to hold in check, and I am hopefully not so arrogant as to assume that there’s not a way that the book could have been two very different halves that would’ve worked well. I’m sure that there are. But having said that, I think that some of the strongest works of fiction I’ve read that have a speculative angle and a really, really strong, strong hook do sort of stick with a singular premise and really dive into that.

And I’ve got three books in front of me that I think did that well or did it less well, which we can talk about later. But I really, really think that it would’ve been better off if the author had really chosen to dive into the psychological state of the protagonist—because, you know, it doesn’t have to be sympathetic. There’s so much you could do with that, because it’s quite narcissistic to fall in love with an artificial construction that’s based off your own subconscious. And that is something that could also be really interesting to explore, and the protagonist as an anti-hero could have been sort of further developed from that. But, you know, I’m careful all the while not to spoil the novel because I think that if people are into queer indie fiction, it is something that they should consider picking up. But I personally think that it would’ve been better just as a single novel. I don’t think it necessarily needed the other elements really at all.

That first half … like, at one point they discovered that the nearby planet, and I said this in the review, all of the messages—inbound and outbound messages—from that planet are fake. And that was really creepy as well, because they only heightened the isolation and like, “OK, so is everyone on the planet actually dead?? You know, what is behind this? And … I don’t know. Nothing really got resolved in a way that could live up to that potential.

Dan Hartland: As I say, in the review you, for me anyway, make the case that this is a classic instance of a novel having an awful lot of good ideas but not settling on any one.

As you were speaking, I was remembering there are two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation featuring the perennially, unhappy in love chief engineer, Geordi La Forge, and in one episode he creates a hologram of the woman who designed the USS Enterprise, right?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. So I remember this!

Dan Hartland: Yeah! And he has to talk to the hologram to figure out the thing that he has to fix to make the ship go again. But in the process, he falls in love with this hologram. And then, maybe a couple of seasons later, the actual designer of the SS enterprise appears on the ship and she’s, like, “What the … have you been doing? What’s this hologram?!” And she doesn’t fit the kind of fantasy of the hologram that Geordi has, and the whole thing unravels from there.

I think they do have to talk to each other to find the thing to fix the ship to make it go again. I think basically it’s the same plot, just with a different character, but I think this distance between those two episodes is what gave them impact, that sort of two-season gap where, you know, you don’t hear about this character, but then suddenly, “Oh, she’s back and he has a hologram. Remember the hologram?!” is what gives that second episode its impact.

So yeah, it’s a trope that has precedent. But not only does the trope have precedent, your suggested treatment of it has precedent as well. Nileena, let’s bring you in here, because one of the things—and it will seem perhaps to listeners as if I planned this sort of discussion between two reviews, but I didn’t, it’s just that you handed these reviews in and then I’m like a parasite, just feeding off your work—but it was so interesting to me to read your review next to Redfern’s because it’s about a book in which there is isolation in deep space. It’s a book in which there are kind of messages from far away, which aren’t quite what they seem to be. It’s a novel, or a novella, where the main character does have an interaction with a kind of nonhuman intelligence and forms quite a strong bond with that intelligence.

And yet your reaction to this novella was almost—it’s not kind of the opposite to Redfern’s—but you wanted, where Redfern thought, “Hmm, this needs to be sort of shaved away, the edges of this, we need to balance it out, we need to rationalize the novel in some way,” you are like, “No, no, I need more of this. It would be great if this book were longer, if we had more time with these characters and in these settings, so that we can really understand them.”

The reason I say that’s not quite opposite to Redfern is because of course that’s what Redfern thinks. So you are both basically saying, “More please,” but within different kind of contexts. So your book was Orphan Planet. I just wondered whether you could talk a little bit about, as Redfern has, your experience of reading that, of getting into it and then finding that it wasn’t quite what you were imagining or looking for or felt worked.

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. So, with Orphan Planet, I felt like … So, for the most part, I did like the book. Like it was mostly a positive experience. But I felt like I also had a lot of unanswered questions by the time I got to the end of it.

So the premise is, it’s about this girl who’s stuck on a planet all alone. She’s like the only person except for this artificial intelligence. And she gets these messages, and I thought that was a really interesting premise. But also, first of all, I felt that there could have been like more psychological depth when it comes to the main character. Like, I felt at parts … I felt like she was too well-adjusted for someone who’s been—who has all her life been—the only person on the entire planet.

And also like, you know, what happened: why she’s there and what’s actually going on outside? There was some explanation for that, especially when another character comes in and she starts investigating what happened all those years ago—you do get to see some of it—but I also felt parts of it were … I mean, there could have been more of an explanation, because I still had a lot of unanswered questions.

So I felt either it could have really focused on this one character and the psychological aspects of it, or it could have expanded the worldbuilding a little bit more. But then I don’t know if that would’ve worked as a novella. It would have to be a little longer. So I felt like these two aspects could have expanded on either of these two things: either kept it super-focused on one character or explained more. But, even though for the most part I did like the book, I felt there was something missing.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, and that very much comes across in your review: that the setting is interesting, the character dynamics even have potential, but the novella just doesn’t give itself space. But I mean, would you say that you were left … unconvinced … by the setting or the characters?

Because you mentioned that the protagonist is just way too well-adjusted for this person that has basically grown up in total isolation, you know, sort of locked away from all human contact on this sort of barely-terraformed planet and yet seems fine with that. “That’s okay!” And so is that a problem when you are reading this novella and constantly in the back of your head you’re like, “Ah, is that really how this would work?” Is that what undermined your reading, just this sense that it hasn’t thought through its own setting?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. There were parts where I did feel like that the character was … she was there on this planet basically since she was a baby and she grew up all alone. And I kept thinking, “OK, how, how did she turn out, like, even a little bit well-adjusted?!” I then kept thinking, “Am I overthinking it? Maybe, am I just supposed to suspend my disbelief for this?” But like, yeah—it was on the back of my mind all the time.

Dan Hartland: And it’s interesting, because in genre work, and in particular SFF, we are often told that suspension of disbelief is crucial to the reading protocols of approaching these kinds of text. But I always feel as if—I don’t know how you two think about this—but suspension of disbelief is a deal between writer and reader. It’s not something that the reader gives the writer: “OK, I’m just gonna suspend all my critical faculties and just let you write at me.” There is a responsibility on the writer, I think to enable you to leave some disbelief at the door again.

Was that your experience? That the novella just didn’t quite … help you believe in it?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, I guess I did try to … like, to an extent I did try to suspend my disbelief, or, you know, just try to accept it or rationalize it in some way, but I felt like it didn’t do enough to let me do that.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Redfern, I’m conscious that you are wearing two hats in this conversation—because you are a critic, but you’re also a novelist. You’re a fiction writer. So this conversation is getting a little closer home for you, right? So, with sort of maybe half the critic hat and then half the fiction writer hat on, what are your views of that kind of suspension of disbelief? Because we’re all—both of you here are—kind of saying that you’ve read a text that hasn’t quite helped you stay with it, right?

Redfern Jon Barrett: I was just thinking that it’s such a complicated thing, you know, suspension of disbelief. It’s sort of in this gray area between being conscious and not.

You know, sometimes I’m more willing to suspend my disbelief for something I really want to believe in, or there’s some other aspect of it I enjoy, but it’s not completely in your control. Right? It’s sometimes you really, really want to believe in a work or a premise, but it just … you’re pulled out of it regardless.

But at the same time, I think we have different tolerances depending on how we’re approaching the novel. And, as a novelist, that’s something that is really, really at the forefront of my mind, especially when it comes to character and worldbuilding. So for Proud Pink Sky, for example—my novel set in the world’s first gay state—it was really, really important to me that I created a believable world, because I love worldbuilding and I’m so easily pulled out if there’s something incongruous or something unbelievable about a world.

So I’d spent so many years working on this gay state, and I have notes for everything from, like, the parliamentary structure to the political parties. You know, I had a whole Polari—the gay slang—dictionary at the end of the novel because I really wanted above all else to create a believable world for the reader that they could really, really get drawn into.

And I think that is something that as an author you have to constantly keep in mind: how, or try and predict how, is the reader gonna respond to this? How is this going to sound to the reader? And of course that’s always gonna be different and it’s not something that you can ever completely nail down, but it’s such a huge part of the process. And I think that makes me more disappointed, as a critic, when I read and something about the characters or the worldbuilding or the way the novel’s structured in this case just really loses me, really pulls me out of it. It’s such a disappointment.

And, you know, I had a similar thing with my review before that of Ken MacLeod’s trilogy. I loved the first two books. And then in the third, the worldbuilding just completely pulled me out of it and it felt ungrounded compared to what he’d done before, which I really felt was masterful. And I don’t know, I feel like there’s a particular soreness to that kind of disappointment.

Dan Hartland: I remember the MacLeod novel—your review of it, I haven’t read the novel—and yeah, that disappointment really shone through in that review: that you’d read the other two and that’s an even more egregious problem for a reader than the one we’re discussing here, right? Where you’ve read two previous novels in the trilogy and you’d be like, “These are amazing!” And then the third book comes along and you’re like, “Arrgh!”

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah! And especially when it’s the last one. If it’s the middle one, it’s kind of like, I dunno, I feel like less devastating somehow.

Dan Hartland: Well, I really enjoy second books in trilogies. I’ve got this thing for the hinge of a series, and you are right that sometimes what I like about them is that they are not perfect. They can’t be, because they’re that point of pivot. But yeah, you’re right: When the third book lets you down, it’s the final season of Game of Thrones, isn’t it? It sours the whole experience.

But one of the things that I’m also interested here is that worldbuilding is one thing, but the other thing that we’re talking about both of these books is—from the perspective of “need more of it” and also kind of, not “less of it,” but “more focus on it”—is that one of the things that isn’t working here is the psychology of the protagonist for both of you.

So there’s this worldbuilding, this sort of reams of notes on the parliamentary system of the world that never go on the page but inform everything that happens on the page, and therefore gives it some sort of verisimilitude to you; but also, the way that the characters are convincing and therefore you go with them through all this stuff. And if they aren’t convincing, then you kind of almost can’t.

And I wonder, Nileena … like, Redfern has said that they found the protagonist of If the Stars Are Lit kind of underdeveloped, or at least the way in which that character reacted to situations insufficiently developed, to really believe in, to use that word again. You likewise say that this character in Orphan Planet just doesn’t ring true: there isn’t sufficient trauma, if you like, expressed in how they react as you read the novella.

Were you aware of that affecting your reading, that kind of lack of conviction that you had in the character, or was it only something you realized later as you wrote?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, I think it was there on the back of my mind as I read it, but I didn’t think … I wasn’t actively thinking about it for the most part. It was something that kept lingering in my mind as I read.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. It’s that what Redferm was saying, that conscious/subconscious thing. You’re not quite aware of what isn’t clicking, but you know something, isn’t.

I’m thinking about one of your old reviews for us, actually. So Redfern mentioned their review of the Ken MacLeod. I’m thinking of your review of the Indra Das book The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar. And again, that’s another novella, and you really enjoyed that book, but this is what interests me: At first you thought the same thing, that maybe the novella wasn’t developing the world enough and it wasn’t therefore delivering on the promise of its premise.

But you realize that that’s kind of the point of that book, and you say, “Indra Das might have created a world in which epic adventures and fantastical scenarios exist, but our point of view character exists on the fringes of the world.” And therefore you don’t get full immersion in the way that you might want … but that, because thematically that works for the novella, it’s okay.

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, it does. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: And that brings us to this idea of: when can a book—a novella or a novel—not give us what we want but still work, right?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. So, from what I can recall, when I went into it, I was expecting it … So I had read another book by Indra that was like a lot more epic. It had like a lot more characters and a world and worldbuilding. So I was expecting something like that. So when I went into this, I was like, “OK, this doesn’t elaborate on a lot of things.”

We are told that there’s this vast world with dragons and all these adventures and all that stuff, but we don’t really get to see any of it. But as you keep reading it, I kind of realized, “OK, that’s kind of the point of it. This is written from the perspective of someone on the fringes of that world.” It didn’t really meet my expectations in that sense, but then I realized I did like what the book was doing. It was something very different from what I expected, but also it was something very interesting on its own terms.

Dan Hartland: And sometimes those are the best reading experiences, right? Where we go in thinking, “OK, we’re gonna get this from this book.” So when you go into Last Dragoners, you are thinking Dragonriders of Pern, right? You are thinking, “Oh, it’s gonna be this big thing and there’s gonna be, I don’t know, flying dragons and fire and all that stuff.” And then there isn’t.

And your first reaction, inevitably, to that is, “Oh, but we wanted the thing that we liked before! We liked the thing!” You sit with the book and you think, “Oh no, this is great.” And the surprise of that, the discovery of that, is actually really pleasant—and we wind up loving that book for pulling the rug from under us.

Have we … can we think of any others? Redfern, do you have an example of a book that, you know, hasn’t necessarily done what you would do or what you would’ve imagined this book would’ve done, but in fact has totally won you over? So we’re think … we’re talking here of two books that didn’t quite achieve that. How can a book not give us what we want—because books shouldn’t necessarily do that, right?—but succeed in that effort?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. It’s actually kind of a tough question. Because on the one hand that has happened, you know—of course I’ve read books that I really enjoyed that weren’t quite what I expected. But at the same time, coming up for a blurb for a book is its own skill, right? And if a book is completely not what you expected, then I think it’s kind of in a way failed to sell itself quite properly, if that makes sense.

I’m having trouble—I know it’s happened, but I’m having trouble off the top of my head thinking of a specific one. I think, as well, what you said before about having two hats with it, you know: one of the books that I have in front of me is, is Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, which I love. But what I loved about that book is—and this was something that I completely didn’t expect from it—was, you know, it’s set with an older woman and a younger girl and they’re in this apartment and society seems to just be disintegrating around them. And we’re not told for most of the book why that is. It’s just really, like, the buses stop running, things just slowly sinking into disorder, almost as though the connections that tie us together as people and allow us to form society are dissolving. And later in the book, it kind of reveals that it’s an environmental catastrophe, which I was almost disappointed by because, I don’t know, I kind of just liked this idea of people losing their ability to connect with each other!

So I just finished a manuscript based on that exact premise! Because I wrote the novel that I really wanted to see. And that is that our empathy, our interpersonal relations, just stop functioning and society starts to slowly break down as a result. So that was really fun to work on.

Dan Hartland: The Lessing is a great example of a book that you’re investing a lot in, and it holds off its revelation, and then towards the end it almost just slips it in, right? Like, yeah: it isn’t almost materially relevant to your experience of the reading. But in your case, Redfern, you were like, “Oh, that’s the explanation,” and felt a little bit let down by that, right?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. Like, I mean, again, this is something that … I’m aware there’s a difference between what I want to see and what makes a book good. I think it’s an amazing book. I just really, really, really obsessed about the idea that, you know, our greatest strength—our ability as a species to form these connections and hold them to the point that we can live in cities of millions of people and not have just complete disorder—that the idea of that breaking down is one of the most terrifying things to me. And the fact that it has a different root cause I almost found as a disappointment from that book. And again, that’s why I was like, “OK, I’m gonna write a book where that is the root cause.” Again, it’s just a really complex thing, what book you want, what you expect to read. It’s a hard thing to express.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: We are skirting around this idea of length here: Nileena wants more from the novella in question; Redfern, you want more from the first half of the novel in question. And we’re talking here about what the writer spends their words on and how many words they choose to spend. And then we’re also starting to talk about markets and how to sell a book.

And it seems to me that novellas are having a moment in the market. I don’t know whether you two agree. I feel we’re seeing more of them. You know, do we think that the novella has this problem specifically? Nileena, when you were reading Orphan Planet, did you just wish it was a novel? Would that have solved the problem? More words?

Nileena Sunil: I guess it depends on how the author would approach it if they wanted to change it in some way. I guess if you’re focusing it on the character and the psychological aspects, I guess it could still work as a novella, but then you’ll have to cut out some of the worldbuilding elements or some of the external elements, to an extent, if you want to keep it to a novella length. Or, if you want to just expand the world and let us know more about what’s going on outside the very contained environment of where most of the book is set in, for that, I guess you would need more words. It would have to be a novel in that case.

Dan Hartland: It’s a question of focus, right? Where the novella needs to be this very clearly targeted thing, where the novel has room for highways and byways and subplots and side characters. The novella’s secret weapon is clarity, maybe. So that’s why Last Dragoners worked for you, perhaps: that it knew, “OK, I’m gonna look at this very particular character in this very particular corner of this wider world, but I’m not going to stray into the wider world. I’m gonna stay here in this area of focus.” Whereas in Orphan Planet, you are almost missing the wider world, it needs some of that in order for its main story to work.

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. I mean, I think it could have still worked without much focus. If the worldbuilding is less, it would be fine, but there has to be more depth to the characters and the very contained environment. Or you can expand outwards and have a bigger novel where there’s like a lot more going on. So I felt it needed to be either expanded, like, depth-wise—and maybe make it more contextual or, you know, expand outward and make it a vaster world and explain a lot more of what’s going on.

Dan Hartland: The route that the book takes demands different things of it, right? So Orphan Planet is trying to be this kind of quite focused novella that is pretty fixed on its main character, but your problem is that, in your reading, Nileena, the main character lacks the depth to make that convincing. And the only way around that, if you want your character to be a little flatter or whatever, is to make the world more interesting. But for that you need to be a novel and lose the focus.

I’m really conscious of the problem that we have here being that we’re almost as critics—and, Redfern, you are a critic and a writer, so you are probably just telling yourself these things!—but, for Nileena and I, we are telling writers what to do! Like, we’re saying, “No, no, no, this is the thing!” And I’m convinced by what Redfern said earlier, which is that we need to take books on their own terms and we can’t decide what we think it should have been and criticize it on that basis. So. How do we achieve that, Redfern—since that was your idea, I’ll come to you! Like, how, if we come to a short book that secretly we wish was longer, how do we come to terms with that? And, if we come up to a door stop—like a huge thing—and we’re like, “Ah, I wish this had like fewer chapters,” how do we accept that that’s not what it is and write about it sympathetically?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Well, I think it ties into what both of you were just saying about … you know, obviously accepting books on their own terms, but also what Nileena was saying about, you know, there’s lots of different ways in which the novel could have worked. I think that’s a really interesting point, because, yes, you can have breadth and have that work really well. You can have depth and have that work really well. So it’s not like there’s just one direction that things can go in there.

I think it’s really when the novel feels dissatisfying based on what it’s trying to do. Because there are novels that I love that are just really focused on worldbuilding and, you know, the characters are a bit more just archetypes, but they’re there to really flesh out the world, you know? And then there are things that I love where we don’t really see much of the world. A lot’s implied, but the characters are so vivid and rich that that winds up really being what works about the novel.

And, just going back to novellas quickly, one of the other books I have on my desk in front of me is Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram—really embarrassed if I’ve mispronounced their surname. And, you know, I was really, really fascinated by this premise that this person is stuck in a never-ending metro system. And, you know, it’s found this purgatory-sort-of-space, and I didn’t know what to expect of it. And the novel continually surprised me.

It was really a reflection on depression and suicide. And, you know, I hadn’t read much about it beforehand, so it was something that really I wasn’t expecting—and, on its own terms, I think it did such a wonderful job. You know, it’s not how … it’s not a book I could have written, you know? I don’t think anyone but this author could have written this book. But you can see what it’s setting out to do and you can see how well it’s doing at that.

So I think it’s a real tough one when you have a book that you feel there should have been more from and could have been longer to go into it more, or a book that you feel that the words are kind of wasted and that it really needs a good edit down. Just coming to mind at the moment, one of my favorite books—and it’s almost a cliche to love this book—but you know The Handmaid’s Tale! I read The Testaments last year and I really hated it, because it just didn’t need expanding on. Like, Margaret Atwood did such an amazing job of encapsulating this incredibly claustrophobic world, this incredibly claustrophobic perspective—that’s literally claustrophobic because of the wings that the protagonist wears on her hood—and so much is just left to your imagination to imagine what’s happening in this world and what it is.

And then it’s just, “Oh, actually we’re just going to dump that all in another book.” And it’s just so unnecessary. And again, I feel like that failed on its own terms, but it’s such a subjective thing at the same time that it’s kind of hard to say why something fails.

Nileena Sunil: I kind of felt the same way about The Testaments. Like, almost exactly the same way!

Dan Hartland: Yeah, me too! So, I mean, we can end here on a note of harmony, right? We all hated The Testaments. You know, we were just talking about, “Maybe some novellas could benefit from additional worldbuilding.” Well, here is some additional worldbuilding that, you know, no one wanted. It wasn’t necessary!

Yeah, as you say, Redfern, it’s all so subjective and every text must be taken on its own terms because of that. You know, it might be the case that one book is saved by some additional work on the page—not just in the notes, but on the page, explaining how the world works and going into that breadth that Nileena was looking for, maybe, from Orphan Planet—and then there are other books which just … I mean, I don’t wanna say Handmaid’s Tale … of course Handmaid’s Tale hasn’t been damaged by the existence of The Testaments, but The Testaments exists, guys! Like, it must affect, in some senses, our backwards reading. And that’s a shame, isn’t it?

Redfern Jon Barrett: You can’t erase it from your memory. That’s the thing, you know: like, I haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale since reading The Testaments, but I know that now there’s all this extra stuff there and it’s like, I can’t ignore it. So I think in a way it does impact the original text in a sense. And it’s actually sad to say, because I, I absolutely love Margaret Atwood. I’ve read every single one of her novels, she’s been a huge inspiration for me. But The Testaments was just … yeah, like you say, so unnecessary. And that’s the point: if a novel’s done its job well, it doesn’t need more.

Dan Hartland: And that’s what we’re dancing around, isn’t it? How do you tell as a reviewer whether a novella has done its, or a novel has done its, job and therefore is complete, doesn’t need more? And how, as a reviewer, do you approach the experience of reading a text which you feel does—that, for whatever reason, has an absence for you?

I was thinking again, Nileena, of another review you wrote for us. I’m really sorry to keep picking on your back catalog in this way, but you must be on the novella beat for us—because you also read The City in Glass, and I remember we had a conversation briefly about this over email because I read that book too and felt that it was super-well-turned. Like, the prose is just … you call the prose evocative, and I think that’s spot on. It’s quite long for a novella, but I think it still counts as one. It’s this kind of mythologized city and you compared Italo Calvino—which is pretty high praise!

It really worked, right? That book doesn’t need anything else, but it has huge gaps in it. There are whole passages of time that we don’t really know what happened in them. Right?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, that’s true. I think in that kind of work, because it was meant to be this kind of a dreamy feel to it—it kind of felt like reading a myth—because of that, I think it kind of worked for me. Because you weren’t supposed to get down to the details of it because it’s like set in such a long span of time and has this almost mythical feel to it. I don’t know—it’s kind of hard to say what exactly works for this type of story, what does it, what might not work for another type of story.

But yeah, it did feel like—when you take everything considered—it did. I didn’t feel like, “Oh, this long period of time, I don’t know what’s going on.” It didn’t really feel that way for me because of the way it was written.

Dan Hartland: You’re absolutely right that the form fits the function, fits the style, fits the theme, and therefore there isn’t the gap. There isn’t a space that we’re feeling needs to be filled, even though the book is actually relatively short.

And that brings us back to this idea that you just kind of know as a reader when a book feels complete to you. There was recently a discussion across multiple podcasts about the novella. I think Roseanna Pendlebury—on A Meal of Thorns, I think it was—was talking about Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and mentioned that the first part of that book is basically the only part that she needed; that the rest of the novel could be discarded. That the whole of the novel is contained in the first part, which effectively is a novella. But then over on The Coode Street Podcast, I think Strahan and Wolfe took some exception to this and spoke about novellas more widely and what they are and how they work.

And I think the big issue with all of this is … I’m not sure there is a separation in some ways. Like, a novella is just a novel that is slightly short. I mean, we try to come up with these rules—“Oh, well it’s 45,000 words; oh, it’s 70,000 words”—for the purposes, it seems to me, of awards categories. But actually, as a text, we’re seeing more of these shorter novels, these novellas, but we just approach them as we would a longer work.

Right? They work or they don’t.

Redfern Jon Barret: Yeah! [Laughs]

Dan Hartland: I’m relieved! I’m relieved to hear that!

Nileena Sunil: So I told you that I read a lot of novellas when I need to review them. But otherwise, I tend to pick up whatever, see what’s my fancy at the moment. I don’t specifically think that I’m gonna read a novella or I’m gonna read a bigger novel.

I have read a few novellas recently, which did work well for me. I read Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher, which was like a fairy tale retelling, and I thought it worked quite well. It was a pretty short, self-contained story and, since it’s a fairy tale retelling, there wasn’t much extra worldbuilding required—because it treads like old ground when it comes to that.

Then I also read a few novellas that are part of a larger series, which may contain bigger novels. Like I read P. Djèlí Clark’s The Haunting of Tram Car 015, that’s like a part of a larger universe. And that worked well as a self-contained work. But also kind of got me curious about a lot of aspects of the world. But I knew it’s part of a larger series—so if I wanted more of the world, I could just go and read those books!

Dan Hartland: It’s interesting you talk about the, the P. Djèlí Clark books, because the word “novella” is Italian, and each story within The Decameron was a novella—so we are going back, with this kind of publishing trend towards novellas in shared worlds (the Singing Hills series as well is a similar kind of thing), we’re going back to the fourteenth century here. Like, you can pick a novella off a shelf and it’s part of a wider collection.

Redfern Jon Barrett: I just wanted to jump in a sec on what you were saying about the lack of distinction between novels and novellas. Because it ties into the third book that I have on my desk, The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin, which is another book that I love. I think it’s usually marketed as a novel, but if you look at the actual length of it, I don’t know how many words it is, but it’s definitely novella territory.

And you know, in general, I think there’s the same thing between the difference between novels and novellas, or the supposed difference, as there is between genres in general. You know, it’s actually much, much less boxed-in in reality than it’s made out to be in terms of marketing. You know, as a writer particularly, it’s really frustrating that these things are treated so separately.

And one of the things that I’m happy to see happening more and more is an acceptance of what’s termed crossover novels, which I actually think is a bit redundant because I think a lot of great novels since the inception of the novel have been crossover novels. A lot of books do not fit comfortably within a single genre.

And honestly, we don’t even know what we’re talking about half the time when we label a book in a particular genre. Like, where is the boundary between horror and thriller? Someone show me, you know? And it’s especially frustrating and difficult sometimes as a writer because you need to put your work in a particular box, and I think it just taps into this wider issue with the tension between creativity and marketing. How do you decide which box it goes in? You know, it’s quite arbitrary a lot of the time, and I think that applies to the length of novels too.

Dan Hartland: I hope that, at Strange Horizons, the reviews we write—although we’re based within a tradition of literature that is broadly speculative—we are aware of that. And we try to approach these books—and this is what we keep coming back to in this conversation—on their own terms, and try to put aside any kind of ideas about what a thing is or what a thing isn’t, and just see what it’s trying to say.

[Musical Outro]

Nileena Sunil: You mentioned that I might be on the novella beat. OK, there’s actually a kind of a reason behind it. I’m actually a little … like, while choosing a book to review, I’m a little scared of picking up a larger book because I feel like: “What if I don’t like it and I still have to push through just for the review?!” So I tend to choose like novellas, or shorter books!

Dan Hartland: How have I been doing this this long and not figured that one out?!? [laughter]

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com.

After our last episode, friend of the show Jonah Sutton-Morse got in touch to complain about my calling out the perils of podcast addiction. In response, I can only say, in all sincerity: Jonah, I hope you’ve listened all the way to the end of this one.

See you next time.