Better Nebulate than Nebunever! (The Nebulation Continues)
This week I turned my eagle eye toward the Nebula-nominated novellas, and when that didn’t work I actually read them.
My thoughts (or whatever you want to call them) below the jump. First a general observation that, again, may not be terribly original: the novella ought to be the perfect length for an sf/f story. It’s long enough to admit of a fair amount of world-building, while also giving time to unfold a few characters and tell a story. I’m not sure most of the nominees exploited the form to its full advantage; several of these stories don’t really have enough content to justify their length and might have been more effective if they’d been told with more economy.
On the other hand, I’d say that only one of them suffers from the “genre-lite” syndrome I referred to in my last post, so maybe I was generalizing from too small a sample. In short, Hic Spatiales Calamarii Loquentes (“Here there be talking space squids”).