So Who Publishes Novellas These Days?

When genre readers think of novellas, they tend to think of either TorDotCom, who release a steady stream of awards-nominated novellas every year (including this week’s release Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo, which I’ll be reviewing later today, and next week’s The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi), or of magazines like Asimov’s, AnalogSF, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction which have regularly featured novelettes and novellas in their monthly content over their decades of publication.

But there are plenty of other magazines and small press publishers bringing out novellas every year in a variety of genres, and I’d like to mention some of them. This is far from a complete list, and I encourage readers to mention any I don’t in the comments!

Neon Hemlock Press puts out novellas in the horror/SF/fantasy genres, with a focus on LGBTQIA+ creators and stories. They are currently in the last days of their annual novella crowdfunding event, where you can back (a.k.a. preorder) their 2023 slate in print and/or e-book formats. Go check them out before the crowdfunding effort ends on Thursday, March 16th at 4pm.

Speaking of queer-focused publishers: several items in the catalogs of both Lethe Press (including Octavia Cade’s The Stone Weta) and Rebel Satori Press are novella-length, spanning all the genres of speculative fiction and moving into historical, romance and mimetic fiction as well.

Looking novel-length queer romance? Check out Bold Stroke Books. I’m a particular fan of ‘Nathan Burgoine’s “Little Village” novella series, and I’ve been meaning to check out some of their lesbian romance novella collections.

Stelliform Press’s novellas focus on the on-going climate emergency and intersectional views of environmental justice, and range in genre from horror (The House of Drought by Dennis Mombauer) to fantastic science fiction (Weird Fishes by Rae Mariz), and every point in between. Their latest, Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri, comes out May 25th.

If the classics and mimetic fiction are more your thing, look no further than Melville House Publishing. Their “Art of the Novella” collection reissues classic novellas, some in solo book form for the first time ever. They also have a “Contemporary Art of the Novella” series if you’re looking for modern mimetic works at novella length.

Aqueduct Press’ Conversation Pieces series brings feminist science fiction to the demanding reader. While not every volume in this long-running series is a novella (some are poetry or short story collections, others works of non-fiction), quite a few are. Recent releases include To The Woman in the Pink Hat by LaToya Jordan and Apollo Weeps by Xian Mao.

On the mystery side of things, The Mysterious Bookshop’s Bibliomysteries series are usually novelette length excursions into everything from noir to cozy mysteries.

And in addition to the magazines listed at the start of this post, I would be remiss in not mentioning Clarkesworld, which also regularly includes novellas in their pages.

It's NOVELLA MONTH!

For no other reason than “I feel like it,” I’m declaring March “Novella Month” here on the blog. As far as I can tell, there is no month-long celebration of what has become for me, and many of the readers I know, my favorite length for fiction. Among the writers I know and whose work I love, a good many excel and revel in the novella realm. My goal for the month is to simply celebrate the form with book reviews, quotes from other readers, and hopefully some guest-posts by or interviews with novella writers, editors, or publishers, regardless of genre. I’ll use the hashtag #NovellaMonth when I post on social media.

So What Is a Novella?

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) define novellas as ranging from 17,500 to 40,000 words, and most other genre fiction awards/organizations appear to agree: the Hugo Awards, the Romance Writers of America RITA Awards, British Fantasy Awards, Paris Literary Prize, the Nero Wolfe Society’s Black Orchid Award, and the Shirley Jackson Awards to name a few alongside SFWA’s Nebula Awards. (The Horror Writers Association’s Stoker Awards lump novellas and novelettes into a “Best Long Fiction” category.)   Even sites that simply discuss the definition of novella quote or refer to the SFWA definition. Some blogs stretch the upper limit to 50,000 words, but none of the major recognized awards seem to. In terms of page length, if the average single-spaced page has approximately 500 words, novellas would range from 35 to 80 or 100 pages.

Per a few conversations with fellow writers, stories in the 150-200 page range tend to be described as “short novels” (for instance, C.S.E. Cooney’s wonderful The Twice-Drowned Saint, recently re-released by Mythic Delirium Books). In my mind even 150-180 page length work fits under the novella umbrella – but I’m not the one creating literature awards season criteria, so take that for what it’s worth. (Also, please don’t come at me with “that’s not a novella!” if I review or talk about books that are less than 50 pages or more than 100 under the #NovellaMonth tag. It’s not a hill worth fighting over, I promise.)

What Is It About Novellas, anyway?

For me, the joy of novellas is that they can be the same type of quick reads as short stories (depending on my mood, other distractions/chores, etc.) but with the world-building and characterizational depth of novels. Robert Silverberg, whose long out-or-print collection To Open The Sky is one of my most-often re-read books, composed of 5 linked novellas originally published in Galaxy magazine, said it more eloquently, in the introduction to his collection Sailing to Byzantium: “[The novella] is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms...it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book. Thus it provides an intense, detailed exploration of its subject, providing to some degree both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel.”

I’m pretty sure I loved the form before I consciously knew what it was, even having read To Open the Sky for the first time sometime in 5th or 6th grade, although I readily admit that the novellas we were assigned to read in high school didn’t work for me – another quick internet search shows that English Class favorites like The Old Man and The Sea (26,601 words), Of Mice and Men (29,160) and Ethan Frome (34,500) all fall into that definition of novella up above. I struggled with all of them in high school (with apologies to Eugenia DelCampo and the other wonderful English teachers I had), probably due less to quality than to the fact that I have never liked being told what I had to read. I’ve never attempted to read those books again. Perhaps I should give them a second chance. On the other hand, one of my most-reread classics is A Christmas Carol, which clocks in at 28,500, and I also loved The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (25,500), both of which were assigned/recommended by my high school English teachers.

I had no idea that these books were anything other than really short novels – until I read Stephen King’s collection Different Seasons, sometime in 1982 or ’83, in which’s Afterword he discussed how hard it was to get stories of this length published, being too long for the short story magazines and too short for book publishers. That has shifted a lot in the last ten years as many small press publishers, and even some of the bigger houses, are more than happy to publish novellas as stand-alone books rather than in collections. (I’m planning to run a list of such publishers, with a focus on the small presses, sometime this month.)

To Novella or Not Novella?

As a writer, all my published work has been in the short story realm, perhaps bordering into novelette. I’ve started two different novellas over the years, but they’re both incomplete. I haven’t been writing much fiction at all since at least 2018, but I’m thinking I might motivate myself to revisit one of those projects this month.

A small selection of the novellas I’ll be reading or reviewing this month (the bottom half of the pile have already been read)

So, reader friends – what do you love about the novella form? What are your favorite novellas? Please weigh in in the comments. Maybe you’ll introduce me to something new – or maybe you’ll convince me to re-read one of those classics I struggled with in high school!

Book Review: THE RED LAMP

TITLE: The Red Lamp

AUTHOR: Mary Roberts Rinehart

312 pages, American Mystery Classics, ISBN 9781613161029 (softcover, hardcover)

MY RATING:  3 stars out of 5

SHORT REVIEW: The atmospheric “seaside gothic” setting, a plethora of interesting potential suspects, and the possibility of supernatural activity in The Red Lamp make up for the repeated instances of the main character being in the wrong place at the wrong time in this mystery from “the American Agatha Christie” Mary Roberts Rinehart. If you can get past the main character’s frequent mis-steps and overuse of the “if only we had known how important [item] would be” trope, the rest of the cast, as well as the setting itself, will pull you in and make for a mostly enjoyable read.

LONGER REVIEW: The Red Lamp is narrated by literature professor William Porter mostly through the use of a journal he kept during a particularly troublesome summer holiday on the property he inherits after his Uncle Horace dies. Locals insist the house is haunted. Porter is skeptical, but can’t deny weird stuff is going on, especially when local sheep are ritualistically slaughtered and a volunteer deputy goes missing. Porter can’t help being in the wrong place at the wrong time multiple times throughout the book, becoming the chief suspect as disappearances and bodies pile up.

And that’s what I struggled with the most with this book: just how many times can a man who knows he’s under suspicion and being watched realistically put himself in situations that only increase the police’s suspicions. If it were being played for humor, as a pastiche of period mystery novels, I might feel differently, but there’s no indication Rinehart was sending up the genre or herself. Porter complains of his rising anxiety over being suspected often enough that at one point I actually shouted, “Then stop going places alone!”

I also was not a fan of the overuse of the trope where the narrator interrupts his own journal with phrases like “if only we’d realized at the time how important [thing] would be later…” as if the author didn’t trust her audience to pick up on clues, or as if the narrator is asking the reader for forgiveness for his overweening cluelessness.

What did I like about the book? The atmosphere of the seaside setting. The large manor house and smaller lodge and boathouse are all as much characters as the humans, and the rural surroundings of wood and farmland and dirt roads add a nice sense of menace at key moments. I liked the slow development of the possible supernatural aspect and how the author kept me wondering right up to the end as to whether the big reveal would be supernatural, mundane, or a combination of both. The broad cast of characters, from Porter’s “psychically sensitive” wife, lovesick niece and the niece’s heroic love interest, to the suspicious local doctor, neighboring “recently rich” couple and fairly incompetent police, kept me guessing and provided plenty of suspects outside of the protagonist to choose from.

What I liked and what I didn’t like ultimately balanced each other out. I think had the book been about a quarter shorter in length, with fewer contrivances to make the narrator the chief suspect, I would have enjoyed it more.

This book has been on my shelves in one form or another for quite a few years, having picked up older paperback editions at various used bookstores. American Mystery Classics brought it back into print a few years back, and it’s that edition that I added to my TBR Challenge as an alternate title last year. It’s the title from last year I didn’t read, so I made sure it was first on this year’s challenge. I’m glad I read it, despite the flaws. Mary Roberts Rinehart has been called “the American Agatha Christie” and according to some accounts even outsold Dame Agatha. American Mystery Classics has been steadily bringing her catalog back into print, and I intend to read a few more of her titles, probably with one of her series characters.

Book Review: THE GIRLS IN NAVY BLUE

TITLE: The Girls in Navy Blue

AUTHOR: Alix Rickloff

416 pages, William Morrow and Company, ISBN 9780063227491 (softcover, e-book, audiobook)

MY RATING:  4 stars out of 5

SHORT REVIEW: While there is a mystery, or more accurately several mysteries, at the core of The Girls in Navy Blue, it is mostly historical fiction, and more accurately early 20th century historical fiction. The book takes place in two distinctly different years: 1918, just after the United States has entered The Great War in Europe, and 1968, during the then-latest of the 20th century’s endless stream of global conflicts. Rickloff spools out and intertwines the mysteries at a near-perfect pace, neither rushing the reveals nor leaving the reader completely in the dark for too long, using each small reveal to build towards the novel’s dual climaxes. Along the way, we become invested in the four women at the center of the narrative. I’ll admit, I teared up a bit at the end.

LONGER REVIEW: I joined the monthly book club at my local bookstore (Sparta Books in Sparta, NJ) partially for socialization and partly to force myself to read outside of my habitual genres (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery). The Girls in Navy Blue definitely fits that description. While there is a mystery, or more accurately several mysteries, at the core of the book, it is mostly historical fiction, a genre I am not very well-read in at all, and it is more accurately early 20th century historical fiction, which I’m even less well read in.

The Girls in Navy Blue actually takes place in two distinctly different years: 1918, just after the United States has entered The Great War in Europe, and 1968, during the then-latest of the 20th century’s endless stream of global conflicts. The action in both eras takes place in the same location: an oceanside cottage in Ocean View (although the 1918 chapters also take place on the grounds of the nearby Naval hospital and a few other places). In 1918, the cabin is inhabited by three women who have joined the Navy Yeomanettes to do their part for the war effort, each of whom carries a secret or burden that motivates them. In 1968, the house is occupied by the grand-niece of one of those women. Mysteries connect the years: why did Blanche leave the house to her estranged niece Peggy? What drove the housemates and friends apart in 1918? What secrets was housemate Viv harboring? And what tragedy is Peggy running from?

Rickloff spools out and intertwines the mysteries at a near-perfect pace, neither rushing the reveals nor leaving the reader completely in the dark for too long, using each small reveal to build towards the novel’s dual climaxes. Along the way, we become invested in the four women at the center of the narrative: Blanche, a strong-willed child of privilege who finds life full of unexpected challenges; Marjory, whose German surname means constantly having to prove her patriotism; mysterious Viv, finding her way free of her past; and Peggy, reeling from unimaginable loss and trying to find her new path. In both eras, the women cope with misogyny, restrictive societal expectations, and judgement by other women. Whether the author intended it or not, this book has a lot to say about how little progress we’ve made in some aspects of society if the reader takes the time to compare not just the 1918 scenes to the 1968 scenes but also both of those to our current year.

I also found the construction of the novel interesting. The 1918 scenes are narrated in first person by Viv, while the 1968 scenes are more of a limited omniscient POV centered on Peggy. I found it an effective way to further differentiate the eras, lend a different type of immediacy to each era, and help keep the reader in tune with when each chapter was occurring (chapter headings with the year and POV character name also helped).

And I’ll readily admit – I teared up a bit at the end of the novel when everything came together.

Book Review: LOST IN THE MOMENT AND FOUND

TITLE: Lost in The Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)

AUTHOR: Seanan McGuire

146 pages, Tordotcom Publishing, ISBN 9781250213631 (hardcover, e-book, audio)

MY RATING:  5 stars out of 5

SHORT REVIEW: Lost in the Moment and Found may just be the most heartbreaking entry so far in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, commenting as it does on the ways in which we lose our innocence: sometimes suddenly (the unexpected death of a beloved parent; the unwanted advances of a dangerous adult) and sometimes so subtly we don’t even notice the change is happening. Content Warnings for: gaslighting, grooming, death of a parent, childhood trauma, emotional abuse of a child. But Antsy runs before anything can actually happen, and the Door that appears to her takes her to The Shop Where The Lost Things Go. Not every Door leads to Grand Adventure, but sometimes mundane things can be just as dangerous. Lost in the Moment and Found isn’t the easiest book to read in the Wayward Children series, but it is an important one with what it has to say about the ways children are manipulated and taken advantage of and about how we start on the road to healing from trauma.

LONGER REVIEW: Lost in the Moment and Found may just be the most heartbreaking entry so far in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series. Which is not something I thought I would ever say after reading the end of In An Absent Dream (book #4), but there you have it. Because the even-numbered books in this series are stand-alone stories set in the characters’ pasts and can be read in order, I’m not going to assume anyone reading this review has read Absent Dream and spoil that ending – suffice to say, the conclusion of Lost in the Moment feels like Absent Dream’s opposite twin. People who have read both will understand what I’m getting at.

Lost in the Moment and Found is the portal story of Antionette, called “Antsy,” and it starts with the heartbreak of a child witnessing the death of a beloved parent. This is not a spoiler, as it happens in the first few pages and sets the stage for everything that will come after, but more of a Content Warning: if childhood loss of a parent disturbs you, you should go in to this book forewarned. In fact, this is one of several Content Warnings. All of the Wayward Children books deal with heavy topics, but this one involves gaslighting, grooming, emotional abuse of a child, and the clear intimation of impending sexual assault of a minor. But McGuire also assures us in an opening note: “Antsy runs. Before anything can actually happen, Antsy runs.”

And when Antsy does run, the Door that appears for her, with the traditional admonishment to Be Sure written above it, takes her to The Shop Where the Lost Things Go. Unsurprisingly, this is yet another of McGuire’s intriguing and deeply-developed portal worlds – but with a difference. There is no Quest for Antsy to go on to save the locals from a Great Evil before she can go home; there is no clear villain to overcome. There are just lost things to be catalogued and shelved until the person who lost them shows up to claim them, or until they are so forgotten they can be sold to someone else. The Shop has two other residents: a secretive and commanding old woman named Vineta, and a talking magpie named Hudson, who hire Antsy because of her ability to open the Doors that appear throughout the shop, allowing Vineta and Antsy to go shopping across myriad portal worlds. (Most of the worlds Antsy visits are worlds readers of the series have not seen before that I hope we’ll see more of – but I have to admit I might have squealed a bit in delight at the brief appearance by my favorite of the portal worlds we have seen before. I won’t spoil which one, or when it appears. It’s a fun call-out to earlier books.)

Also unsurprisingly, all is not as it seems with the Shop or its residents. The question that drives the narrative is whether or not Antsy will figure out what’s going on before it is too late for her to return home. The reader, of course, realizes the danger Antsy is in long before she does, but the reveal of the depths of that danger and its origins is beautifully revealed.

Lost in the Moment and Found comments on the ways in which we lose our innocence: sometimes suddenly (the unexpected death of a beloved parent; the unwanted advances of a dangerous adult) and sometimes so subtly we don’t even notice the change is happening (one of my favorite quotes from the book: “That’s one of the things about living in a body. It can change, but the ways it changes today will be the ways it has always been tomorrow. If the modification isn’t noted in the moment, then it can be all too easily dismissed.”). And while I found the book heartbreaking at multiple points, I also found it poignant and personal and imbued with hope that Antsy (and all of us) will eventually find the happiness and love she has lost.

Lest you think the book is a complete downer: there are plenty of moment of intrigue, of joyous exploration, and, without spoilers, comeuppance for at least some of those who deserve it. There are also hints at the nature of the portal Doors and why they appear to whom they do.

Lost in the Moment and Found isn’t the easiest book to read in the Wayward Children series, but it is an important one with what it has to say about the ways children are manipulated and taken advantage of and about how we start on the road to healing from trauma.

I received an advance reading copy of this book for free from TorDotCom Publishing via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. Lost in the Moment and Found releases today, January 10th, 2023.

Book Review: BE THE SERPENT

TITLE: Be the Serpent (October Daye, Book 16)

AUTHOR: Seanan McGuire

368 pages, DAW Books, ISBN 9780756416867 (hardcover, e-book, audio)

MY RATING:  5 stars out of 5

SHORT REVIEW: Be the Serpent, the sixteenth book in the October Daye urban fantasy series, is everything Seanan McGuire promised it would be: a major game-changer for the characters, answering at least one long-standing mystery at the heart of the franchise, and at times utterly heart-breaking. It is also, in my opinion, the best entry in the series so far. Content warning for child death. This is the book that begins to answer the question of what really happened to the Queens of Faerie, and I found it to be a highly satisfactory reveal, totally in line with clues that have been dropped since almost the very beginning of the series.

LONGER REVIEW: Be the Serpent, the sixteenth book in the October Daye urban fantasy series, is everything Seanan McGuire promised it would be: a major game-changer for the characters, answering at least one long-standing mystery at the heart of the franchise, and at times utterly heart-breaking. It is also, in my opinion, the best entry in the series so far. Which is saying something considering how much I love these books.

Let’s start with a content warning: one of the inciting incidents of this book involves the death of a child. The death is handled with tact and care and is not gratuitous. It is absolutely necessary for the story to progress the way it needs to. The reader experiences the death at a slight remove (via Toby’s ability to “ride the blood” and see people’s memories), which blunts the pain a little bit – but it still hits hard, as it is meant to. McGuire is known for not killing characters just for shock value; every character who dies in the October Day series does so because the plot demands it or because their story is done and so every death counts regardless of whether the dead character is someone the readers liked or hated. This death is no different, it just feels worse because the victim is a child. So there you are: fair warning.

Every fourth book in this series is a “big one,” changing things irrevocably for Toby, her friends, and sometimes the world of Faerie at large. Very often, this has meant Toby gaining new information about the way Faerie works. One of the series’ long-standing mysteries is “What really happened to the Queens of Faerie, Maeve and Titania?” This book is the beginning of the answer to that question. This is something fans of the series have been speculating on almost since book one, with deeply considered theories and very strong opinions. Of course, I’m not going to spoil the reveal. Some people will love it, some will hate it; I found it highly satisfactory and totally in-line with all the clues McGuire has dropped in the preceding 15 books. And as heart-breaking as many fans assumed it would be. The death of a child may incite the action, but the big reveal and its aftermath are just as tear-inducing.

This is not to say the book is a depressing slog. Despite, or perhaps because of, the heartbreak, the book is fast-paced and exciting. Certain characters’ actions and behavior are infuriating (long time readers can probably guess who I’m referring to) and certain other characters’ responses are heartwarming. There’s the usual amount of humor sprinkled throughout as well – it’s not a Toby book if there isn’t some snarky banter among her found family and appropriate flirtatious tension between Toby and her Tybalt. There are also a few interesting developments for members of the supporting cast starting with the opening scene.

I’m posting this review far enough after the publication date that most fans of the series already know this, but ---SPOILER ALERT--- the book ends on a cliffhanger, the only entry in the series to do so. Sub-plots have carried over across books, but this is a real “oh my god, what’s going to happen” ending. The good news is the next book comes out in under a year and the author has a strict “no more than one cliffhanger per series (if any at all)” policy. So this will wrap up in the next novel, which I believe is titled These Violent Delights.

As is also standard now for the October Daye series (as well as McGuire’s Incryptid series), this book contains a stand-alone novella expanding on the lore of the world in some way. This time, we get another glimpse into the largely tragic life of the Luidaeg, better known as the Sea Witch. I love every story Seanan has written expanding on this character’s long life, and this one is no exception. Like the novel that precedes it, this is not an easy novella to read – it centers emotional abuse levied against the main character by her own family and it lays open wounds that the Luidaeg still hasn’t healed in the present day of the series – wound that may in fact never be healed. Seeing such a formative moment in her life play out is heart-wrenching for those of us who love her despite (or again, perhaps because of) how scary she is.

I received an advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

This review is also very late. Be the Serpent published on August 30th, 2022.

SERIES SATURDAY: Warriors of Zandar

This is a blog series about … well, series. I love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies, comics.

Beyond The Farthest Star: Warriors of Zandar

Publisher: American Mythology

Publication Date(s): 2022

Writer/Editor: Mike Wolfer

Pencils and Inks: Allesandro Ranaldi

Colors: Arthur Hesli

Letters: Natalie Jane

Last week on Series Saturday, I reviewed American Mythology’s recent four-issue mini-series Pellucidar: Across Savage Seas featuring Gretchen Von Harben, the first of two comic book series officially considered canonical Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe entries. Beyond The Farthest Star: Warriors of Zandar is the second of those series, and stars Gretchen Von Harben’s daughter Victory Harben.

Over the past two years, readers of the “Swords of Eternity Super-Arc” series from Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. (Carson of Venus: The Edge of All Worlds by Matt Betts; Tarzan: Battle for Pellucidar by Win Scott Eckert; and John Carter of Mars: Gods of the Forgotten by Geary Gravel) have been introduced to Victory, learned a bit about her childhood, and bore witness to a few of her many adventures bouncing through space and time thanks to an accident involving the Gridley Wave that allows those in Pellucidar to communicate with the surface world. Beyond the Farthest Star: Warriors of Zandar is another of those space-and-time-bouncing adventures, in which Victory finds herself on the far-off titular planet and smack in the middle of a battle between two races: the peaceful Ki-Vaas and the brutal Keelars. As usual, the out-going and gregarious Victory makes a new friend almost immediately, which pulls her further into the local conflict: the Keelars are harvesting the Ki-Vaas and subjecting them to a device that extracts and saves the life-force of anyone placed in it.

Writer Mike Wolfer paces the main story – Victory and her friend’s attempts to rescue the captive Ki-Vaa and stop the Keelars – pretty perfectly across the four issues, once again easily matching Edgar Rice Burroughs’ prose style in comic book form. Complications abound before Victory and her compatriots solve the problem at hand, but there is a resolution to the main story. We also get a nice look into Victory’s character: her sense of social justice, her willingness to do the right thing even at great personal peril, her open-hearted nature. In Wolfer’s hands, Victory Harben continues to be a character I want to know more about and want to see in adventure after adventure.

There are some unresolved secondary plots, but as this is definitely not Victory’s final adventure I’m not concerned that they will remain unresolved for long. I am intrigued by references to the Keelar’s unseen master “The One from Above,” a figure who remains mysterious and unseen even in the final issue of the mini-series. I’m also wondering just how long Victory will remain on Zandar and whether this world will also be the setting for Christopher Paul Carey’s upcoming novel Victory Harben: Fires of Helos, which is the final installment in the “Swords of Eternity” Super-Arc mentioned above.

Wolfer also does a wonderful job, mostly via dialogue that doesn’t feel like an info-dump and never feels out of character, conveying the differences between the Ki-Vaa and Keelar societies. Burroughs, in his Mars and Venus books especially, was known for making sure his alien planets were populated with a diversity of physical and societal types where so much science fiction of the time (and even in the more recent past) took the short-cut of having homogenous planet-wide societies. The latter may make for easier storytelling, but it also feels a bit unrealistic.

Allesandro Ranaldi’s artwork is highly expressive and really conveys the alien nature of the planet Victory has found herself on. Wolfer conveys via dialogue the differences between the two societies, and Rinaldi shows us the very large difference in physicality. The Ki-Vaa are humanoid but distinctly not human, while the Keelar are blockier, for lack of a better term. (It’s probably not intentional on the part of the artist, but the Keelar remind me of shorter, hairless versions of Looney Tunes character Gossamer.) Arthur Hesli’s colors make this new world pop.

Victory Harben is not the only connection between this series and the greater canonical Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe: the planet Zandar is in the same solar system as Poloda, the planet introduced in the novel Beyond the Farthest Star (hence the lengthy title of the mini-series). Farthest Star is one of my favorite Burroughs novels. We’ll never know what Burroughs intended for Tangor, the hero of the novel, or Poloda or the solar system as a whole – but ERB Inc. clearly has plans for them. Victory Harben is, I think, the ideal character to bridge the gap between Farthest Star and the rest of the canonical ERBU.

SUNDAY SHORTS: Two from Lightspeed #144

I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. I’ve considered promising to review a short story every day, but that’s a lot of pressure. And while no one will fault me if I miss days, I’ll feel guilty, which will lead to not posting at all. So better to stick to a weekly post highlighting a couple/three stories, as I’ve done in the past.

Two From Lightspeed Magazine #144

Grace Chan’s “Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu” starts out as a simple missing persons thriller: Orin’s sidekick/mechanic Calam, an orphan taken under Orin’s wing a decade earlier, has pulled the disappearing act Orin always suspected he would – but Orin isn’t letting go that easily. The pilot/Beaconer wants answers about who Calam really is and where he came from. And so Orin tracks Calam back to Calam’s homeworld. If this story was a simple “find the missing person / learn their secret” story, it would still be fantastic. Chan paces the reveals wonderfully throughout, threading Orin’s feelings about Calam neatly into the overall narrative. But the story takes on added resonance as Orin learns more about the injustice Calam’s family, in fact entire society, has been dealt. Without spoiling too much: this is a story about colonization, about how the winners write the history books, and about how the colonized are forced to assimilate or be wiped out. I had just recently completed Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States before reading this story, and the non-fiction book heavily influenced my reaction to the events of the fictional story. The reveal of what happened to Calum’s family is not the denouement of the story, however. There’s more to it than that, and Chan kept me riveted up to the final paragraph.

In “The Plastic People,” Tobias S. Buckell extrapolates a future in which Earth is essentially a giant trash heap and the rich have, generations ago, escaped to live in orbiting space stations. Occasionally, the children of these families like to camp amongst the trash-heaps for a bit of adventure. On one such trip, Rhea finds a seemingly-feral child among the trash and decides to “rescue” the boy – after all, bringing the boy to live among the civilized surely must be better for him than leaving him among the trash where his own parents don’t seem to care if he’s fed or lives or dies. Complications ensue, of course. Buckell makes his main character likeable at first, but she’s still very, very flawed thanks to the way she’s been raised. The privilege of Rhea and her friends is on display from the very start of the story, and even though she thinks she’s doing something good and noble she’s still mis-informed about the nature and history of the people still living below – including why families like hers left Earth for … well, not greener pastures, exactly, but certainly for a less polluted life. The story comments on how what’s passed down as family historical truth isn’t always true, how the privileged often take on “rescue” projects that they then lose interest in, and how sometimes the idea of “one life-changing encounter” is just that – a nice idea, but not something that happens as often as one would hope. But there’s also a nice underthread about the resiliency of humanity in general, and how we might adapt physically to survive, even if that survival doesn’t look like the gleaming future we’ve longed hoped for.

Full disclosure: I am one of the proofreaders for Lightspeed Magazine, as well as its sibling publication Fantasy Magazine.

SERIES SATURDAY: Pellucidar: Across Savage Seas

This is a blog series about … well, series. I love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies, comics. It’s been on hiatus for a while, but returns this week with the first of two posts about new content from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

Pellucidar: Across Savage Seas,

Publisher: American Mythology, 2022 (in conjunction with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.)

Story: Christopher Paul Carey

Writer/Editor: Mike Wolfer

Pencils and Inks: Miriana Puglia

Colors: Periya Pillai

Letters: Natalie Jane

In Pellucidar: Across Savage Seas, Gretchen von Harben (all grown up her from last appearance as a twelve-year-old girl in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins) narrates to an unseen audience her first visit to Pellucidar, the hidden world at the Earth’s core. Accompanying adventurer Jason Gridley on the airship Favonia as a college student, Gretchen is knocked loose when the Favonia is attacked by a flock of pterosaurs. She parachutes to a remote, uncharted island with only a pistol and limited ammo. There she encounters beings fans of the Pellucidar books will recognize (human Gilaks and ape-like Sagoths) as well as entirely new races that this series adds to the official Burroughs canon (Kratalaks and Azlaks). Gretchen faces a lot of peril over the course of four issues, and in the tradition of the strong female Burroughs characters who have preceded her (Jane Porter-Clayton, Dejah Thoris, Duare, and more), she more than rises to the occasion. This may be Gretchen’s first recorded adventure as an adult, but I certainly hope it’s not the last. She’s an engaging and dynamic character who deserves to be featured (along with the supporting cast that’s been built around her) in many more stories.

Christopher Paul Carey crafted the general story of Gretchen’s first adventure in Pellucidar, originally intending it to be a novel. Writer Mike Wolfer did a wonderful job converting the story to comic book form, pacing the story perfectly across four issues. Fewer issues would have rushed the story too much, and I think five or six issues would have padded the story out too much. Reading the series as it was issued in monthly (or as close to monthly as the publisher could get given various supply chain issues plaguing small independent publishers these days), I was very satisfied with where each issue left off – cliffhangers, of course, as befits a story that could easily have been told as a classic 1940s movie serial – and never felt like the drama of the end of a chapter was unearned. Carey is a Burroughsian scholar of the highest level, and Wolfer matches him well in creating a story that Burroughs would be proud of. For instance, I have no idea how much of the dialogue was in Carey’s original plot, how much the writers crafted together, and how much is purely Wolfer – but regardless, each character’s voice is distinctive and clear while still being perfectly Burroughsian in style.

Complimenting the writing, Miriana Puglia’s artwork is wonderful. Her clean lines and fluid body language convey action and emotion with equal clarity. Fight scenes have a flow and symmetry that makes them easy to follow, and upon multiple reads tiny details stand out. And when it’s time to go creepy (as one almost inevitably must when adventuring in Pellucidar), Puglia absolutely rises to the occasion. There’s one particular page in issue 4, for example, which made me a bit nauseous (trust me, this is a compliment.). Colorist Periya Pillai keeps the action well-lit with a mix of bold and quiet colors as appropriate to the scene; even moments in dark caves or underwater are easy to follow because Pillai’s colors don’t go so dark that they subsume Puglia’s art.

In recent years, Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. has made a concerted effort to expand the official canon of the ERB Universe with new novels and comics series like this one, that bear the “Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe” banner across the top of the cover as well as an “Official ERB Universe Canon” stamp and hew as closely to Burroughs’ original interconnectedness universe as possible. In the novels of the current “Swords of Eternity” Super-Arc, readers have been introduced to an intrepid young woman traversing time and space named Victory Harben. Yes, there’s a direct connection between the Gretchen von Harben of Pellucidar: Across Savage Seas and the Victory Harben who has been appearing in those novels: it’s not a spoiler to reveal here that Victory is Gretchen’s daughter and is the person to whom Gretchen is narrating this story. Along with appearing in the novels/novellas already released, Victory will take center stage in her own novel later this year – but before that, she’s also been the star of another American Mythology / ERB Universe comic book mini-series: Beyond the Farthest Star: Warriors of Zandar, which will be the subject of next week’s Series Saturday post.

SUNDAY SHORTS: Two from The Deadlands

I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. Posts will range from flash to novellas. At some point, I might delve into individual stories/episodes of anthology formats in other media, like television and comics, but for the time being, I’m sticking to prose in print and audio.

I don’t think I’ve yet done a Sunday Shorts about The Deadlands, a relatively new (just a year old) online speculative fiction magazine focused on the Afterlife – or afterlives, more accurately. Stories, poems, and non-fiction about grieving, about ghosts, about what happens after, or sometimes as, we are shuffling off this mortal coil, plane of existence, etc. The Deadlands is published by Sean Markey and E. Catherine Tobler is the editor-in-chief. Here are my thoughts on the two fiction pieces in the latest issue.

In KT Bryski’s “This is I,” Elaine, the Lady of Shalott, crosses paths via a magic mirror with a woman she comes to know as “Gug,” but who is really poet/artist Elizabeth Siddal, wife of Dante Gabriel Rosetti. In a story that blurs not only the lines of reality but also of narrative voice (with sections alternating between first, second, and third person points-of-view), Bryski delves into the ways in which men control women and alter the courses of their lives. Elaine has the curse on her that if she stops weaving in her high tower and looks out over Camelot, Camelot will fall, and she will be cursed. “Gug” has been used as a muse, been manipulated into marriage, and told her womanly nature means she can’t create art the same way a man can. Bryski also plays with the various versions of “The Lady of Shalott” that Tennyson wrote, plus interpretations by others. It took me a page or so to understand what the author was doing with the alternating POVs, but then I settled in, and the story flowed towards a perfect ending.

Maria Haskins’ “The Morthouse” focuses on a mother who has lost her teenage son to a horrific winter illness and who is so distraught she cannot do anything but haunt the village “morthouse,” where the bodies of those who die during winter are held until the ground is soft enough to dig graves, with occasional trips to the church she might no longer believe in, and the fields around the village. She regrets not asking the midwife who brought her child into the world during a problematic birth for help in keeping him alive, and eventually goes to ask for help in bringing him back to life. The midwife sets the grieving mother three tasks to gather items that might help. The mother’s grief is palpable throughout, as is her estrangement from her church and from her husband. The author also nicely explicates the traditional distrust in religious communities for anyone who works with nature to cure illness instead of just relying on God, without going the traditional route of showing the midwife (in this case) being abused by other members of the community. The story takes its time before coming to a satisfying, emotional, conclusion.