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Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Novellas as Chapbooks, 2003
As I've said, calling these books "chapbooks" probably abuses the definition of that term a bit, but I don't have a ready alternative to mind. (And Golden Gryphon, at any rate, actually calls these books chapbooks.) Over the bast few years, there have been quite a few slim novella-length books published: this has become a significant source of fine novellas. PS Publishing in England initiated this phenomenon, and recently Golden Gryphon in the US has published a few.
In 2003 I read six such books, four from PS Publishing and two from Golden Gryphon. These were Light Stealer, by James Barclay; Jupiter Magnified, by Adam Roberts; In Springdale Town, by Robert Freeman Wexler; Dear Abbey, by Terry Bisson; A Better World's In Birth, by Howard Waldrop; and The Angel in the Darkness, by Kage Baker. (The latter two being from Golden Gryphon.)
These totaled about 153,000 words. Five are novellas, the other (Waldrop's) is about 12,000 words, a novelette.
My favorite of these was Robert Freeman Wexler's "In Springdale Town", about a former soap opera actor who comes east from California to, it turns out, the (fictional) town in which the soap opera he appeared in was set. Yes, that's kind of an old idea, but Wexler does it very well. Second best is probably Terry Bisson's "Dear Abbey", about a couple of radical environmentalists (the "Abbey" of the title is of course Edward Abbey) who experiment with time travel and end up getting a tour of the far future of Earth. Among other things this story fits into my list of recent stories that seem to regretfully say farewell to the SFnal dreams of the last century. Roberts's story has an interesting concept (Jupiter seems suddenly much closer to the Earth, and this event is viewed through the POV of a Swedish poet), but I don't really think he managed to work things out well enough. Baker's story is a Company story, and it's OK reading but seems to me not one of the stronger Company stories, and like several of her Company stories for my taste too much significance is buried in the way the story fits into the larger plot arc. Waldrop's story bored me, mainly I think because I had not much idea how and why the story was "Alternate" history -- i.e. it depends too much on knowing fairly obscure (to me, at any rate, historical events). Barclay's story is really minor bog-standard fantasy. I don't think I'd have liked it regardless, but I suspect its status as a prequel to his ongoing series did not help it.
**(ADDENDUM ADDED LATER)**
I'll add one book here, this one a real chapbook from SRM Publishing. "Master Walk", by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, about 30,000 words long.
Making the total 183,000, 6 novellas and a novelette.
The Lee and Miller story is YA-oriented, apparently the first in a series, about a young human in a far-future galaxy, apparently mostly human-controlled, under the apparently benign rule of the "Advocacy". This young man is studying the ways of the mysterious marmoset-like alien information traders, the Chenri. He is looking for information about the lost Chenri homeworld, but he seems to be attracting unwelcome attention. He also meets a young Chenri who seems to want to travel with him -- for good reasons or bad? It's pretty enjoyable stuff, not great, but I'll be looking for future stories in the series.
