May 27, 2025

On the novella and my new goth techno ambient pop single

Hello.

The past two months have been difficult: my busiest time at work (I work at a college and am involved in many end of the academic year activities, including Commencement); my most confusing time for health (I have horrible hay fever—spring is a continual exercise of "do I have a cold, the flu, a sinus infection, or 'just' allergies"?); my most intense season of grief (several people who are important to me passed away in spring); and my most erratic creative season (due to the prior items in the series).

All of which is to say that spring is a strange time for me. It makes me melancholy. Much more than fall and winter—my two favorite seasons—do.

So what is one to do with such melancholy but write an indie goth ambient and techno-inflected pop single: catacombs released earlier today and is free to stream on Bandcamp.

Singing remains incredibly embarrassing to me, and yet I'm most interested in exploring music that uses sounds that have largely resisted overt storytelling through vocals that use clearly discernible lyrics (ambient, drone, cinematic, techno, industrial) in a way that messes with pop form. I understand why techno and ambient decided lyrics and pop structure were something to discard in search of a more pure, more minimal, less commercial expression of music. At the same time, I love both those sound palettes AND the storytelling that can only be done with lyrics.

But enough of that.

Today: some follow-up from the last newsletter and then a few thoughts spurred by Mary Doyle Springer's Forms of the Modern Novella.

Some follow-up to March's newsletter

1. Some kind soul purchased an item from my Bookshop wish list! Many thanks to whoever sent me Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory. I will write about it sometime soon.

2. I've completed line edits and a first proofread of the SF&F collection I mentioned back in March and also have a start on the cover. I've titled it Oddities: Fantasies & Science Fictions. I'm reasonably confident that I'll be able to release it later this year.

3. On creative plateaus: I've started a short novel and a short story that feel like I'm moving on to the next phase of my writing. It was illuminating to re-read the stories and novelettes in Oddities and see them cohere in theme and approach more than I had thought and then for that very fact to push me away from them. Not that the results so far (and I've only made a start) are radically different. It's just that what I'm doing and interested in and how I'm going about it feels like a substantive albeit shaky, tentative shift.

4. After writing about my translation of Kafka's "Ein Landarzt" and Bluma Goldstein's influence on my understanding of Kafka's work, I mentioned in a post script that I had decided to order her book Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives. I must admit that I ordered a used copy. But what a surprise to discover that the copy I ordered was signed by Goldstein. The inscription reads: For Larry, in appreciation for your positive support all these years. Warmest wishes, Bluma.

   On the back page of the book, someone (Larry?) has written the start of a letter in the form of a poem to Bluma, although I can't decipher most of the handwriting. There's also a quote from the book. And then tucked into the book facing that page, I found a lined page from a note pad that has the Lilly (pharmaceutical company) logo on the bottom and at the top the word mark for Zyprexa Olanzapine. On the unlined back of the page, someone (Larry?) has rewritten what was in the back of the book, although, it's incomplete. The handwriting is a little easier to understand. It starts: I know a (once) adventurer—who with the conservative rabbi looking on hand me co-sign a set without knowing what it was. (except set looks like it could Sct or 5ct; the ct are underlined, but so later is the word "cruelty"). I don't know what to make of all this. It sounds like something I'd make up, but I assure you I have not. I suppose this is what happens when your primary intersection with a former professor is Kafka.

On the novella (and short novel)

It's a shame that Mary Doyle Springer's Forms of the Modern Novella is out of print. Because while I'm delighted by the return of the novella/short novel as a more robust part of the U.S./UK publishing ecosystem over the past few years, particularly in SF&F, I think that authors and editors looking to this form would be well served to have a better understanding of its' history and possibilities.

This is not to say that Forms of the Modern Novella is a perfect study of the novella. It's quite limited in the texts it chooses to focus on and engages in a formalism that was even old-fashioned at the time of publication (1975), which MDS acknowledges in a chapter section titled (charmingly, imo) Polemic on the value of formal analysis and classification.

Unsurprisingly, I love novellas and short novels: these in-between things that say too much and not enough; that are so flexible in terms of structure and form and yet so often seem to end up providing the same specific reading experience; that can easily get too prickly or too smooth.

MDS claims that the "functions which the novella seems definitely to achieve" (12) are:

1. The plot/revelation of character [differentiated from the novel in that focus remains on "a single character revelation"]
2. The "degenerative or pathetic tragedy" [MDS specifically mention's Death in Venice as an example; focuses on a single episode]
3. Satire (with, again, a focus on a single "object of ridicule" rather than a "compendium" [which would be more suitable for novel-length fiction])
4. Apologue (meaning a work that's meant to make some kind of statement on a theme/illustrate a problem—a, MDS claims, modern answer to/version of allegory)
5. The subclass of apologue "the example" (12-13) [which focuses on one character who undergoes an experience that points to the theme/statement of apologue, and which, yes, can sometimes be didactic, but can also be thought-provoking]

MDS notes that based on these functions, the novella leans more towards the tragic than the comic. Not that novellas can't be "comical," but tragic rather than comic as in tragedy vs. comedy and what character journeys the work focuses on and how the work ends.

I'm not suggesting that you should take these five modes of the novella as conclusive, especially not once we extend our scope outside of literary realism.

At the same time, I think those of us who read, write, and write about SF&F could grapple a bit more with formalism when it comes to structure/form/mode rather than focusing quite so much either on simply the story of the novella itself and/or the genre-ness of the novella.

If I'm going to make such a claim, then I should probably model it. But I'm not ready to do so (other than to say that on a superficial first glance, Sofia Samatar's The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain could potentially be read as all five of the above): I need to re-read Forms of the Modern Novella and then find the right SF&F novella (or right set of novellas) to focus on. Maybe Alex Jeffers's The Mourning Coat?

Instead, I want to list what MDS sees as some of the key "signals of apologue" (39). Teasing out what makes the modern form of apologue different from and more suited to modern readers than allegory is tricky. But if you have felt the push and the pull in a novella (or novelette or short novel) between realism and fable-ness/tale-ness (say, in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis or Han Kang's The Vegetarian or Herman Melville's Billy Budd), then maybe you understand what MDS is getting at: this sense that the author is trying to say something, but without the multi-vocality of the novel or the sharp slap of the short story. A trying to be somewhat more universal while also telling a good, focused story while also bringing in just a bit of the yarn or fable and where certain objects, places, phrases can have a repeated intensity and characters are realized but also stand for (or at least gesture at) something.

So what are these key signals?

They are (pgs. 39-51):

1. Distance on character (MDS calls this the "one indispensable sign of apologue"; how this might or might not apply to SF&F novellas is something for further study)
2. Relative plotlessness (instead what MDS calls a "story line"—a series of incidents that don't provide "the satisfaction of plot fulfillment" but rather "the fulfillment of the apologue statement")
3. Manipulation of our sense of time
4. Ritualistic and improbable effects
5. Repetition of words and images
6. Traditionally symbolic settings
7. Heavy-handed narrative, or authorial commentary
8. Heavy stylized prose

A reminder that these elements are based on a formalist approach: they derive from what MDS has observed as common attributes of the novellas that are part of the set which she used for her study. More than fifty years have passed since she did this study. A set of novellas that have been published since then very well could change not only that list of signals but the nature of apologue in relation to the novella itself (or even whether it remains a viable term to attach to the form itself at all).

At the same time: those key signals still seem to me to be a good starting point. So many of the novellas I've read that have been published in the last 20-30 years do one or more of the items on that list.

As interesting as Forms of the Modern Novella is, it left me wanting an updated version of it. But it also convinced me that a more formalist reading of a literary form can be valuable (what I haven't quoted here is all the many examples MDS deploys in her text). Given how many novellas have been published since 1975, you couldn't be quite as (somewhat) comprehensive as MDS was (although her list is still "only" 180 total works). You might not even be able to do it with all of the novellas/short novels Tor or Melville House + Fitzcarraldo Editions have published.

But a subset of those?

That might work.

We tend, especially in SF&F, to either focus on the individual title or a sub-genre or a short list of "acclaimed" or "classic" or "award-winning" titles when we talk about the field.

I understand why that is.

I'm thinking, though, that an informed list of titles might more sense as a focus if we're looking to say something interesting, illuminating, or maybe even useful.

And the beauty of novellas is that their length and thus the particular form they take make for a more manageable and, I suspect, productive body of work to attend to.

What do you think?

P.S. I'll be at 4th St. Fantasy June 13-15. This is pretty much the only public event I attend. Whether we've hung out there before or not or even have met or not, if you're going to be there, let me know!