ted, you cut the category too long

[calimac]

supergee links to an article, in the Economist of all places, advising readers to read Ted Chiang.  The author of the article gets what SF is about.  Ted Chiang, in fact, could serve at this time as a useful shibboleth: If you've heard of him, you know the SF field; if you haven't, you don't.

I find Chiang an excellent but unnerving writer, because I'm used to SF as a polemical form of fiction: the author tells you, explicitly or implicitly, what he or she thinks about the story being told: what is right or wrong, what raises alarm or causes satisfaction.  This is why I don't believe the authors who claim they're just spinning yarns for beer money; the authors who say things like that (R. Heinlein, P. Anderson) are among the finest - as in intense or effective, not necessarily in eliciting agreement - polemicists in the field.  And they're also prone to polemical non-fiction in their own voices that say things entirely consistent with their pronouncements in fiction, so I don't believe that the viewpoints in their stories are merely put-ons for the sake of a story.  (It can be done, but it isn't done often, and the author's real view usually emerges by the end - see Resnik's Kirinyaga.)

But Ted Chiang doesn't do that.  He simply tells you the events, and leaves no clue as to what he thinks about them.  His stories tend to elicit the reaction from me, "And your point is ...?"  I find this unnerving.

But that's not why I brought this article up.  The author points out that Chiang writes only short fiction.  "His longest works are novellas of about 50,000 words."

And my first thought was, "Are our Hugo category word limits obsolete?"  It's true that SF novels have been getting longer.  Even the epic sagas of yore - Skylark, Lensman, the original Foundation series - were minuscule little things compared with the blockbuster series of today.  Half a century ago when the Hugo categories were established - though the exact word counts weren't necessarily immediately attached to them, and I don't know when that happened - 50,000 was a full-length novel.  Now here's somebody who thinks it's a novella.

On the other hand, are they that long?  I don't know for sure which stories are being referred to, but one of the longest is surely "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," which was published as a standalone volume.  It's also the only one I have an electronic copy of so I can easily check the word count.  It's 30,000, not 50,000.  I can speak from experience as a Hugo administrator that readers are often very bad at offhand estimations of how long a story is.

More data are needed.  Ted Chiang could write a story about it.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I looked at those word counts just recently, during discussion of a Libertarian Futurist Society award nominee, and it really surprised me that the lower limit for "novel" was so low. Back when I was trying to write fiction, I looked into word counts and I got the impression that 60,000 words was the recommended minimum length for a novel.