A novella (also called a short novel, or novelette) is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The English word "novella" derives from the Italian word "novella", feminine of "novello", which means "new".^[1]

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000.^[2] Other definitions start as low as 10,000 words and run as high as 70,000 words.^[3][4][5]

The novella is a common literary genre in several European languages.

Structure[link]

A novella generally features fewer conflicts than a novel, yet more complicated ones than a short story.^[6] The conflicts also have more time to develop than in short stories. They have endings that are located at the brink of change.^[6] Unlike novels, they are not divided into chapters, and are often intended to be read at a single sitting, as the short story, although white space is often used to divide the sections. They maintain, therefore, a single effect.^[6] Warren Cariou wrote:

The novella is generally not as formally experimental as the long story and the novel can be, and it usually lacks the subplots, the multiple points of view, and the generic adaptability that are common in the novel. It is most often concerned with personal and emotional development rather than with the larger social sphere. The novella generally retains something of the unity of impression that is a hallmark of the short story, but it also contains more highly developed characterization and more luxuriant description.^[7]

History[link]

According to Sergio Waisman, the idea of serialized novellas dates back to the One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Arabian Nights,^[8] from around the 10th century. The novella as a literary genre later began developing in the early Renaissance literary work of the Italians and the French. Principally, by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), author of The Decameron (1353)—one hundred novelle told by ten people, seven women and three men, fleeing the Black Death by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills, in 1348; and by the French Queen, Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), [aka Marguerite de Valois, et. alii.], author of Heptaméron (1559)—seventy-two original French tales (structured like The Decameron).

Not until the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries did writers fashion the novella into a literary genre structured by precepts and rules. Contemporaneously, the Germans were the most active writers of the Novelle (German: "Novelle"; plural: "Novellen"). For the German writer, a novella is a fictional narrative of indeterminate length—a few pages to hundreds—restricted to a single, suspenseful event, situation, or conflict leading to an unexpected turning point (Wendepunkt), provoking a logical but surprising end; Novellen tend to contain a concrete symbol, which is the narration's steady point. They are still famous now.

Notable Examples[link]

Famous English language novellas include John W. Campbell's Who Goes There?, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, George Orwell's Animal Farm, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Isaac Asimov's Nightfall, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Stephen King's Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

French examples of the novella include Voltaire's Candide and Colette's Cheri among others.

Versus novel[link]

See the article novel for the historical generic debate.

See the article Length of a novel for comparative word counts.

This etymological distinction avoids confusion of the literatures and the forms, with the novel being the more important, established fictional form. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's (1881–1942) Die Schachnovelle (1942) (literally, "The Chess Novella", but translated in 1944 as The Royal Game) is an example of a title naming its genre.

Commonly, longer novellas are referred to as novels; Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Heart of Darkness are sometimes called novels, as are many science fiction works such as The War of the Worlds and Armageddon 2419 A.D. Less often, longer works are referred to as novellas. The subjectivity of the parameters of the novella genre is indicative of its shifting and diverse nature as an art form. In her 2010 Open Letters Monthly series, "A Year With Short Novels," Ingrid Norton criticizes the tendency to make clear demarcations based purely on a book's length:

Google "novels" and "length" and you will find tables of word counts, separating out novels from novellas, even from the esoteric and still shorter "novelette" — as though prose works were dog show contestants, needing to be entered into proper categories. But when it comes to writing, any distinctions that begin with an objective and external quality like size are bound to be misleading. The delicate, gem-like jigsaw of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Ray [sic] could not be more unlike the feverishly cunning philosophical monologue of Albert Camus' The Fall, but both novels are about the same length.

^[9]

Stephen King, in his introduction to Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas, has called the novella "an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic";^[10] King notes the difficulties of selling a novella in the commercial publishing world, since it does not fit the typical length requirements of either magazine or book publishers. Despite these problems, however, the novella's length provides unique advantages; in the introduction to a novella anthology titled Sailing to Byzantium, Robert Silverberg writes:

[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.^[11]

In his essay "Briefly, the case for the novella", Canadian author George Fetherling (who wrote the novella Tales of Two Cities) said that to reduce the novella to nothing more than a short novel is like "saying a pony is a baby horse."^[12]

See also[link]

Novels portal

• List of novellas
• Novelette
• Chain novel

References[link]

Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg at the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention
Born	(1935-01-15) January 15, 1935 (age 77) Brooklyn, New York City
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Nationality	American
Period	1955—Present
Genres	Science fiction, Fantasy

Robert Silverberg (born January 15, 1935) is an American author, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards. He is a 1999 inductee into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Early years[link]

Silverberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. A voracious reader since childhood, he began submitting stories to science fiction magazines during his early teenage years. He attended Columbia University, receiving a B.A. in English Literature in 1956. His first published novel, a children's book called Revolt on Alpha C, appeared in 1955, and he won his first Hugo the following year for "best new writer".^[1] For the next four years, by his own count, he wrote a million words a year, mostly for magazines and Ace Doubles. He used his own name as well as a range of pseudonyms during this era, and often worked in collaboration with Randall Garrett. (The Silverberg/Garrett collaborations also used a variety of pseudonyms, the best-known being Robert Randall.) From 1956 to 1959, Silverberg routinely averaged 5 published stories a month, and had over 80 stories published in 1958 alone. In 1959 the market for science fiction collapsed, and Silverberg turned his ability to write copiously to other fields, from carefully researched historical nonfiction to softcore pornography.

Literary growth[link]

In the mid-1960s, science fiction writers were becoming more literarily ambitious. Frederik Pohl, then editing three science fiction magazines, offered Silverberg carte blanche in writing for them. Thus inspired, Silverberg returned to the field that gave him his start, paying far more attention to depth of character development and social background than he had in the past and mixing in elements of the modernist literature he had studied at Columbia.

The novels he wrote in this period are considered far superior to his earlier work.^{[citation needed]} Perhaps the first book to indicate the new Silverberg was To Open the Sky, a fixup of stories published by Pohl in Galaxy Magazine, in which a new religion helps people reach the stars. That was followed by Downward to the Earth, a story containing echoes of material from Joseph Conrad's work, in which the human former administrator of an alien world returns after the planet's inhabitants have been set free. Other acclaimed works of that time include To Live Again, in which the memories and personalities of the deceased can be transferred to other people; The World Inside, a look at an overpopulated future; and Dying Inside, a tale of a telepath losing his powers.

In 1969 Nightwings was awarded the Hugo for best novella. Silverberg won a Nebula award in 1970 for the short story Passengers, two the following year for his novel A Time of Changes and the short story "Good News from the Vatican", and yet another in 1975 for his novella "Born with the Dead".

Later developments[link]

After suffering through the stresses of a thyroid malfunction and a major house fire, Silverberg moved from his native New York to the West Coast in 1972, and announced his retirement from writing in 1975. In 1980 he returned, however, with Lord Valentine's Castle, a panoramic adventure set on an alien planet, which has become the basis of the Majipoor series;— a cycle of stories and novels set on the vast planet Majipoor, a world much larger than Earth and inhabited by no fewer than seven different species of settlers.

Silverberg received a Nebula award in 1986 for his novella Sailing to Byzantium, which takes its name from the poem by William Butler Yeats; a Hugo in 1987 for his novella Gilgamesh in the Outback, set in the Heroes in Hell universe of Bangsian Fantasy; a Hugo in 1990 for Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another. He is a 1999 inductee into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and in 2004 he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Silverberg has been married twice. He married his first wife, Barbara Brown, in 1956. The couple separated in 1976 and divorced a decade later. Silverberg married science fiction author Karen Haber in 1987. The couple resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 2007, Silverberg was elected president of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association.

Selected bibliography[link]

Novels (except Majipoor series, see below)[link]

• Revolt on Alpha C (1955)
• The Thirteenth Immortal (1956)
• Master of Life and Death (1957)
• The Shrouded Planet (1957) (with Randall Garrett, as Robert Randall)
• Collision Course (1958)
• Invaders from Earth (1958)
• Stepsons of Terra (1958)
• Aliens from Space (1958) (as David Osborne)
• Invisible Barriers (1958) (as David Osborne)
• Starman's Quest (1958)
• The Plot Against Earth (1959) (as Calvin M. Knox)
• The Dawning Light (1959) (with Randall Garrett, as Robert Randall)
• The Planet Killers (1959)
• Lost Race of Mars (1960)
• The Seed of Earth (1962)
• Recalled to Life (1962)
• The Silent Invaders (1963)
• Time of the Great Freeze (1963)
• Regan's Planet (1964)
• One of Our Asteroids is Missing (1964, as Calvin M. Knox)
• Conquerors from the Darkness (1965)
• The Gate of Worlds (1967)
• Planet of Death (1967)
• Thorns (1967) Nebula Award nominee, 1967;^[2] Hugo Award nominee, 1968^[3]
• Those Who Watch (1967)
• The Time Hoppers (1967)
• To Open the Sky (1967)
• World's Fair 1992 (1968)
• The Man in the Maze (1968)
• Hawksbill Station (1968)
• The Masks of Time (1968) Nebula nominee, 1968^[3]
• Downward to the Earth (1970) Locus SF nominated, 1971^[4]
• Across a Billion Years (1969)
• Nightwings (1969)
• Three Survived (1969)
• To Live Again (1969)
• Up the Line (1969) Nebula Award nominee, 1969;^[5] Hugo Award nominee, 1970^[6]
• Tower of Glass (1970) Nebula Award nominee, 1970;^[6] Hugo and Locus SF nominee, 1971^[4]
• Son of Man (1971)
• The Second Trip (1971)
• The World Inside (1971) Hugo nominated, 1972^[7]
• A Time of Changes (1971) Silverberg's first Nebula winner, 1972; Hugo and Locus SF nominee, 1972^[7]
• The Book of Skulls (1972) Nebula Award nominee, 1972;^[7] Hugo and Locus SF Award nominee, 1973 ^[8]
• Dying Inside (1972) Nebula Award nominee, 1972;^[7] Hugo and Locus SF Awards nominee, 1973^[8]
• The Stochastic Man (1975) Nebula Award nominee, 1975;^[9] Hugo, Locus SF, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards nominee, 1976^[10]
• Shadrach in the Furnace (1976) Nebula nominee, 1976^[10] Hugo nominee, 1977 ^[11]
• Homefaring (1982) (novella), Hugo and Nebula nominee, 1983
• Lord of Darkness (book) (1983)
• Gilgamesh the King (1984)
• Sailing to Byzantium (1984) (novella), Nebula winner 1985
• Tom O'Bedlam (book) (1985)
• Star of Gypsies (1986)
• At Winter's End (1988)
• Project Pendulum (1989)
• Letters From Atlantis (1990)
• The New Springtime (1990) (aka The Queen of Springtime)
• To the Land of the Living (1990)
• Nightfall (1990) (with Isaac Asimov)
• Thebes of the Hundred Gates (1991)
• The Face of the Waters (1991)
• The Ugly Little Boy (1992) (with Isaac Asimov)
• Kingdoms of the Wall (1992)
• The Positronic Man (1992) (with Isaac Asimov)
• Hot Sky at Midnight (1994)
• Starborne (1996)
• The Alien Years (1997) Locus SF nominee, 1999^[12]
• The Longest Way Home (2002)
• Roma Eterna (2003)
• The Last Song of Orpheus (2010) (novella)

Majipoor series[link]

• Lord Valentine's Castle (1980) Locus winner and Hugo nominee, 1981^[13]
• Majipoor Chronicles (1982)
• Valentine Pontifex (1983)
• The Mountains of Majipoor (1995)
• Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997)
• "The Seventh Shrine" (novella, 1998, in Legends)
• Lord Prestimion (1999)
• The King of Dreams (2001)
• "The Book of Changes" (novella, 2003, in Legends II)
• "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (short story, 2004, in Flights)
• "The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar" (Oct/Nov 2009 F&SF)
• Tales of Majipoor (forthcoming collection of Majipoor stories)

Short story collections[link]

• Lest We Forget Thee Earth (1958) written under the pen-name Calvin M. Knox
• Needle in a Timestack (1966)
• The Calibrated Alligator (1969)
• Dimension Thirteen (1969)
• The Cube Root of Uncertainty (1970)
• Moonferns & Starsongs (1971)
• Valley Beyond Time (1972)
• The Reality Trip and Other Implausibilities (1972)
• Unfamiliar Territory (1973)
• Sunrise On Mercury (1975)
• The Feast of St. Dionysus: Five Science Fiction Stories (1975), Scribners
• The Best of Robert Silverberg (1976)
• The Shores of Tomorrow (1976)
• Next Stop The Stars (1977)
• Capricorn Games (1979)
• World of a Thousand Colors (1982)
• The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party (1984)
• Beyond the Safe Zone (1986)
• The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg: Secret Sharers (1992)
• Phases of the Moon (2004)
• In the Beginning (2006)
• To Be Continued: The Collected Stories Volume 1 (2006)
• To the Dark Star: The Collected Stories Volume 2 (2007)
• A Little Intelligence (with Randall Garrett) (2009)
• Something Wild Is Loose: The Collected Stories Volume 3 (2008)
• Trips: The Collected Stories Volume 4 (2009)
• The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Stories Volume 5 (2010)
• Multiples: The Collected Stories Volume 6 (2011)

Forthcoming:

• We Are for the Dark: The Collected Stories Volume 7 (2012)
• Hot Times in Magma City: The Collected Stories Volume 8 (2013)
• The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories Volume 9 (2014)

Anthologies edited by Robert Silverberg[link]

• Voyagers in Time (1967)
• The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964 (1970)
• Alpha 1 (1970)
• Alpha 2 (1971)
• New Dimensions 1 (1971)
• Alpha 3 (1972)
• New Dimensions 2 (1972)
• Alpha 4 (1973)
• New Dimensions 3 (1973)
• The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two (1973)
• Alpha 5 (1974)
• Mutants (1974)
• New Dimensions 4 (1974)
• Epoch (with Roger Elwood) (1975)
• New Dimensions 5 (1975)
• Strange Gifts (1975)
• New Dimensions 6 (1976)
• Alpha 6 (1976)
• Alpha 7 (1977)
• Alpha 8 (1977)
• New Dimensions 7 (1977)
• Alpha 9 (1978)
• Dawn of Time (with Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander) (1979)
• New Dimensions 11 (1980)
• New Dimensions 12 (1981)
• The Best of Randall Garrett (1982)
• Legends (1998)
• Legends II (1999)
• Far Horizons (1999)
• Tales from Super-Science Fiction (2011)
• Times Three ISBN: 978-1-59606-319-8 (2011)

Non-fiction[link]

• Treasures Beneath the Sea (1960)
• Sir Winston Churchill (1961, as Edgar Black)
• First American into Space (1961)
• Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations (1962)
• Philosopher of Evil (1962, as Walter Drummond)
• The Fabulous Rockefellers (1963)
• Sunken History: The Story of Underwater Archaeology (1963)
• How to Spend Money (1963, as Walter Drummond)
• Fifteen Battles That Changed the World (1963)
• Empires in the Dust: Ancient Civilizations Brought to Light (1963)
• Home of the Red Man: Indian North America Before Columbus (1963)
• The History of Surgery (1963, as L. T. Woodward)
• The Great Doctors (1964)
• Man Before Adam: The Story of Man in Search of His Origins (1964)
• Akhnaten: The Rebel Pharaoh (1964)
• 1066 (1964, as Franklin Hamilton)
• The Loneliest Continent: The Story of Antarctic Discovery (1964, as Walker Chapman)
• The Man Who Found Nineveh: The Story of Austen Henry Layard (1964)
• Great Adventures in Archaeology (1964)
• Socrates (1965)
• Scientists And Scoundrels: A Book of Hoaxes (1965)
• Men Who Mastered the Atom (1965)
• Niels Bohr: The Man Who Mapped the Atom (1965)
• The Old Ones: Indians of the American Southwest (1965)
• The Great Wall of China (1965)
• The World of Coral (1965)
• The Crusades (1965, as Franklin Hamilton)
• Antarctic Conquest: The Great Explorers in Their Own Words (1966, as Walker Chapman)
• The Long Rampart: The Story of the Great Wall of China (1966)
• Rivers: A Book to Begin On (1966, as Lee Sebastian)
• Forgotten by Time: A Book of Living Fossils (1966)
• Frontiers in Archeology (1966)
• Kublai Khan: Lord of Xanadu (1966, as Walker Chapman)
• Leaders Of Labor (1966, as Roy Cook)
• Bridges (1966)
• To the Rock of Darius: The Story of Henry Rawlinson (1966)
• The Hopefuls: Ten Presidential Campaigns (1966, as Lloyd Robinson)
• The Morning of Mankind: Prehistoric Man in Europe (1967)
• The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado (1967, as Walker Chapman)
• The Auk, the Dodo and the Oryx (1967)
• The World of the Rain Forests (1967)
• The Dawn of Medicine (1967)
• The Adventures of Nat Palmer (1967)
• Challenge for a Throne: The Wars of the Roses (1967, as Franklin Hamilton)
• Men Against Time: Salvage Archeology in the United States (1967)
• Light for the World: Edison and the Power Industry (1967)
• The Search for Eldorado (1967, as Walker Chapman)
• Sophisticated Sex Techniques in Marriage (1967, as L. T. Woodward)
• Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archeology of a Myth (1968)
• The World of the Ocean Depths (1968)
• The Stolen Election: Hayes vs. Tilden, 1876 (1968, as Lloyd Robinson)
• Four Men Who Changed the Universe (1968)
• Sam Houston (1968, as Paul Hollander)
• The South Pole: A Book to Begin On (1968, as Lee Sebastian)
• Stormy Voyager (1968)
• Ghost Towns of the American West (1968)
• Vanishing Giants: The Story of the Sequoias (1969)
• Wonders of Ancient Chinese Science (1969)
• The Challenge of Climate: Man and His Environment (1969)
• Bruce of the Blue Nile (1969)
• The World of Space (1969)
• If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem (1970)
• The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (1970)
• Mammoths, Mastodons and Man (1970)
• The Mound Builders (1970)
• The Pueblo Revolt (1970)
• Clocks for the Ages: How Scientists Date the Past (1971)
• To The Western Shore: Growth of the United States 1776-1853 (1971)
• Before The Sphinx: Early Egypt (1971)
• Into Space: A Young Person's Guide to Space (1971, with Arthur C. Clarke)
• The Realm of Prester John (1972)
• The Longest Voyage: Circumnavigation in the Age Of Discovery (1972)
• John Muir, Prophet Among the Glaciers (1972)
• The World Within the Ocean Wave (1972)
• The World Within the Tide Pool (1972)
• Drug Themes in Science Fiction (1974)
• Reflections and Refractions: Thoughts on Science Fiction, Science and Other Matters (1997)

References[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Robert Silverberg

External links[link]

• The Quasi-Official website
• Robert Silverberg at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Complete list of sci-fi award wins and nominations by novelist