A Look at the Blackwyrm Novella Series
In the age of fat fantasy series, doorstop thrillers, and historical epics it’s often impossible to find a short, satisfying read. Gone are the days of the 60,000 word science fiction novel, or even the novella doubles series Ace once put out. Long a standard of genre fiction — both the worlds of SF and of fantasy having a host of renowned novellas and short novels considered classics in their respective fields — these short, sharp stories are increasingly ignored for multi-book works of massive length. But, sometimes, it’s nice to get a book done in a day or two, it’s nice to explore an idea, premise, or setting without committing to dozens or hundreds of hours with it.
Which is why I was very interested to see indie game company Blackwyrm’s new fiction line of novellas and short novel chapbooks. With an ambitious schedule of a book a month last year, Blackwyrm produced books ranging up and down the genre spectrum — from military fantasy to psychic thriller, from slipstream SF to crossgenre mashup. In fact, all of the Blackwyrm titles I’ve seen do something a little bit different with genre tropes, and indeed they’ve billed their line as ‘Experimental Fiction.’
When people ask me what I like to read I usually answer with a simple ‘everything,’ but of course that’s not strictly true. I don’t read trigonometry textbooks or Romance novels, celebrity memoirs or cookbooks, monographs on the evolution of sheep shearing or anything by Dan Brown (in fact, just give me that thing on sheep first). But when I say ‘everything’ I’m being figuratively if not literally honest, because my tastes — especially when compared to the average reader — are very broad. I don’t read only one kind of thing. I’m a generalist.
James Enge’s Morlock stories have been some of the most popular fiction we’ve published in Black Gate. His first Morlock novel, Blood of Ambrose, published by Pyr in April, was very warmly received, and described as “A future classic… this novel succeeds beautifully” (The Great Geek Manual) and “Like Conan as written by Raymond Chandler” (Paul Cornell).
The place is here, the time is now, and the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey.
Hey, have you heard? Archie Andrews is going to marry Veronica Lodge. Good for him; I always had this thing for Veronica. I hope Archie isn’t in this only for the Lodges’ money. In celebration of this momentous moments of moments, I’m going to write about the Hittites.
Recently I received a bit of a surprise when I went to a local library that has long been one of my ambush zones for the acquisition of unsuspecting books. All those lovely 25 cent mass market paperbacks with the stickers on the spine, all those nicely broken-in trades, all those hardbacks with the covers mylared over and glued down, were gone. Vanished. Whisked away on an electron breeze to inhabit the alternate world of the internet.
Star Trek (2009)