the length of truth

[sergebroom]

I didn’t belong in the world.

Some years ago, I had carelessly stepped off my earth, entering a realm that only resembled what was home. I was lost, and it was the worst kind of lost. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t decipher which day and which hour had transformed everything familiar and happy.

Was it in ’99, when the future decided to invade us?

Or in ’02, when Ramiro was found, just south of the Canadian border?

I am seldom inclined to make predictions, which is good because my dismal track record has shown that, should I embark onto a career as a prophet, I’d find the enterprise anything but profitable.

Nonetheless I expect that Robert Reed’s story Truth, published in the Oct/Nov 2008 issue of Asimov’s, will win next year’s Hugo in the novella category. Its depiction of our near future going to Hell in a handbasket because of nuclear terrorism is a harrowing tale. Only one of the attackers from a farther tomorrow has been caught and, in spite of the information that the government has been able to get out of him throughout a decade of captivity, things have only gotten worse. Like I said, the story is not a pleasant journey, but very much worth it.

And, unlike many novellas I’ve read over the last couple of years, it was right for it to be a novella. It didn’t have the structure of a miniature novel like War of the Worlds did(1), or like the two halves of those old Ace Doubles, but everything that was there had to be there.

Connie Willis’s All Seated on The Ground, last year’s Hugo winner, isn’t a miniature novel either, but it goes zippingly, never dull, especially as its two main characters examine each and every bit of Christmas music they can think of, to make sure that the aliens recently landed in Denver won’t do what the music commands, especially the bits about slaying children, or grandmothers being run over by reindeers.

Elsewhere… Some novellas had me bored outright and committing the unspeakable sin of skimming. One of last year’s other nominated novellas was fairly entertaining, but by the end, I asked myself if the point of the tale would have been better served by its being a short story. I am reminded of how last year’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma didn’t have me yawning, but the many events added to the original’s plot didn’t add anything to the story. Then again, didn’t someone once say that a movie’s plot can – and should – be containable in a novella? That’d explain why it’s not easy to transform a novel into a movie.

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(1) On the other hand, was its length what was considered normal for a novel when HG Wells originally wrote it?

Comments

[redrose3125.livejournal.com]

Graham Greene wrote a novella for The Third Man before he wrote the screenplay. He needed to write the novella first, in order to turn it into the screenplay.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

You mean that he was asked to write an original screenplay, but that he couldn't do it without first writing the story as a novella?

[redrose3125.livejournal.com]

Yep.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Is the novella set in Istambul? Last year TCM had a documentary about the movie.It was originally going to be happening there, but I think it was moved to Austria because somebody owed the producers quite a bit of money and the only way they could take it out of the country was by making a movie there. It's a good movie. (And boy did they have a hard time getting Orson Welles to show up for filming. The only way they could lure him in was by promising to teach him some magic tricks. Honest.)

Speaking of turning prose into movies... When I read that Kuttner & Moore's short story Vintage Season would be made into a movie, I couldn't figure out how that would work. Then I saw the movie, which is known as Grand Tour, and realized that they didn't inflate... er, I mean... they didn't expand it to movie length. The short story became one act within the play. The rest of the story was about the main character stealing the time-travelling device to keep the disaster from happening. That worked all right, but it seriously undermined the power of the original story. The movie version of A Sound of Thunder took the same approach, and also undermined the original's power. Which goes to show that stories, especially short ones, that rely on a OhMyGod surprise ending shouldn't take us beyond the surprise.

[redrose3125.livejournal.com]

My memory says the novella was in Vienna.