Zelazny by the Numbers: Seven

For the seven linked novellas composing Lord of Light. I tend to like novellas. You don’t see them as much anymore. Stephen King called them "an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic."

My interest in the novella as the ideal length for a story has always been something of a chicken or egg situation. Do I prefer it because Roger Zelazny wrote stories of this length and I tend to look favorably on everything he did, or do I like the length and format novellas themselves and I became such an enthusiast of Zelazny because of this preference? I suspect it’s a bit of each, but mostly the former. To put it another way, and at the risk of being reductionist, the stories are the length Zelazny needed them to be.  It’s not important that they were of the particular length they were; that’s just how things worked out. After all, his stories were hardly exclusively of this length, and on several occasions, he expanded shorter works into full-length novels. (Though it’s worth noting that I generally do prefer the shorter versions more, with the notable exception of Wilderness.)

I do think Lord of Light is the exception to this general rule, and the format is crucial to its appeal. The novel would not have worked as well as it did if it had been written in another way. It’s interesting to note that this was born of practicality. Zelazny wrote it in that fashion in order to be able to sell the story piecemeal if he couldn’t sell the entire book.  They stand on their own, but the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts.