RogerBW's Blog

2020 science fiction novelette, in the Diving Universe series. An incident during the voyage of The Renegat.

This feels like material that might have been cut from that novel, in fact – apart from some explanatory wording it could easily be dropped in and would explain a bit more about one of the characters there, and how they get into the psychological state they do by the time of the rescue.

It would make no sense without having read The Renegat, though: why is this person in charge? What are they trying to do, other than "get home"? Who's shooting at the ship? (Well, even if you've read the novel you still don't know that.) I think it makes more sense to look at it the other way round: would you be missing significant information if you'd read The Renegat but not this addendum? And I have to say, no… ish. The psychology does leave one feeling slightly differently about this character… but it's filling in some detail in a way that raises no great surprises, and it's not wildly different from the way I'd imagined this incident must have gone. Also, although it's sold as a "novella", by Hugo standards this is a long novelette at less than 17,000 words, and paying publisher's prices for something that really belongs as part of a short story collection may offend the fair-minded.

I do not have to contend with editorial and business decisions, but had I had the arranging of it, I'd have put this into Tne Renegat and then split that into two more-normally-sized books.