Subject: GRIFFIN'S EGG by Michael Swanwick

From: [email-masked] (Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070)
Date: 13 Feb 92 19:15:55 GMT

GRIFFIN'S EGG by Michael Swanwick
                        A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
			 Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper

        In response to complaints about rising prices for novels--somewhere
   around US$25 for a hardback these days--and also that novels are getting too
   long and bloated, some publishers are responding by publishing novellas in
   book form at lower prices.  (Pulphouse took this a step further and is doing
   short stories in paperback at US$1.95 each.)  The first such novella I
   noticed was THE HEMINGWAY HOAX by Joe Haldeman (though it turned out that
   that had been fleshed out to novel length--about 150 pages, or 45,000
   words); now we have GRIFFIN'S EGG by Michael Swanwick.  How successful this
   trend will be is unclear.  Unit pricing has always been popular with
   readers; years ago a friend of ours had a "penny-a-page" rule for books
   which by now must have been modified to at least a penny-and-a-half.
   Perhaps realizing this, Haldeman said in his acceptance speech for the Hugo
   for Best Novella for "The Hemingway Hoax" that people had asked if they
   should buy the novel if they already had the novella and he wanted to assure
   them that the only difference between the novella version and the novel
   version was that for the novella version he had cut 15,000-20,000 words of
   explicit sex from the novel.  At any rate, whether US$16 for a 100-page book
   will be more acceptable than US$25 for a 500-page book remains to be seen.

        Now admittedly everything I've said so far is crassly commercial and
   has nothing to do with art or entertainment, which are presumably what books
   are about.  So what about the novella itself?  Set on the moon in a future
   in which mining and manufacturing are carried out on the moon to avoid
   destroying the earth's ecosphere, it seems to be about how this is
   destroying the moon.  Then a thermonuclear exchange occurs on earth and it
   seems to be a "how  will we survive in isolation" story a la Heinlein.  Then
   it shifts to bio-chemical warfare, mind-altering drugs, ....  There is just
   too much here for a novella--the plots twists are too rapid-fire.  It's
   ironic, but this would have been better as a novel.  As a novella, all the
   good ideas are just too dizzying.

        (The title is from a Vachel Lindsay poem quoted before the title page.
   It is, alas, extremely sexist and its inclusion, coupled with some of the
   events in the story, gives the story a slant that I suspect Swanwick did not
   intend.)

   %T      Griffin's Egg
   %A      Michael Swanwick
   %C      New York
   %D      January 1992
   %I      St. Martin's Press
   %O      hardback, US$15.95
   %G      ISBN 0-312-06989-8
   %P      92pp

Evelyn C. Leeper   |   +1 908 957 2070   |   att!mtgzy!ecl or [email-masked]