The Limitations of Novellas: Failed Dystopias

• Ayman Almomani

This article discusses how effective the novella form might be for the dystopian genre. Developing the idea of a “textual space” from Patricia McManus’s Critical Theory and Dystopia, I outline three qualities particular to dystopias: guards, gaps, and a dystopic story world. Novel-length dystopias provide vast textual spaces for the reader to actively interpret the fictional world, as I demonstrate through two case studies: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. In contrast, the gaps and guards in novella-length examples of dystopia differ due to the restricted space available in the form. To make my case I use two novella-length texts often included in the dystopian canon: E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Beyond a comment on length, I show how the dystopian genre works through textual space and how the lack of space in novellas cannot produce the same effects.