Penric's Mission by Lois McMaster Bujold

[lightreads]

Penric’s Mission

2/5. Continuing adventures of Penric and his accidental demon. It would have been a 3/5 for pleasantly diverting Bujoldian adventure, but then. My dudes. You can not write the first third of a novel, half-assedly resolve about 20% of the conflict and none of the important interpersonal questions, and then just end it with everyone literally marching off into uncertainty and call it a novella. And it’s not one of those artistic non-endings, either. It’s a screamingly obvious “whoops this grew a novel but I donwanna write it but I do want to sell some books sooooo….”

Comments

[castiron]

This exactly. Mission doesn't stand alone well enough to be a novella. Add Mira's Last Dance, and then it works; Mira's Last Dance has some unresolved threads at the end, but I didn't feel like I was missing the last part of the story.

I've been buying the print versions of the Penric books from Subterranean Press, but this one I skipped because it doesn't stand on its own. Maybe someday someone will release a 3-in-1 print volume of Mission, Mira's Last Dance, and Prisoner of Limnos, and then I'll shell out the money.

[lightreads]

I am so far behind on this, I didn't even remember that Prisoner exists. And I think there's a new one coming soon? Idk, I hope these are making her money or whatever, because otherwise it's kind of frustrating.

[castiron]

Prisoner is the most recent one that I'm aware of; there's also Penric's Fox, which came out before Prisoner but is set between Shaman and Mission. Fox is a standalone story.

I like Penric and Desdemona and the world, but I do think some of these stories would do better beefed up into full-length novels.