: Re: What is a "light novel" and how does it differ from a novella? My friend has sent me a work to critique which he hopes to make into a light novel. I've never heard of this type of story

@Murray165

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Who cares? No realy, book and story categorization is an effort doomed to failure (even though it does have uses). The main reason That categorization will fail is that stories are about people and people do not fit well in well defined boxes, and besides once you have a story that defines a category every other story in the category won't fit quite right even when an author is not trying to break categories. You are much better off with story description as adjectives are nonexclusive.

Let's give an example that I am very familiar with. These are the stories that used to be known as 'novel fantastic' before the categories split into science fiction and fantasy and then further split into space opera, cyberpunk, steampunk, high fantasy, epic fantasy, and so on and so forth ad-ridiculum. The splits are fuzzily identified by such rules as if it has spaceships or time travel it is sci-fi and if it has elves or dragons it is fantasy. Larry Niven Would beg to differ. He is a famous Science fiction author who made a serious effort to get the science right in every book he wrote but 'Rainbow Mars' Which Was written as a fantasy and included spaceships, NASA, a unicorn, and a time machine. So would Anne McCaffrey whose dragonriders of pern books which feature in addition to the aforementioned dragons features spaceships, computers, genetic engineering, orbital mechanics and time travel. We can also add Wen Spencer to the list Who in her Elfhome books has not only elves and spaceships, but she has magic and social networking, and she tops it off with dragons that teach quantum mechanics. Even Joss Whedon got into the act. His most famous category buster is Firefly which is a cross between a space opera and a western with cyberpunk and thriller influences.

There are two and only two questions that really matter: Is it a good book? Will it sell? Unfortunately the answers may differ.

Believe it or not, but this answer was inspired by this account.

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