This is small of me, but I can’t help myself. Someone says they’re obsessed with the TV version of Game of Thrones—or The Expanse, Altered Carbon, The Shannara Chronicles, The 100, The Magicians, whatever. I tilt my head forward, peer over my nonexistent glasses, and inquire, with what I like to imagine is a sparkle of menace: Yes, but have you read the books?

The hiccup of guilt is so pure. Of course they have not. Of course they would like to. The corners of their eyes crinkle with regret.

Here’s the twist: In this moment I love them. Their shame is beautiful. For them, literacy—having read the source material—endures as an ideal, something to strive for. More miraculous still, they feel this way about works of science fiction and fantasy. Perhaps they recognize the sacredness of these texts and wish they were better credentialed in contemporary nerddom.

Relax, lovelies. Not everyone can read everything, and there’s something uniquely daunting about speculative fiction. As a genre, it’s known to sprawl. Contemporary page-to-screen megaseries like Game of Thrones and Shannara haven’t helped in this regard, serving only to fortify the Tolkien-powered reputation for density and interminability. You know: maps in the front, appendices in the back, tiny type smushed in the ten-thousand-billion-page middle, all in the service of quests within quests full of unpronounceable place-names and esoteric magicks that, unless elaborately flashcarded, have no chance of sticking in the feeble memory. Who or what is H’m-gh’la again?

So you’d be forgiven for thinking that these convoluted encyclopediae fantastica are the only thing the genre has to offer. They are not. If you’re new to speculative fiction, or just too exhausted to commit to seven volumes of anything besides Harry Potter, have hope. Because as long as there have been hobbitses, there have been hobbit-size stories: tales, as they’re sometimes called, “of medium length.” I’m speaking of sci-fi/fantasy novellas, a classic form that’s only recently emerged as the genre’s most vibrant—and, in the crazed modern era, readable—option.

Four years ago, Tor.com, the spec-fic magazine put out by Tor Books, launched an imprint “dedicated to publishing the best novellas and short novels from emerging writers as well as established authors.” To which not a few observers responded: Shwhat? Novellas? These in-betweener fictions, typically in the realm of 100 pages (17,500 to 40,000 words, say authorities), have never been known to fly off bookshelves. Or to sit on them at all. Stephen King once famously called the form “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic,” so unstable as to be unmarketable.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. Sci-fi can claim as its own a number of bestselling classics of medium length, from The Stepford Wives and The Metamorphosis to A Clockwork Orange and I Am Legend. Or, if you prefer titles closer to the genre’s pulpy roots, there’s H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which tops out at 32,548 words, and, at just 25,642, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Best Novella has been a category at the Hugos and Nebulas since the ’60s.

Even so, King wasn’t wrong. For most of their existence, SFF novellas have been trapped in monthly magazines and anthologies, where only a fringe readership could visit them (along with short stories, but those babies can also live free in dedicated collections). At least, until Tor.com Publishing came along and liberated the novella, putting slender volumes in the hands of readers everywhere. In four years, they’ve published on the order of 100 and seem to announce new ones weekly, from a catholic stable of worthy practitioners. In 2016, capitalizing on the surge, Saga Press published the collected novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin. Last year, my local indie bookstore started populating a whole shelf with “Sci-Fi Novellas We Love.” All of a sudden, it was hip to be spare.

The form, after all, honors the genre: The novella traces its origins to fairytales and morality plays. Proto-fantasies, basically. In that sense, Tolkien’s world-building was never native to the genre. He simply blew up the balloon.