I'm late. This novella came out in 2015 but I'm just getting to it. In any case, this Nebula and Hugo award-winning novella packs a punch for its short length and that's why I consider it a prime example of both effective and efficient writing.
Effective:
Effective writing can be summed up as writing that simply gets its job done. For fiction writing, in particular, effectiveness can have many different facets to it. But I'll focus on just two:
- The writing gets plot and character across, i.e. the reader understands what's happening, who the character is, and so on. And...
- ...the writing flows. Drawing the reader forward, not requiring them to stop and reread sentences.
I was the only Himba on the ship, out of nearly five hundred passengers. My tribe is obsessed with innovation and technology, but it is small, private, and, as I said, we don’t like to leave Earth. We prefer to explore the universe by traveling inward, as opposed to outward. No Himba has ever gone to Oomza Uni. So me being the only one on the ship was not that surprising. However, just because something isn’t surprising doesn’t mean it’s easy to deal with.
Note the simple sentencing of the first two sentences. Each sentence begins with the subject, the noun, and the second sentence follows from the first in that Binti, the narrator, states: "I was the only Himba..." and the second sentence starts with "My tribe is..." You can intuit Himba is the tribe Binti is from and more. The rest of the paragraph further elucidates Binti's social predicament as being the only Himba aboard and how she is different from others. The character of Binti (hitting point (1) above) comes fully across in these sentences which are full of meaning yet so easy to understand (hitting on (2) above) I would have no qualm whatsoever in recommending this book to every fifth grader I came across.
Binti is a prime example of effective writing because of its subject matter, its length, and because of most readers' unfamiliarity with Himba culture. A lot of writers would not even attempt this subject matter nor this characterization simply because it requires such simple, strong, elegant sentences to get all of that across in a manner near anyone can understand; such that even people unfamiliar with the culture are suddenly familiar with it. They have to be, because her culture is key to Binti's character and to the plot.
Efficient:
This novella clocks in at 96 pages and it's complete with opening, conflict, climax and denouement. No small feat. Many people in the publishing business consider science fiction books, especially, to require longer word lengths (like a 100,000+ words) in order to fully get the concept of the sci-fi world across.
However Dr. Okorafor does this, easily, in a third of that length. That's because there is room to intuit most of her sci-fi world; considering its galactic community, other forms of intelligent life, how Earth even came to send students to Oomza Uni, how the technology developed for living "shrimp" ships and so on. But all of these ideas have been tried and tested before in the realm of science fiction (though not necessarily with Okorafor's twists). In that sense, it's wise of an author to choose tropes or sci-fi worlds and gizmos that have already been tried and tested when writing such a short piece of fiction, i.e. a novella.
In this way, there's a lot that can go unsaid, and Okorafor uses this to make her writing tight, compact and packed with a punch. Her writing wastes no words by having to travel into the periphery of details that, yes, a lot of sci-fi and fantasy readers love to gobble up, but no that's not Okorafor's intent. She intended to write a short, efficient sci-fi story and she wrote a short, efficient sci-fi story.