This essay will situate the rise of the novella to prominence in contemporary literary culture as a media-theoretical problem. The novella has emerged as a premier global form of contemporary literature. The subject of popular writing workshops and major reprint series by both trade and experimental publishing houses, it caters to a desire for novelness in a moment of compressed time for writers and readers alike. But what is it about the form that drives our love of it? How does the relationship between time and technology structure its compelling status as well as the narratives of its history chosen to contextualize it? My examples, from the crucial subgenre of the SF novella as well as its experimental counterparts, will suggest that the mechanics of narrative length and ambition have been mobilized by contemporary writers and readers alike through the novella to reflexively recast relationships between fiction and technology.