#i mean sure vulcans are fine with painstakingly combing through historical artifacts to contribute to a better understanding of culture

[spiders-notagain]

Vulcans dont have novels; a headcanon

As a planet with few trees, Vulcans had less paper. (Also many of the techniques humans use to make paper use water and Vulcans had less of that too) That doesnt mean they had NO paper. After all they did have some small forests. Aside from writing things on clay and sand tablets, ancient vulcans experimented with several different materials for paper. But eventually settled on two main products. A kind of regional variant of cotton and a type of relatively common brittle rock.

Thus Vulcans didnt really have alot of books and relied primarily on paintings and tablets to store information for future use or even future generations. Paper (and especially books) were seen as a certain sign of luxury and only used for important documents. The common people passed down memories and fictional stories by word of mouth/mind melds through generational lines. And it was very common for clans/families to have important traditional stories. In some families, being given the story was an important rite of passage.

There was alot of poetry though as it could be stored on single sheets of paper or immortalized in tablets. Even for the common people, learning about different types of poetry was a sign you were well educated. As well as other types of art forms but especially the rare written word.

Sometime before the nuclear wars they developed technology that allowed them to store large amounts of information digitally. All but removing the reliance on books to store important data. With that freed up, books were more accesible to the common people. Or rather what we would call middle class. Poor people could still not afford books.

And thus the return of the short story and the long short story/novelette. They were about the same product in thickness, except the short story is usually cut in half lengthwise. While there was a standard size, some bookmakers elected to use custom cuts.

A bookmaker did two things, binding and printing. First by hand, later when a simplified font was created, with letterpressing. Except when they were making journals in which case they would leave it blank.

Empowered by their new avenue for creativity, many simply wrote down the stories that had been passed down to them, some wrote fanfiction of their generational stories that nobody in their family wanted to pass down, some wrote brand new stories, some wrote journal entries about their own life or just detailed their family tree, and some wrote fanfiction of their favorite plays.

Most of the stories written in these formats did not have the 3 act story structure and since they had no audience to pander to, personal stories were self indulgent. They were often left open ended or devoid of context. (And some of it was literally just smut with plot)

Really savvy authors would use this gap of information to their advantage the way some human authors do. Others would make historians cry because for example their story is about this guy being enemies with this other guy because he stole his sister from a respectable family so the girls brother is trying to hunt them down and try and figure out some things about the guy but the author never mentions any of that in the story so you dont find out her name till halfway through, theyre running from an unseen enemy, and you dont even get to find out what happens after the brother finally catches them because the story was about the culture clash they experience being on different social statuses and also the weighing of love vs responsibility, and also kind of a rebuttal to a play the author saw 4 years ago that included a subplot that romanticized young love and they thought the premise was stupid. So they imagine both characters dying at the end at the hands of the brother and none of the aforementioned themes are immediately obvious anyway because their writing style was super poetic and flowy and they handled all their mature themes very subtly.

There wasnt really a book industry for published literature nor libraries as we think of our local ones. That did not mean they didnt have long stories. The closest equivalent were plays or interpretive dance which were around for millions of years, even beyond the earliest days of paper. (A handful of classic dance styles were preserved to modern day, not quite as fervently as martial art styles but respected for the cultural value they possess) They were revered as one of the most popular forms of entertainment and since many saw them as a kind of treat, they were drawn out to increase enjoyment with some of the better ones being 4-5 hours long.

They did eventually start adopting a sort of publishing industry. The earliest version of it was during post-reformation when they improved society as a whole. And the technology they used to store information digitally was more readily available than books. (Partially because pre-reformation it was considered a war technology) So the first industry was scientific articles. Particularly after they started going to space and really started learning things.

Although a few vulcan writers had experimented with common fantastical (re: genres that feature impossibilities) human book genres like sci fi and fantasy and to some extent horror, they didn't actually really delve into it till they met humans and those kinds of book genres became normalized throughout the federation.

Well thats not entirely true. Vulcans did have horror in the form of ghost stories. Not that they always included ghosts but urban legends, scary campfire stories and the kind of stories you tell your kids to scare them into behaving. Those had all been around for centuries but no one really wrote them down before the popularity of books so theres a lot of missing context from the various stories that just mutated or merged with other stories over time. Urban legend history is a category almost no vulcan wants to get into. Not necessarily because its full of the distasteful fantastical but because of how 'pointless' and low-payoff it is to comb through artifacts and old texts for hints about what might be relevant to that one story about the mystery le'matya where some texts only describe it as a shadowy unerving figure that doesnt do anything but seriously freak you out. But some texts describe it as three times the size of a normal le'matya and having knife sharp claws and pure white eyes and can kill a grown man with two slashes. One for the neck and one for the poison. And then while youre paralyzed it eats your guts out. If you hear it coming, it means youre already a goner.

But like, that shares a bunch of characteristics with this other nightmare creature so they think at some point someone merged the two stories to make it scarier. But they're not sure because most of the texts they have concerning the terrifying deadly le'matya were written before the ones they have about the mysterious unnerving le'matya. Except there's also this one poem that could be about the other nightmare creature or it could be about the deadly le'matya because the contents sorta fit both. But it does have an extra detail that they used to time date it so if they could figure out which one the poem is about then it would solve that earlier question.