I know I've asked this before

[james_davis_nicoll]

I was reading a mystery last night that turned out to be a lot shorter than I expected because the manuscript pages were single-sided. The book turned out to be less than 280 pages long. Despite this lack of length the author managed to fit an entire plot between the two covers.

It's comparatively rare for an SF novel to be that short and nearly unheard of for a fantasy novel to be under 300 pages. I've also never seen a mystery that came close to the brick-like dimensions of many F&SF novels. There seems to be a hard limit of about 400 pages over in mystery.

Mysteries also eschew the cliff-hanger ending and the book-fragment approach, which I greatly appreciate.

Does it make sense to ask why modern [1] F&SF readers appear to prefer longer lengths than do mystery readers?

1: I have a number of older books upstairs that come in under 200 pages and like the mystery they all have complete plots.

Comments

[maruad.livejournal.com]

"1: He died last summer and I managed to miss the news."

I am sorry to hear he died. He was one of my favourite mystery writers.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Well, see, there you are: Mysteries are still using clunky footnotes, because they haven't evolved the sophisticated in-cluing apparatuses of SF.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

"Profits will be higher even if sales are lower due to the way production and distribution costs scale"?

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Well, clearly SOME books are unnecessarily thick. It's probably safe to cut out 800 pages out of any Tad Williams book, for instance. But as a general rule, I'd rather have one of the 400-600 page books of modernity than the 200 page books of olden days. Rendezvous With Rama is a nice skeleton of a story, but it's hardly a full book.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I prefer the shorter novel with faster pacing though years ago I enjoyed the longer novels. I wonder how much of that has to do with my no longer having the time to spend reading enormous wordy tomes (you would think retirement would give a person more leisure)? Nowadays I look for bran flakes when I need bulk rather than a trilogy.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I always figured the increasing length of books was linked to steadily rising prices: readers were subconsciously trying to maintain a certain ratio of pounds of words per dollar in order to avoid feeling ripped off.

However, that fails to account for the differential between genres.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

(judging by the thickness of the mass market paperbacks, though that isn't always a reliable guide).

I was in Borders recently, and they had 5 copies of the trade paperback omnibus of Cook's early Black Company novels (from Tor), and one copy was literally twice as thick as the others. Same ISBN, same number of pages, but twice as thick.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Sophisticated methods like stopping the plot dead to blather on about the details of a made-up FTL drive and the super-duper weapons the FTL-capabable ships cart around?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

"We need to fit at least three copies per rack pocket."

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Why would this affect F&SF more than other genres, though?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I have this dim memory from the 1980s that there's a magic book length that determines the boundary between when you can fit as many or more books faced as spine out but I think that puts a cap on length rather than encouraging longer books.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The second is that once the mystery you started the story with is uncovered, the story is over.

I read something in the last year where this wasn't true. The last third of the book was spent dealing with the consequences of learning who did it. I thought it was an interesting approach (but obviously not so interesting that I can remember the name of the book).

[almeda.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, Tanith Lee's Sabella is a compellingly-crafted jewel, and I can't imagine it any longer without ruining it.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

In my experience (I have NOT read all of them!), they tend not to be complete plots in the way James means. They're installations of a series.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

There just appear to be natural lengths for different kinds of story.

Or for different reading-purposes. If what you want out of a book is a snappy plot that resolves itself, shorter lengths work. If what the reader wants, though, is to immerse in a vibrantly-detailed world in great depth and wallow around in it while characters do stuff, doorstops definitely make sense.

[scalzi.livejournal.com]

It's why I inserted the wiggle word "tend." There are also SF novels that go long beyond 110,000 words, Peter Hamilton's immediately comes to mind. However, once again, in general there does seem to be a publisher formula for length, which has SF as "x" and fantasy as "x + 20 to 40 percent."

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I'd probably have to say that'd feel like two separate stories to me.

Of course, on reflection, things are also complicated by stories that use McGuffins, albiet those tend to simply play around with where the true 'mystery' starts.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Buyers, not readers. Publishers don't give a fresh dog turd about whether the book actually gets read, just purchased.

How many Harry Potter fans got multiple copies of "Beadle the Bard" this holiday season from friends and family who think they would like it. (I saw someone yesterday in a Borders and Nobel returning four copies of B the B.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Faced vs. spine is a shelf thing; in rack pockets everything is faced. But there's a fairly standard size, and it turns out you don't want to get most of your authors above the length where fewer than "n" books fit in a pocket (I think n=3, but I'm less certain on the number than on the basic concept).

I'm still remembering sf/fantasy authors being *cut back* on acceptable lengths a while ago, after the initial growth through the 80s.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Multiple plot threads?

It can't be the only reason, since Gregory McDonald kept two in parallel in his (rather short length) Fletch mysteries, while Philip K. Dick tended to use three plot threads, sort of like the Love Boat, in his (rather short length) SF. But it might be a contributing factor.

[kayshapero]

There ARE time when a judicious use of [infodump] [/infodump] would be appreciated...

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I have to reluctantly admit that I have an info dump chapter in the afor mentioned novel. It's there because a) it's word count, b) it's at a point in pacing where slack 'time' works, and c) the test readers actually *insist* that it should stay. They like that chapter. I don't know why. It's breaking almost all the rules about not doing info dumps, and I'd rather cut the chapter all together, but I was also taught to listen to the readers.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

SF readers are probably more likely to be the sort person who would calculate the cost per page in the first place. I remember Robert Jordan fans complaining that Crown of Swords and Path of Daggers were significantly shorter than previous volumes (WoT wordcounts).

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Well, I know that I'd buy more fantasy and SF if the publishers/authors tried to keep a median length below 300 pages. I hate having to read what essentially would be the length of an entire PKD novel without having the plot show up decently but instead having to suffer how the author spends a hundred pages introducing too many characters and providing too many infodumps.

And seriously, people talk about how it is because of all the world building which has to fit in. If that were true, wouldn't the world building be better?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

One positions one's self in a market that has seven percent of the marketplace differently than one positions one's self in markets that have more than twenty percent (crime) or nearly fifty percent (romance) of the marketplace.