james_davis_nicoll | I know I've asked this before

I know I've asked this before

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.

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I generally don't read them and since I don't buy books I wouldn't know where they get shelved in the bookstores. I get ARCs from publishers, say to myself, "Oh that belongs to [other reviewer]," and set them aside for giving away. I will say that most of them that I do get come from SF/F publishers, have fantasy as their category, and are short. I know there's a good bit of urban/paranormal fantasy from publishers like Kensington and Dorchester that I'm simply unaware of because I'm not on their distribution lists (which is fine by me).

Here's my cynical view.

Publishers need a certain ratio of words to income as part of a spreadsheet to justify themselves to their investors. However, new authors are a chancy thing- more often then not they won't pan out. So to their eyes it is safer to have one author writing 5X words, than 5 authors writing X words.

Also (and more seriously), advertising a novel, persuading both the book sellers and the public to buy it, is a non-trivial expense. By having fewer, larger novels the publishers and sellers can concentrate their advertising dollars on a few, focused ad campaigns.

The upshot of this trend of course will be a single book published each year, approximately the size of the entire world-book encyclopedia set.

In Operation Chaos, Anderson's infodumps become longer the later the date in composition. The bridgework between the original stories is especially very clunky. Here's Anderson on the ~~Communist~~ Johannine threat (a Satanically inspired counterculture/faith):

In particular, we looked for the Johannine Church to be generally discredited and fade away. True, its adherents had fought the Caliph too, had in fact taken a leading role in the resistance movements in the occupied countries. But wasn't its challenge to the older creeds -- to the whole basis of Western society -- what had split and weakened our civilization in the first place? Wasn't its example what had stimulated the rise of the lunatic Caliphist ideology in the Middle East?

I now know better than to expect reasonableness in human affairs.

Contrary to popular impression, the threat didn't appear suddenly. A few men warned against it from a the beginning. They pointed out how the Johnnies had become dominant in the politics of more than one nation, which thereupon stopped being especially friendly to us, and how in spite of this they were making converts throughout America. But most of us hardly listened. We were too busy repairing war damage, public and personal. We considered those who sounded the alarm to be reactionaries and would-be tyrants (which some, perhaps, were). The Johannine theology might be nuts, we said, but didn't the First Amendment guarantee its right to be preached? The Petrine churches might be in trouble, but wasn't that their problem? And really, in our scientific day and age, to talk about subtle, pervasive dangers in a religious philosophical system... a system which emphasized peacefulness almost as strongly as the Quakers, which exalted the commandment to love thy neighbor above every other-well, it just might be that our materialistic secular society and our ritualistic faiths would benefit from a touch of what the Johnnies advocated.

So the movement and its influence grew. And then the activist phase began: and somehow orderly demonstrations were oftener and oftener turning into riots, and wildcat strikes were becoming more and more common over issues that made less and less sense, and student agitation was paralyzing campus after campus, and person after otherwise intelligent person was talking about the need to tear down a hopelessly corrupt order of things so that the Paradise of Love could be built on the ruins... and the majority of us, that eternal majority which wants nothing except to be left alone to cultivate its individual gardens, wondered how the country could have started to disintegrate overnight.

Brother, it did not happen overnight. Not even over Walpurgis Night.

Kind of verbose, no? Ham-handed; telling not showing; and I thought *I* had an ax. But here's the introductory paragraph to the first Operation Chaos story:

It was sheer bad luck, or maybe their Intelligence was better than we knew, but the last raid, breaking past our air defenses, had spattered the Weather Corps tent from here to hell. Supply problems being what they were, we couldn't get replacements for weeks, and meanwhile the enemy had control of the weather. Our only surviving Corpsman, Major Jackson, had to save what was left of his elementals to protect us against thunderbolts; so otherwise we took whatever they chose to throw at us. At the moment, it was rain.

In the first nine paragraphs, there are eight new analogies but only one explanation, which in fact is tangential.

Anderson is far from the only author who became more Clavin-esque with time; but many SF authors became Clavin-esque at around the same time. I'm not sure why. But I think those authors formed the model for many subsequent SF writers. (The roots of the problem in fantasy are different, I think.)

eee. It's a wonderful premise and the earliest stories are classic Unknown Magazine fare, but the latter parts have pages and pages of infodump, including biographies of Bolyai and Lobachevsky.

Yeah, that's what he explained to me, too. Maybe slightly different details, but the pressures--both for lengthening and for capping the length--are dictated by the booksellers rather than the publishers.

The next question is, why did these publishing demands work out so differently in f/sf than in mystery? Why are mystery novels thinner than f/sf? It's not just that f/sf has *room* for doorstop novels and trilogies; I think the average f/sf book is substantially thicker than the average mystery novel.

I will also note that there are more non-series f&sf novels published than non-series mystery--pretty much every genre mystery novel is assumed to be part of a series. Contrawise, as James pointed out, mysteries are at least always complete stories rather than "whoops, reached the word count, go buy the next two novels to see how it turns out".

(I note that romance novels--outside of the disposable novels like Harlequin--have also gotten physically bigger during the period of the growth of f/sf novels.)

s/Damon Runyon/Dashiell Hammet/? (Runyon wrote mostly short-from, but I can't see calling it either 'terse' or 'gritty')

I felt the same way with Pangborn's _Davy_. What there was of it was very good, but I felt he had to cut out so much to fit into a publishable length.

I always read Sayers for the banter and erudition. The mystery part just keeps getting in the way. (Dog collar? Seriously?).

is interesting for all sorts of reasons, good and bad.

OC is four novellas, and three of the four are ambitious and flawed in different ways. It's not a great book, but it's a very interesting one just from the how-does-the-sausage-happen POV.

Frex, the infodumps in part IV are indeed awful, as is the ham-handed attempt to connect the bad guys to Current Events. (Anderson caught a bad case of dirtyfuckinghippyphobia right around the time he wrote this... in fact, this might be the first appearance of it in his writing.) (Funny coincidence: right around this time, c. 1969, the Nixon administration was coordinating a huge, illegal, covert domestic surveillance program to try to find the non-existent connections between domestic dissidents, war protesters, and ***The Communist Menace***. Its name: Operation Chaos.) And parts of that story are even worse than you've shown. And yet, there are some powerful images -- mostly the ones where he shows only a single piece of something, or just alludes.

Clavinism, first off-the-cuff guess: reaction to the New Wave. Good writing is what those weird guys are doing; it's all literary and has girl cooties now. Let's go back to cardboard characters, simple plots with wicked villains, and 'as you know, Bob' explication.

Doug M.

Somewhere between page 600 and 1000 of the first book, these days. ;-)

That's simply not true at all. A really good writer can work with economy of expression and have good work in less words. I tend to view having to use more words to put the same thing across that you could in fewer as a sign of 'throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks' writing.

I like my books like my men, usually on the bed but with occasional quickies in the bathroom?

ergh.

Who was it who wrote "I am sorry this letter is so long, I did not have time to make it shorter"?

Could some of the growth in book length be due to technology. Manuscripts were once delivered to the publisher in ink on paper format. Actual human beings had to convert it into a printable form, probably several times. This makes the act of including something in the final product a result of at least one conscious choice. I think these days works are submitted electronically so each exclusion requires a conscious choice.

That might be true if it was Some Random Kewl Programming Language(TM). But it's not. While I disagree with some of the points presented, at least there is a method to the madness. Just ask yourself why it's not something like Lisp, for example. If that seems to be a nonsensical question, then this might be a case of the author assuming too much from his audience. Just as an earlier generation of general readers might have been flummoxed by Hohman transfer orbits, perigee, Lagrange points, etc, so might the generation of today might be understandably confused about the design principles behind programming languages.

Maybe this has to do with the demise of the pulps and the short story? So-called, at least. So in one sense, the writers are getting better, or at least the slush pile isn't quite so dreadfully bad. But they also don't have much practice at economizing, nor have felt the need to do so as keenly as in the days of yore.

Then too, the charge being leveled of 'telling, not showing' has to explain why one is better than the other in specific categories. Yes, infodumps can be clunky, and often are, and often overused. But consider what they replace (sometimes.) For Anderson to show the history of Johannine influence in politics while keeping the word count essentially the same strikes me as a fairly difficult task. Iow, that clunky infodump replaces what would arguably be several stories worth of material in and of themselves.

I think these days works are submitted electronically so each exclusion requires a conscious choice.

Your think is wrong.

Publishers will take in an electronically-delivered MS ... if it's one they already issued a contract for. (My UK editors all gleefully brandished Sony Readers at me when I dropped in on them last month: saves them lugging briefcases full of dead tree betwixt home and office if they want reading matter on the commuter run.) And they require it, these days, when it's time to send it to the (external, third-party, outsourced) typesetting department.

But unsolicited submissions are an entirely different matter. If you let folks submit electronically, then half of them -- the half who don't read your submission guidelines or don't think they apply to *them* -- will spam the entire industry senseless with megabyte sized email attachments.

PS: This is not to say that word processors haven't made it easier to write longer books, and indeed TNH has opined that this factor alone caused the average slush submission to grow by 10% during the 1980s. But it's not a primary cause.

Edited 2008-12-29 17:09 (UTC)

I feel obligated to point out that while classic mysteries continue to be short, many thrillers generally are just as long as SF/F novels: big fat paperbacks clocking in at 300-500 pages.

How does that affect the analysis?

Not long ago I happened upon a 1970 copy of Ellery Queen. The stories were much shorter than those that EQ is printing now -- and they were much better, too.

It's a rare magazine story these days that I don't condense by reading until I get bored before reading the last page. Sometimes that means first paragraph and last page! If my sister and my spouse didn't also read them, I'd stop subscribing to EQ and Alfred Hitchcock. (I also no longer notice any difference between the two magazines.)

I read every last one of the old stories all the way through, even though there were more of them to the issue.

And to further confuse things, Asimov's only accepts short stories in hardcopy manuscript form.

Though that may be because Asimov's is possibly run by idiots more than anything else.

While it may be true that the dying earth characters are archetypes, at least you get the archetypes dealt with in a few pages. In modern fantasy nobvels, it would take several hundred pages to get to the point that the characters are the same old archetypes. For example: Cersei in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Disagree. Often (not always, but often) a clunky infodump shows a soft spot in the structure of the story.

I'd say that's the case here -- the whole "Johannine Church as COMMUNISM, with a touch of counterculture thrown in" is not well thought out.

Perhaps more to the point, look at the other example Carlos gave. Same author, same series, but he managed to "show" very well without any infodumping whatsoever. And fast -- that's a single paragraph. A very dense one.

Anderson even seems to be vaguely aware that he's committing a sticky; notice the "Brother, it didn't happen in one day". That's Anderson... what's the trope for when you're trying to spackle over something, and end up hanging a lampshade on it?

Doug M.

No, it's more important to ask "Why bother spending a huge amount of space on something so utterly boring?" This is like doing a mystery novel, and starting it out with a full chapter about the conception and birth of the protagonist.

It was a useless info dump, that needed to be whacked down to two pages at most, and a sign that the author while a credible computer scientist really needed some training in how to write a book.

Yes, but the difference with today's novels is that they only had pages of infodump, and a biography of Bolyai and Lobachevsky...and it was kept pertinent to the story.

If it had been a story done today, Bolyai and Lobachevsky would have each gotten a couple chapters, or maybe a hundred pages each. Most likely starting from their conception. Or hell, if it had been Jorden or Martin writing the book, Bolyai and Lobachevsky would have been a couple of main characters for an entire volume.

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I know I've asked this before

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Re: The way David Hartwell explained it to me ...

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Anderson

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Technology.

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I think the books in some mystery series are growing longer.

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