First, the pleasures of reading a short novel versus a honking big brick of a novel are different. The short novel provides a couple of evenings of entertainment; the honking big brick provides an extended escape from the mundane world into the world of the book, which means the longer the story, the longer you can escape into the book's world.
Yes, I know, all novels are escapist in one sense. But the kind of escapist entertainment being sought by someone who prefers 200 page novels is I think very different in emphasis from the kind of escapism being sought by someone who prefers 800+ page novels. One is oriented more toward a brief, contained diversion, the other toward getting away from the world and its cares for as long as possible.
Another genre that tends to produce very long novels is the historical novel, whether mainstream or within a genre. For instance, in the romance section, even with the books spine out, you can instantly tell the difference between the thick brick historical romances and the thin little contemporary romances.
The historical trend in SF seems to be away from providing almost exclusively short contained little packages of entertainment to providing more long term immersion in other worlds. Right now you're still getting a mix of the two, but with more and more longer novels and continued multipart stories over time. Fantasy, at least since Tolkien, has been almost exclusively about providing lengthy immersion over several books in another world. Mysteries, OTOH, have continued to be focused around providing brief contained diversions.
I guess this means the audience for mysteries and fantasy are staying relatively stable, while the audience for SF is transitioning from one that prefers contained packet entertainments to one that prefers total immersion entertainments.
What that means about how the audience is changing, I'm not sure, but it's not exclusively gender related, although I think fantasies are read by women more so than mysteries. Look at an almost exclusively male form of entertainment, the videogame - the difference between role playing games and FPS games is becoming less and less distinct, but you can still tell them apart by looking at how long it takes to play through the entire game - a RPG like Fallout 3 or Oblivion can take 200 hours or longer to finish, while your typical FPS game can be finished in about 20 or 40 hours of playing.
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First, the pleasures of reading a short novel versus a honking big brick of a novel are different. The short novel provides a couple of evenings of entertainment; the honking big brick provides an extended escape from the mundane world into the world of the book, which means the longer the story, the longer you can escape into the book's world.
Yes, I know, all novels are escapist in one sense. But the kind of escapist entertainment being sought by someone who prefers 200 page novels is I think very different in emphasis from the kind of escapism being sought by someone who prefers 800+ page novels. One is oriented more toward a brief, contained diversion, the other toward getting away from the world and its cares for as long as possible.
Another genre that tends to produce very long novels is the historical novel, whether mainstream or within a genre. For instance, in the romance section, even with the books spine out, you can instantly tell the difference between the thick brick historical romances and the thin little contemporary romances.
The historical trend in SF seems to be away from providing almost exclusively short contained little packages of entertainment to providing more long term immersion in other worlds. Right now you're still getting a mix of the two, but with more and more longer novels and continued multipart stories over time. Fantasy, at least since Tolkien, has been almost exclusively about providing lengthy immersion over several books in another world. Mysteries, OTOH, have continued to be focused around providing brief contained diversions.
I guess this means the audience for mysteries and fantasy are staying relatively stable, while the audience for SF is transitioning from one that prefers contained packet entertainments to one that prefers total immersion entertainments.
What that means about how the audience is changing, I'm not sure, but it's not exclusively gender related, although I think fantasies are read by women more so than mysteries. Look at an almost exclusively male form of entertainment, the videogame - the difference between role playing games and FPS games is becoming less and less distinct, but you can still tell them apart by looking at how long it takes to play through the entire game - a RPG like Fallout 3 or Oblivion can take 200 hours or longer to finish, while your typical FPS game can be finished in about 20 or 40 hours of playing.