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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Fantasy and SF novels have to do a lot more than mysteries do -- not just setting up plots and characters, but entire worlds, societies, and laws of nature -- so it makes sense that they'd be longer.

The shorter SF books of Ye Olde Days were just trying to ape other genres' lengths without thinking about what really made sense, with the result being that the books were all way too short and felt like plot outlines in book form and had to mostly drop characterization anyway.

The mysteries I have that are set overseas but intended for American and l'anglospheric audiences are not any longer than the ones set in countries the average reader can be expected to be familiar with. The ones set in Botswana are actually kind of short.

As I recall, Janwillem van de Wetering's [1] Grijpstra and de Gier books used canned footnotes explaining the ranks used by the Dutch and I think McClure just assumed anyone who wanted to read about South African cops would pick up on the peculiarites of Apartheid South Africa's legal system on the fly.

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

Huh. There's a Dutch TV adaptation of the Grijpstra and de Gier books. I wonder if it is any good?

And when I read a Peter Hamilton cluster of bus-crushers, I am never struck by how the story needed 1600 pages for world-building and characterization but rather by the all-consuming mystery of when the plot is going to show up.

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.

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

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

"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.

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

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?

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

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.

There's nothing inherently wrong with an infodump - conan doyle's mysteries are generally full of them, the second half of any given christie novel is just one long prolonged infodump. And christie usually cheats and solves the mystery with an annoying asspull anyway.

From James: And when I read a Peter Hamilton cluster of bus-crushers

Those must be very big books.

As for info-dumps, Kim Stanley Robinson (who should know) said something to the effect that there's nothing wrong with lectures as long as they're good lectures.

Edited 2008-12-28 20:06 (UTC)

Kate Nepveu had a nice analysis on the Tor blog of why the opening infodump in Lord of the Rings works, even though it's an infodump. If you must have an infodump, you could do worse than follow Tolkien's technique. I'm looking forward to reading what she says about the Council of Elrond, which is the infodump that I have trouble making it through.

I recall the most utterly boring infodump I've ever seen was in some novel that was hailed as a masterpiece of transhumanist literature. It followed in detail the creation of one if the main characters, an AI, with a detailed explanation of the software processes involved. It took up something like fifty+ pages and was about as exciting as reading a software manual

I barely stuck around to see the extinction of humanity, and decided not to read the section where everyone gets stuffed into a coffee can and launched into interstellar space, because I knew THAT would probably involve a hundred pages of mind-numbing exposition.

I think that right there is a difference between mysteries and sf/fantasy: mysteries don't need to spend fifty pages detailing the birth of the hero, or another fifty describing how a police officer's gun works. If they did, that genre might be in as much trouble as sf and fantasy are.

Is it scary that I'm thinking "I know which greg Egan you mean"?

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.

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.

That's a weird example to use, because it could have a great deal of significance later on. I seem to vaguely recall something along those lines where the protagonist was, um, forcibly conceived, and many years later while pursuing a similar case, found out that the supposed criminal he was investigating was his father.

So, I'm curious. What did you think the author meant to imply by including all those pages and pages? Imho, the author conveyed a great deal of relevant information. I'm also guessing that you don't know a great deal about programming languages.

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Not very. The late eighties (iirc) movie was better. If you're looking for more Dutch police action, Nicholas Freeling's Van der Valk novels are quite nice.

Are the similarities within the set of books about Dutch cops strong enough to treat them as a subgenre?

One thing I liked about van de Wetering's books is that the cops don't see themselves as a caste apart, a small group of worthies in a constant state of siege from stupid civilians and nefarious criminals (ISTR that the old fellow who ran the police unit spent WWII in a Nazi prison and as a consequence was not keen on sending people to jail if there were workable alternatives).

I liked something from van de Wetering's background that never made it into the books as far as I recall: the fact that at least at one point in recent history it was possible to get drafted into the Dutch police (or more exactly, you could opt to perform your manditory N years of public service as a cop).

Well, the Freeling books are somewhat older and depict a very different Holland: post-war, small, poor, hidebound and conservative, while van de Wetering is from the post-sixties watershed. Also, Freeling is of course an outsider looking into Dutch society which also shows in the books.

Nonsense! Writers like Vance, Schmitz Gibson and Farmer were able to give plenty of exotic detail, world building and characterization in reasonable lengths WITHOUT having to spend dozens, even hundreds of pages in wasteful, boring exposition. Currently writers like Brust, Bujold, Butcher and McKillip are able to do so, so arguing its a necessity is nothing more than an apologia for publishers who won't put editors to proper use.

The Vance that I've read (the Dying Earth books/collections, and the Demon Princes) don't have any characters, just archetypes. I despise McKillip's novels that I've read. Brust's long works (The Phoenix Guards et. seq.) are his best, and his recent Vlad books have been disappointingly light on story. Bujold and Butcher both write medium-length fiction, significantly longer than those old-style SF books.

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.

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