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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Although there are repeated claims in this thread that fantasy worlds require long passages of world-building prose, the generic nature of most fantasy worlds and the wide understanding of the tropes and patterns by the readership allows that to be skipped, if the writer wishes. Consider Operation Chaos (a fix-up, yes, but also a good novel), which does everything in less than 1000 pages and three volumes. Submitted today, an editor would see it as an outline and suggest that it should include yards of exploration and exposition, a lot of sex for the werewolf, and a tour of Hell. In three volumes.

Formerly, YA fantasy was the last bastion of this kind of self-discipline, and a book like Dealing with Dragons still provides great satisfaction and a complete story for the reader.

Edited 2008-12-28 18:35 (UTC)

The Operation Chaos I immediately think of (Poul Anderson) was essentially pre-genre fantasy, though. Which means your arguments about generic nature and wide understanding of tropes and patterns don't apply to it. (1971 fix-up of stories mostly from the lat 1950s, looks like).

I used Operation Chaos because it makes the point more strongly.

The material Anderson drew on was not explained to the reader; he assumed that it was widely known and understood. So is 99% of the material that gets explained with such painstaking detail in the present age's doorstop. For some reason, the reader is no longer trusted to know anything (or to infer anything) and far too much paper is wasted on repetitive exposition and detailing. Writers of craft fantasy, the only case where we might need explication, feel obliged to deliver textbooks on whatever their shtick for the story is, instead of settling for a few key facts and getting on with the plot and characterization.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Okay, then, here's the challenge: why don't you write something that conveys the same information in as little space that is not an infodump? Don't tell me, show me.

The point here is that there are different kinds of infodumps. You want to work in the fact that magic is operant to an audience that's already familiar with the trope, that's one thing. Depicting a highly idiosyncratic, historically contingent series of events is quite another.

As I said, I'm willing to be proven wrong, just show me how you would do it.

Operation Chaos also is what I think of as a good example of what I call the "Cop's Gun/Classic Trek" principle of world building: if you refer to something, don't explain it unless it's absolutely crucial to the plot. I.e: cops in mysteries don't stop to explain to the audience how their guns work.

I have to wonder, if that one transhumanist writer was writing a mystery, if he would feel compelled to take fifty pages to describe how a gun works from first priciples: "Gunpowder is a mixture of..."

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.

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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Anderson

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