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

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Mmmph. Checking my copy(assuming we are talking about the same book), the material you are objecting to runs from page five to at most page twenty-seven. More probably, from page five, to pages ten to fourteen. That's not fifty+ pages, your original claim. It's more like six to ten pages.

The point of this discourse, imho, was to show how certain processes such life, consciousness, etc, all share the same type of form, and that form happens to be ubiquitous in nature. Which was reflected in the programming language and the birth of the protagonist.

You missed a few funny bits, btw. Did you get to the part where Inoshiro is scared to death of an empty can of Coke, with it's potential for 'meme parasitation'? To the point where he's going to melt it down?

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Page five to twenty-seven? Twenty-three freaking pages? Geez, that's what, 1/14th of an entire old-school SF novel? That was 23 pages of reading time that bastard stole from me, that I am NEVER going to get back, all in the service of a hoary SF discourse that needed two pages, max.

I confess I don't remember the "memetic parasitation" scene; it was a long time ago, and I've read a lot of more interesting things since then.