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

[papersky.livejournal.com]

My fantasies don't. And they aren't, either. All my books are 93,000 words long.

[pats-quinade.livejournal.com]

Does that include King's Peace? Or was that originally meant to be two novels?

(Not trying to be snarky. I remember King's Peace as feeling much like two books together, in part because of what I remember of the act differentiation.)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes that is two, was two, in one cover. That isn't a secret! I wrote a trilogy of three 93,000 word novels and they published it in two volumes. Go figure. It probably does indicate something about people wanting fat fantasies, or publishers thinking they do anyway.

[scalzi.livejournal.com]

It's why I inserted the wiggle word "tend." There are also SF novels that go long beyond 110,000 words, Peter Hamilton's immediately comes to mind. However, once again, in general there does seem to be a publisher formula for length, which has SF as "x" and fantasy as "x + 20 to 40 percent."