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

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

I have no idea, but I gotta say: I rather prefer my books on the shorter end of the spectrum these days.

Also, a lot of paranormal/urban fantasy tends to clock in at around 300 pages. I don't know if that's because 300 pages is a good length for the type of story that those tend to be or if there's something about the typical paranormal/urban fantasy reader that limits the length (with a few exceptions; the one I'm currently reading is pretty long, but it's also by one of the biggest authors in the subgenre).

[almeda.livejournal.com]

In my experience (I have NOT read all of them!), they tend not to be complete plots in the way James means. They're installations of a series.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

I generally don't read them and since I don't buy books I wouldn't know where they get shelved in the bookstores. I get ARCs from publishers, say to myself, "Oh that belongs to [other reviewer]," and set them aside for giving away. I will say that most of them that I do get come from SF/F publishers, have fantasy as their category, and are short. I know there's a good bit of urban/paranormal fantasy from publishers like Kensington and Dorchester that I'm simply unaware of because I'm not on their distribution lists (which is fine by me).