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

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I like how you were able to post that with a straight face. Of course every generation of fan thinks its better than the one before, so....

I've honestly seen no improvement in plotting and characterization, much less world building in the last twenty-five years; I have however seen a great increase in the baroqueness of same. That is, instead of doing the job in a hundred words, authors have learned to do the same thing in five hundred. Likewise, if three main characters is good, eighteen must be even better!

Take "A Song of Ice and Fire": the world building is no better then that of say "The Broken Sword": in fact the world Martin comes up with is nonsensical. But Martin surrounds that nonsensical world with so much verbiage that readers tend to miss the flaws in the worldbuilding. Likewise, take the characterization of someone like Cersei; Martin surrounds her with so much extraneous detail that it takes a while before one realizes that she's the same stereotypical "bitch queen-mother" that we've seen in the literature for decades.

So largely I'd say it's a matter of authors shovelling a crapload of words to try to hide the flaws in their work, rather than an improvement on the part of the readers.