james_davis_nicoll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2008-12-28 09:47 am
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2008-12-28 09:47 am
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.
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.
Re: The way David Hartwell explained it to me ...
The next question is, why did these publishing demands work out so differently in f/sf than in mystery? Why are mystery novels thinner than f/sf? It's not just that f/sf has *room* for doorstop novels and trilogies; I think the average f/sf book is substantially thicker than the average mystery novel.
I will also note that there are more non-series f&sf novels published than non-series mystery--pretty much every genre mystery novel is assumed to be part of a series. Contrawise, as James pointed out, mysteries are at least always complete stories rather than "whoops, reached the word count, go buy the next two novels to see how it turns out".
(I note that romance novels--outside of the disposable novels like Harlequin--have also gotten physically bigger during the period of the growth of f/sf novels.)