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]

Yes, but the difference with today's novels is that they only had pages of infodump, and a biography of Bolyai and Lobachevsky...and it was kept pertinent to the story.

If it had been a story done today, Bolyai and Lobachevsky would have each gotten a couple chapters, or maybe a hundred pages each. Most likely starting from their conception. Or hell, if it had been Jorden or Martin writing the book, Bolyai and Lobachevsky would have been a couple of main characters for an entire volume.