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

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

It makes sense to ask that. Or to ask, "Why do publishers think this sells better?" When you have a series like the Wheel of Time or various Eddings, which require an entire volume to move the characters from one room to another . . .

Most '50s era F&SF novels were much shorter. Lord of the Rings and Dune were rarities.

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

Do we prefer them, or is that all we are offered?

Although as a biblioholic fast reader I can understand the attraction of something that will last me more than a couple of hours.

[scalzi.livejournal.com]

"Does it make sense to ask why modern [1] F&SF readers appear to prefer longer lengths than do mystery readers?"

It makes more sense to ask why publishers prefer the lengths they do, since I know I'm contractually obliged to turn in novels of no less than 90,000 words and no more then 110,000, whereas I know fantasies tend to have a longer contractually obligated length and mysteries and romances have shorter lengths.

I assume the reason publishers like those lengths has to do with how the books are primarily distributed. I will note that when the primary distribution of science fiction/fantasy novels was through supermarket racks, they tended to be rather shorter.

[abidemi.livejournal.com]

I take my books dreamy and slow, like my men.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Fantasy and SF novels have to do a lot more than mysteries do -- not just setting up plots and characters, but entire worlds, societies, and laws of nature -- so it makes sense that they'd be longer.

The shorter SF books of Ye Olde Days were just trying to ape other genres' lengths without thinking about what really made sense, with the result being that the books were all way too short and felt like plot outlines in book form and had to mostly drop characterization anyway.

[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).

[pats-quinade.livejournal.com]

I'm part of the problem. I like my big fat fantasy doorstops.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Maybe Mystery Readers take shorter bathroom breaks? Perhaps SF&F reader's diets have lead to a need for longer reading material.

Now where did I leave my asbestos underwear?

[barberio.livejournal.com]

There just appear to be natural lengths for different kinds of story.

I decided to give myself a challenge. I wrote a military science fiction noir murder mystery.

It's come in at too long for a 'normal' detective novel, and too short for a 'science fiction' novel. Seriously, considering the 80,000 printed word count that most publishers use as their cut-off, I'm stuck trying to find 10,000 words in an already finished story.

[cheshyre]

Frankly, I'd prefer mystery-length books than giant doorstops which can't finish a complete story.

Perhaps the more important question is why modern F&SF publishers prefer longer works?

[That said, SF&F usually requires a certain amount of worldbuilding that mysteries are not subject to.]

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

SF readers who like shorter plotty material have an alternative to short novels: novellas and short stories in magazines. It's a minority taste given low circulation numbers, but there are many more venues for SF novellas and shorts than there are for mysteries.

[bwross.livejournal.com]

Perhaps mystery readers like novels that are easier to read in a single sitting? It could also be that the mystery market has optimized itself for the best length for content vs. the ability of its readers to wrap their heads around all the facts.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Mysteries don't have any need for worldbuilding and readers don't expect character development (just like early SF) but they do expect the crime to be solved. Still, I can't stop myself from providing counterexamples:

There seems to be a hard limit of about 400 pages over in mystery.

Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost, 704 pages

Mysteries also eschew the cliff-hanger ending and the book-fragment approach

In Carole Nelson Douglas' Midnight Louie series, the primary love interest makes his first appearance in the final sentence of the fourth book. A later book opens with the main characters making a lengthy list of all the murders from previous books that hadn't been solved yet. I stopped reading when a fairly major cliffhanger was not resolved in the next book.

[justinhowe.livejournal.com]

I would love shorter fantasy/SF along the lines of most mystery novels. Something along the lines of the minor world of sword/spell-wielding individual with quark and more than just another snark-fueled first person POV urban-fantasy fiction. Ursula LeGuin or Peter Beagle are the only people I can think of who have even come close to something like this in recent years.

One thing about doorstops is that they give the reader the immersive quality they would get from a movie or video-game. And while I don't believe all that space is needed to detail the world, the majority of readers love to know where the linen of the main characters' pants was produced, and publishers are all too happy to give it to them.

Ultimately, it just bugs me that we have the doorstop to the exclusion of almost anything else.

[janetmk.livejournal.com]

I think the books in some mystery series are growing longer.

I like police procedurals (preferably with British settings). The latest Peter Robinson I read was over 400 pages (the early ones in the series were definitely shorter. Reginald Hill's books are also getting longer--well over 300 pages these days. Early PD James' mysteries were quite short, not so recent ones (judging by the thickness of the mass market paperbacks, though that isn't always a reliable guide).

The series I read tend to have lots of personal stuff (including angst and romance)that add considerable verbiage to the basic mystery.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I prefer the shorter novel with faster pacing though years ago I enjoyed the longer novels. I wonder how much of that has to do with my no longer having the time to spend reading enormous wordy tomes (you would think retirement would give a person more leisure)? Nowadays I look for bran flakes when I need bulk rather than a trilogy.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I always figured the increasing length of books was linked to steadily rising prices: readers were subconsciously trying to maintain a certain ratio of pounds of words per dollar in order to avoid feeling ripped off.

However, that fails to account for the differential between genres.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Multiple plot threads?

It can't be the only reason, since Gregory McDonald kept two in parallel in his (rather short length) Fletch mysteries, while Philip K. Dick tended to use three plot threads, sort of like the Love Boat, in his (rather short length) SF. But it might be a contributing factor.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Well, I know that I'd buy more fantasy and SF if the publishers/authors tried to keep a median length below 300 pages. I hate having to read what essentially would be the length of an entire PKD novel without having the plot show up decently but instead having to suffer how the author spends a hundred pages introducing too many characters and providing too many infodumps.

And seriously, people talk about how it is because of all the world building which has to fit in. If that were true, wouldn't the world building be better?

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Although there are repeated claims in this thread that fantasy worlds require long passages of world-building prose, the generic nature of most fantasy worlds and the wide understanding of the tropes and patterns by the readership allows that to be skipped, if the writer wishes. Consider Operation Chaos (a fix-up, yes, but also a good novel), which does everything in less than 1000 pages and three volumes. Submitted today, an editor would see it as an outline and suggest that it should include yards of exploration and exposition, a lot of sex for the werewolf, and a tour of Hell. In three volumes.

Formerly, YA fantasy was the last bastion of this kind of self-discipline, and a book like Dealing with Dragons still provides great satisfaction and a complete story for the reader.

The way David Hartwell explained it to me ...

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I'm an alien visitor to the US market. Here's how my editor explained it to me:

Until the early 1990s, mass market SF/F paperbacks were primarily sold via grocery store racks, supplied by local distributors (400+ of them).

During the inflationary 1970s and early 1980s, the publishers wanted to increase their cover prices. But the grocery wholesalers who sold the books insisted "the product's gotta weigh more if you want to charge more". So just as buffalo tomatoes got bigger, so did paperbacks. But you can only get so much milage by using thicker paper and a bigger typeface.

In the 1960s, an SF novel was 60-80,000 words, with 80K being considered overblown and long. By 1990 they'd grown to 90-100,000 words.

Then in 1992 or thereabouts Walmart woke up and said "why the heck are we using eighty bazillion distributors?" and fired 90% of them. They went from 40 in California to just 2. The mass market book racks imploded as a sales channel. But that left Barnes and Noble and Borders a market vacuum to fill. So all was well for a while, with the midlist paperback market replaced by a midlist hardcover market.

Same pressure applies: publishers want to get more money per book, so they try to make the hardbacks bigger. Finally, circa 2001, Borders yanked the brake handle and said "we won't buy any non-bestselling titles that cost over $24 in hardcover or $7 in mass market -- they don't shift" (each $1 over $24 cut sales turnover by 20%, IIRC).

Anyway.

We in SF/F have been trained to expect longer books by the grocery distributors.

I would hypothesize that mysteries did not succumb to this selection pressure because there's a countervailing force at work -- the reader's ability to keep track of multiple characters and plot threads. This is aggravated by the gritty, terse style that has been de rigeur in mystery since the day of Raymond Chandler or Damon Runyon -- yes, there are exceptions, but florid verbosity is generally frowned upon, so you don't get the purple passages so typical of a certain type of fantasy.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

The reason we have longer science fiction books now than we had in the socalled golden age is that the average sf reader has become smarter and more demanding, no longer willing to put up with cardboard characters and a generic plot for the sake of a cool idea. If you want good story, good s-f and good characterisation you need longer books.

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

Interesting discussion. Some thoughts:

First, the pleasures of reading a short novel versus a honking big brick of a novel are different. The short novel provides a couple of evenings of entertainment; the honking big brick provides an extended escape from the mundane world into the world of the book, which means the longer the story, the longer you can escape into the book's world.

Yes, I know, all novels are escapist in one sense. But the kind of escapist entertainment being sought by someone who prefers 200 page novels is I think very different in emphasis from the kind of escapism being sought by someone who prefers 800+ page novels. One is oriented more toward a brief, contained diversion, the other toward getting away from the world and its cares for as long as possible.

Another genre that tends to produce very long novels is the historical novel, whether mainstream or within a genre. For instance, in the romance section, even with the books spine out, you can instantly tell the difference between the thick brick historical romances and the thin little contemporary romances.

The historical trend in SF seems to be away from providing almost exclusively short contained little packages of entertainment to providing more long term immersion in other worlds. Right now you're still getting a mix of the two, but with more and more longer novels and continued multipart stories over time. Fantasy, at least since Tolkien, has been almost exclusively about providing lengthy immersion over several books in another world. Mysteries, OTOH, have continued to be focused around providing brief contained diversions.

I guess this means the audience for mysteries and fantasy are staying relatively stable, while the audience for SF is transitioning from one that prefers contained packet entertainments to one that prefers total immersion entertainments.

What that means about how the audience is changing, I'm not sure, but it's not exclusively gender related, although I think fantasies are read by women more so than mysteries. Look at an almost exclusively male form of entertainment, the videogame - the difference between role playing games and FPS games is becoming less and less distinct, but you can still tell them apart by looking at how long it takes to play through the entire game - a RPG like Fallout 3 or Oblivion can take 200 hours or longer to finish, while your typical FPS game can be finished in about 20 or 40 hours of playing.

[orzelc.livejournal.com]

It's just One of Those Things, like the way almost all mysteries are installments in open-ended series featuring the same major characters. There's nothing inherently good or bad about it, and trying to find The Reason is pointless (if diverting).

Technology.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Could some of the growth in book length be due to technology. Manuscripts were once delivered to the publisher in ink on paper format. Actual human beings had to convert it into a printable form, probably several times. This makes the act of including something in the final product a result of at least one conscious choice. I think these days works are submitted electronically so each exclusion requires a conscious choice.