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

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I have to reluctantly admit that I have an info dump chapter in the afor mentioned novel. It's there because a) it's word count, b) it's at a point in pacing where slack 'time' works, and c) the test readers actually *insist* that it should stay. They like that chapter. I don't know why. It's breaking almost all the rules about not doing info dumps, and I'd rather cut the chapter all together, but I was also taught to listen to the readers.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

There's nothing inherently wrong with an infodump - conan doyle's mysteries are generally full of them, the second half of any given christie novel is just one long prolonged infodump. And christie usually cheats and solves the mystery with an annoying asspull anyway.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

From James: And when I read a Peter Hamilton cluster of bus-crushers

Those must be very big books.

As for info-dumps, Kim Stanley Robinson (who should know) said something to the effect that there's nothing wrong with lectures as long as they're good lectures.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Kate Nepveu had a nice analysis on the Tor blog of why the opening infodump in Lord of the Rings works, even though it's an infodump. If you must have an infodump, you could do worse than follow Tolkien's technique. I'm looking forward to reading what she says about the Council of Elrond, which is the infodump that I have trouble making it through.