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Originally Posted by Elsi
Most definitely Science Fiction. I'm just now getting into Fantasy, so I've been catching up on some titles that many people read long ago. I have a large collection of older SF titles dating from the 1950s -- but most particularly from the 1970s. I find myself very surprised at how short the typical SF novel from that timeframe is.
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Blame technical reasons for a good bit of that. Hardcover sales were mostly to libraries. The mass market paperback was the dominant form, and the PB publishers were engaged in a losing battle to keep prices under $1.
Length restrictions were a matter of "What could be fit in a given number of pages".
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Another genre that I am new to is that of historical fiction. I became interested in HF when I read Confessions of a Pagan Nun by Kate Horsley in 2005.
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One you might look at (if any are available) are works by Kenneth Roberts. Roberts did historical fiction set in the American Revolution period. One I was fascinated by (and hope to find and read at some point), is _Oliver Wiswell_, told from the viewpoint of a Tory. We forget that a lot of colonists were loyal subjects of the crown, and had mixed emotions at best over the effort to make the United States an independent country.
Back in 1976, a poster appeared on lampposts in Philadelphia. It was the run up to the bicentennial celebration. The poster said that 200 years was long enough to hold a grudge, and it was time for the colonies to resume their rightful status as subjects of Her Majesty, and part of the British Empire. Britain would get a massive economic shot in the arm, and the US would get the benefit of a thousand years of tradition and history.
I was tickled.
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Dennis