How Long Do You Think a Sci-fi Novel Should Be?

[Dr. Drib]

I think we can all finally agree on how long a novel should be.

[AuzelMakadam]

Interesting question, because the page-count answer changes with the premise. High-concept SF seems to want compression: the premise is the engine, and once it is established, extra pages mostly dilute it. Zamyatin's We does its whole surveillance-state arc in about 200 pages, Forster's The Machine Stops lands harder in 30 pages than most trilogies do in 900, and Babel-17 is short too. Battlefield Earth is the counterexample everyone here already flagged - it just keeps going after the book is over.

I am finishing a dystopia draft at the moment and deliberately kept it novella-length, around 20k words, partly for that reason: the hook (one murderous hour per day, enforced by a virus) does not need 400 pages, it needs a tight spiral where every scene converts.

Which makes me wonder - is the modern 400-500 page norm really a story decision, or a publishing-economics one (hardcover needs to feel worth $28)? Someone above mentioned books written to a page-count target, and I suspect that is exactly where the bloat comes from.

[Sirtel]

Personally I like my books on the slower side, and therefore longer. I want to have the time to immerse myself in the book and its characters. Instant adrenaline on the first page is fine, if the pace slows down some after that, but I don't much like novellas and short stories built solely on the plot - they're over before I start to enjoy them.

Of course people are different. I'm a slow, quiet person and prefer to live my life slowly and quietly (that's one reason I hate social media, it's too fast and noisy for me). Others want more excitement and adrenaline.

(Edit: I have not read Battlefield Earth and am not going to, as I dislike alien invasion themes and dystopias in general)

[AuzelMakadam]

Fair point, Sirtel. The immersion argument is the strongest case for length, and I get the 'over before I start to enjoy them' feeling — though I'd frame the good novella differently: not a sprinter, but the same pace over a shorter track. The Old Man and the Sea is slow in the best sense, it just declines to pad. What changes is density per page, not speed per chapter.

And yes, leaving a world early when you wanted to stay is its own kind of bad ending.

Has a long book ever flipped that for you, where you could actually feel the padding while reading?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by AuzelMakadam

Has a long book ever flipped that for you, where you could actually feel the padding while reading?

Of course. And there have been novellas I've enjoyed. There are always exceptions.

[Courant]

Originally Posted by AuzelMakadam

Interesting question, because the page-count answer changes with the premise. High-concept SF seems to want compression: the premise is the engine, and once it is established, extra pages mostly dilute it. Zamyatin's We does its whole surveillance-state arc in about 200 pages, Forster's The Machine Stops lands harder in 30 pages than most trilogies do in 900, and Babel-17 is short too. Battlefield Earth is the counterexample everyone here already flagged - it just keeps going after the book is over.

I am finishing a dystopia draft at the moment and deliberately kept it novella-length, around 20k words, partly for that reason: the hook (one murderous hour per day, enforced by a virus) does not need 400 pages, it needs a tight spiral where every scene converts.

Which makes me wonder - is the modern 400-500 page norm really a story decision, or a publishing-economics one (hardcover needs to feel worth $28)? Someone above mentioned books written to a page-count target, and I suspect that is exactly where the bloat comes from.

There are different theories, novels have gotten shorter in recent years, and one theory I have heard is that they are getting rid of the padding. Googling it got me a bunch of hand wringing about short attention spans that appear to assume everyone is reading literary fiction (although genre fiction tends to be longer). The genre with the most length is fantasy, with romantasy typically being longer than romance. Besides the bargain, longer books are more prestigious, and especially for fantasy, the most famous ones are longer. I also heard that independent books are shorter, probably because they don't add padding to meet the requirement of a literary agent.