Thursday 26 October 2023

Lengths Of Works Of Prose Fiction

There are:

very short stories, even one-pagers
short stories
novelettes
novellas
novels, which can be of very different lengths

Alone among volumes of The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume II, David Falkayn: Star Trader, informs us on its contents page of the lengths of the works that it collects. Thus, we are told that:

"Territory" is a novella;
"The Trouble Twisters" is a novella;
"Day of Burning" is a novella;
"The Master Key" is a novella;
Satan's World is a novel;
"A Little Knowledge" is a short story;
"Lodestar" is a novella.

Five novellas, one short story and one novel. This information would be helpful in other collections.

The categories are based on word numbers. Not being able to guesstimate the number of words in a text, I fall back on page numbers. My rule of thumb is that a novel is 100+ pages. But page number varies between editions due to font size etc.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I have at hand my copy of the 1965 Chilton Books edition of AGENT OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE. And HUNTERS OF THE SKY CAVE has 119 pages in it. A hundred pages is a good rule of thumb for a novel.

Ad astra! Sean