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I just finished Robert Jordan’s latest trainwreck, “Crossroads of Twilight(Amazon customer reviews)”:http://tinyurl.com/6cqsq, and quite frankly it sucked. 680 pages (hardcover) of pure distilled fuh. This is book 10 of a series that gets increasingly boring and insulting to the reader. But reading it gives me a chance to think about writing, and what really seems to be missing in modern fiction: brevity.

When I was younger I thought the Lord of the Rings was way too long, but compared to so many of these newer stories it is actually quite short. Three volumes of a far reaching but well written tale, and it is rightly considered a master work of the fantasy genre. It seem that such quality of work is not to be found anymore.

Besides Jordan’s bloated sow of a story, Tad Williams’ Otherland is an example of a good author gone terribly wrong. His trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, was on the border of being too long, but had strong characters and an engaging story. In Otherland Williams started a massive four-book epic which had only three characters I really cared about, and spent immense amounts of time describing in detail things that just weren’t important. I gave up on the series in the second of four books, after reading three quarters of the way through that volume. The story is just too long and drawn out to maintain my interest.

The Harry Potter books are another example of this disturbing trend. Each book has been longer than the previous book, and what was once fairly short, engaging stories is turning into huge volumes where I almost want to scream at the characters in frustration at their not getting on with the story.

Neal Stephenson also suffers this disease of authorship. Snow Crash was short, funny, engaging, and had memorable characters. After that his stories become increasingly long, and are now at a point where reading even half of a novel is an effort to wade through all the crap and fuh that marks later works.

Am I the only one who has noticed this?

Recently I started reading many of what are considered the classic and defining works of 20th century science fiction, from authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Philip Dick, and Isaac Asimov. One thing I have noticed that these classic writers have in common is relative brevity. Their novels are rarely much over 200 pages. I plowed right through several of the books in just a day or two. The stories and characters are engaging, and their scope feels right: not too short but not too long.

So now I wonder, are authors getting paid by the page, or maybe readers think that if they get more pages they are getting a better story? Length isn’t related to quality, obviously, or else people would be reading the tax codes and calling them fine literature. What is the allure of these drawn out dictionaries of fuh?