155,000 Words

October 11, 2024

We’re going to talk about a 155,000-word project, but first, let me give you some numbers so we’re all on the same page.

To be considered book length, a book should have a minimum of 70,000 words. Science fiction and fantasy novels are typically longer than the norm because there’s so much worldbuilding to convey.

Here’s the word count for some familiar books:

79,000 – It’s Over or It’s Eden
85,000 – Negotiated Fate
95,000 – The Hobbit
99,000 – Dangerous to Heal
119,000 – Twilight
292,000 – Game of Thrones

I’ve been noticing in 2024, that while long books remain a favorite—series have always been a standout in the sci-fi/fantasy world—fiction is also growing shorter.

You never used to see a novella on the bookstore shelves, but now there’s popular series like The Murderbot Diaries and Binti, and plenty of standalones like The Tusks of Extinction. For those keeping track, a novella is less than 40,000 words.

The shortening of books isn’t driven only by readers, but publishing as well. Paper is getting more expensive so printing long tomes is a financial risk. Authors are selling more e-books and it’s harder for readers to see how long the book they’re buying is when it’s a digital file. Writers have also figured out that while it still takes multiple books to breakout and grow a readership, you can do that quicker if all of your books are 60,000 words rather than 90,000.

So why am I writing a 155,000-word book?

Because that’s what the story calls for.

A few years ago, I was captured by a bit of prose:

This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.

It’s not prose from a book, but a Sandia National Laboratories 1993 report. They were theorizing on how to communicate the danger of nuclear waste sites to far future peoples.

But, what if they don’t speak our language?

Radioactive waste—materials we’re generating and discarding today—are a danger to life for tens of thousands of years. Think about all that has changed in the last ten thousand years. Could we communicate with a person from that time? If we couldn’t interpret a message of warning from so long ago, how could we hope to do the same for the humans of the future?

Perhaps you build a priesthood that passes the information from generation to generation, much like religious messages.

Or, physicist Emil Kowalski put forward the idea that storage locations be highly advanced so only educated, prepared peoples could access them in the future.

French author Francoise Bastide and Italian professor of semiotics Paola Fabbri came up with the idea that, due to human’s long-standing history with cats, felines could be bred to change color when they came in contact with radioactive emissions.

But storage breaks, cats die out, and meaning is lost over time. Could you instead build enormous slabs of concreate to keep people out? Or would that just make humans more curious to dig there? What about building threatening, aggressive architecture? Or would it fall overtime?

You can see how this puzzle takes hold in your mind.