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Some time ago we had a discussion about a sad omission from the Hugo "short story" "novella" "novellette" "novel" "sub-novelette" "semi-novella" etc length categories; "brick".

Most Hugo categories have a set of criteria and "brick" should be no exception, so you are invited to suggest same. To get you started;

So long, cover style changed between front and back cover.
Man with copy in breast pocket saved from being shot. By tank.
Neil Stephenson / China Mieville think author "wordy bastard".
Book requires exoskeleton in place of spine.
Book contains more than seventeen occurences of word "clench".
"Comparable to Tolkien at his most thinly spread by Christopher."

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There are 21 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

There probably needs to be a similar category for series with more than six titles.

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It's too late to nominate the The Algebraist, right?

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At a mere 534 pages?

Not that I'm sure exactly where to draw the line, but I'd say maybe 800?

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The baroque cycle is >800 pages each. Not that that doesn't leave a place for books with fewer words but even more dense ones: some books do have brickness not perfectly encapsulated by their length :)

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Well, that is the question. "Margins sufficient to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. By enumeration of all possible cases."

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Come, come, now, The Algebraist is barely a roofing tile or two.

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Book contains more than seventeen occurences of word "clench".

Or contains frequent references to habits eg braid-tugging (cf one of the main female characters in the Wheel of Time series) or frequent references to the same physical attribute of an alien race (cf Mary Gentle's Ancient Light - I seem to recall her pointing out the same thing about the hands of the aliens on what felt like every other page).

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A book so wordy that even the publisher goes "Sorry, you'll have to split that into three volumes".

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The publisher's likely to be suggesting the trilogisation themselves. :)

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This does not work because these days if you wrote a hack fantasy drabble the publishers would want to bring it out as three 33 1/3 word paragraphs.

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I was thinking specifically of Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy, initially propsed as a single million-word book. That didn't QUITE fly...

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Yes. I personally would pay for a hardback single-volume edition on the grounds that it will hurt more when I ram it up the author's nose in part payment for slugging through 48000 pages of torture porn only to find the ending is a complete washout.

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Where does that leave steaming piles of bricks? I refer to Neal Stevenson's Baroque backbusters...

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Hey, those were absolute genius!

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I'm not sure about genius, but certainly they're entertaining enough that they don't *feel* too long.

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I assume you're planning on nominating Peter F Hamilton... :)

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I believe he's the acknowledged master of the "half-brick" category, in some cases outweighing "bricks" themselves :)

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For a kick in the balls by a nun screaming WRITE A BLOODY ENDING, maybe.

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Neil Stephenson / China Mieville think author "wordy bastard".

The only specific data point I happen to be aware of is "Sir Winston Spencer Churchill's six-volume biography of Marlborough", considered wordy by Stephenson. A brief examination on amazon, however, suggests that the two-volume omnibus edition is only just over two thousand pages, so may actually have been exceeded by the baroque cycle, officially qualifying same for the award.

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Books read by people with a curiously thin forefinger, caused by trying to hold their current page whilst changing train/tube/bus.

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Book must be supported by a complicated series of pulleys lest it crush the reader's knees.

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