Weird fact of the day

[alassenya]

There are five stories in AO3 that are greater than a million words. Only one of them is finished.

I know I like long stories myself, but how on Earth can anyone sustain a narrative for that length of time?

Comments

[and_ed]

A MILLION???? Wow. That's just...too long. I mean, how many words was War and Peace... which is the longest novel I can think of off the top of my head and no, I never read it because have you seen the size of that thing? ;)

[sw33n3y]

Woah, that does seem like heavy going for a writer or reader! What fandoms were they in?

Of course this made me curious as well, so I had to look up a few stats.

'War and Peace' is between 561,000 and 587,000 words, depending on the version. The longest modern era published work is 'À la recherche du temps perdu' by Proust, coming in at 1,267,069 words and the longest known work is 'Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus' by by Georges and/or Madeleine de Scudéry at an eye-watering 2,100,000.

[alassenya]

Plug this URL into your browser and see -

http://archiveofourown.org/works/search?commit=Search&page=1&utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search[sort_column]=word_count&work_search[sort_direction]=&work_search[title]=&work_search[word_count]=

I have to say that I'm not inclined to read any of them.

[alassenya]

Believe it or not, War and Peace is only 18th according to Wikipedia's List of Longest Novels. English translations run from 561,000 - 587,000 but I don't know what the word count is in Russian.

You would think that The Lord of the Rings would be up there too, but no one seems to know the exact word count. I have seen figures varying from 342,000 to 560,000 (which is basically two novels-worth of variation itself). 525,000 seems to be a reasonably authoritative figure based on one of Tolkien's letters, which would place it 23rd on that list.

Interesting sub-fact - I've read four of the books on that list: Clarissa; A Suitable Boy, War and Peace and Les Misérables. I've tried two others but couldn't get into them: A la recherche du temps perdu and Atlas Shrugged.

[sw33n3y]

Oops! My first comment may have landed in the wrong place, but I know you'll see it here somewhere. *g*

Interesting! I wonder how many of the 8,000 viewers of the longest AO3 story made it to the last page.

I imagine you would definitely need to be able to connect with a story of that length, to stay with it for the distance.

[alassenya]

I've no idea - it only counts hits, so theoretically any or all of them could have dropped out after one chapter. I suspect that the authors have disabled comments (there are none) but at least 18 people liked it enough to give kudos.

I am somewhat amused at the instruction not to download - as if that would stop anyone who wants to. And anything on the net can be downloaded one way or another, even if you have to go into page source to do it.

[sw33n3y]

I am somewhat amused at the instruction not to download

That's a bit odd, isn't it? If they have such concerns over copyright, then an internet archive is probably not the safe way to go. *g*

I see this is also a WIP, so that word count is so far.