The article’s premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that shows 12% of readers read scifi in the last year, fantasy 15%, and romance 11%. This is not compelling evidence that scifi is unpopular. Perhaps people are just more diversified in their reading habits now across the board. It would be nice to see some more in-depth data showing trends across time before we leap to the conclusions this article does.
If this means it's also the end of the YA "future-dystopia-only-the-teen-chosen-one-can-end" genre, maybe there is a silver lining. There is only so much dystopian stories to tell before they all run together. The market is saturated.<p>I think the negative portrayal of science in the popular press has something to do with it. Plus the declining science literacy in general. It makes non-dystopian sci-fi difficult to relate to and seem too fantastic.
I think most people continue to have a primitive association between prosperity and "the Mandate of Heaven." If something is good, it leads to economic growth, and this reflects that the gods are happy about that thing. Of course, I'm exaggerating slightly, but it is almost certain that some people do engage in a certain amount of guilt-by-association during bad times, versus a happier praise-by-association during good times.<p>See this FRED chart, which shows real median family income in the USA:<p><a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/</a><p>Family income hits a peak in 1999 and then is stagnant or declining for the next 15 years, hitting a low point in 2014. It does not recover till 2018.<p>And this is certainly one of the biggest shocks about the Internet: that it did not lead to prosperity. I'm old enough to remember the optimism and confidence of the late 1990s, we were all certain that the Internet was about to usher in the biggest economic boom in human history.<p>Exactly the opposite happened: we experienced 19 years of stagnation of family income, the longest stretch in the history of the USA.<p>So, we've all learned some things, and some of the things we learned have been humbling. Deindustrialization was a bigger deal than we realized, and the cyber economy was a smaller deal than we realized, and competition from China was a bigger deal than we realized.<p>Between 1870 and 1970 the dramatic advance of science and technology contributed to rapidly rising standards of living. And it was fascinating to speculate about where such trends would go in the future. And that fascination expressed itself in part through science-fiction.<p>But what kind of science-fiction would appeal today? We've already been saturated by dystopian science-fiction, how much darker should it get? Would people necessarily be interested in a bleak science-fiction that suggests everything is going to get worse and worse forever?<p>I suspect real-life trends have to resume an upward march of progress before the public is again intrigued by this kind of speculative fiction.
I think it was in <i>Skyfall</i> where Q says to 007 "We don't do that kind of thing any more" ... because it wasn't really possible for the writers to come up with exciting tech gadgets. It was just entirely believable that there was already an app for anything they could think of. We have jetpacks, flying cars are going to show up literally in a year or two, Internet comes from space, "AI robot vacuum" is an entirely mundane product, we've got government investigations of robot cars running people over... what kind of thing could a sci-fi writer imagine that you couldn't see a startup selling in a couple of years?<p>Science fiction is hard to do now.
"Sci-fi readers have moved to adjacent genres and non-fiction because the current tech landscape is so depressing" makes a lot of sense to me.
In the UK bookshops, helpfully put sci-fi books in the "Sci-Fi AND Fantasy" section. Because, of course, people that want to read about aliens and FTL want to wade through hundreds of vampire-werewolf-human-love-triangle books first.
I've been working on a hard sci-fi novel for the last seven years or so. During that time, I developed a cross-platform plain text Markdown editor (<a href="https://keenwrite.com/" rel="nofollow">https://keenwrite.com/</a>) to help me write the novel. I could use some alpha readers.<p>If interested, see my profile for details and contact.
If you're looking for something non-dsytopian, John Carmack had a recommendation recently <a href="https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1757428929088872801" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1757428929088872801</a><p>> Just finished Theft of Fire by @Devon_Eriksen_, and it was a great read — hard SF by a retired engineer. If his About page resonates at all, you will probably enjoy it: <a href="https://devoneriksen.com/about" rel="nofollow">https://devoneriksen.com/about</a>
From what I've heard, sci-fi is popular in China nowadays.<p>I read a remark somewhere, maybe on HN, that a nation's output of sci-fi seems to correlate with whether or not they are in a boom. Does this ring true to you guys?<p>I'm not deeply into sci-fi (I wish I read more) but I think it could be true. America had their famous boom after WWII of course, and the Chinese have had every reason to be optimistic for the past decades.<p>I also wonder if there's a correlation with output of historical fiction. Reaching back into the past.
I think social media and so on has caused a bit of a shift of focus to 'inner space'.<p>Older sci-fi especially seems to often just be 20th century society with teleporters, or the united nations, at galactic level, and so on.<p>But we are now living in a sci-fi era, where it's clear the real issues are around culture itself, and only a small percentage of sci-fi deals with that, and often not well.<p>Sci-fi purports to reflect our current society and illuminate aspects of possible societies, but I'd say in some ways it has been overtaken by reality.<p>Sure we can't FTL to Vega minor, or whatever. But if we could, should we? Who should get to go anyway? What would they do there? What are the implications for the rest of society? What about if they have children? Etc, etc.
I see overread books like <i>Dune</i> and <i>Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe</i> as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Back in the 1980s there were so many "sci-fi fans" who had read <i>Hitchhiker</i> 20 times but never read Asimov or Heinlein or Dick or Smith or LeGunn or Pohl or...<p>I am a big fan of Frank Herbert's other books, particularly <i>The Santaroga Barrier</i>, <i>Under Pressure</i>, <i>Destination Void</i>, <i>Eyes of Heisenberg</i>, <i>Whipping Star</i> and the Dosadi books. I can't stand <i>Dune</i> but for some reason people read it over and over again and don't get into the rest of Herbert never mind any other authors.<p>I'd also blame Tor press for the downfall of sci-fi. Some of their books were groundbreaking like <i>Ender's Game</i> and <i>Forge of God</i> but because they represented a counter-reformation to the "new wave" which made Smith look cool again (great!) but really diminished the range of stories people would tell instead of expanding it. There was also the expansion of fantasy megaseries like <i>Xanth</i> (way too squicky for visual adaptation) and <i>Discworld</i> (too bad visual adaptations stopped when Pratchett passed away, but at least I can go to a Hogfather showing on the epiphany and cosplay as Twoflower)<p>I kinda feel about Vinge the way I feel about Niven, he didn't quite continue the promise he showed in his early career in his late career. Same with Charlie Stross, who became as bad a left wing nut (sees a fascist under every rock) as Niven was a right wing nut and gave up on the promising Eschaton series for just plain tiring series like <i>The Merchant Princes</i> (<i>Xanth</i> envy without the notes at the end about how much the author hates writing them?)<p>I liked the self-published <i>We are Legion (We are Bob)</i> which I found at the Salvation Army. Also<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Terraformers-Annalee-Newitz/dp/1250228018" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Terraformers-Annalee-Newitz/dp/125022...</a><p>for a very recent book.
It’s not just a sci-fi, it’s all books. And movies. and TV. and theater. And…<p>The media landscape is a lot more competitive. Vastly so. Of course, with the internet, video games, social media, older forms of entertainment will lose market share.
Honestly, I think all the dystopian sci-fi is hitting too close to home for people lately. It's intriguing and thrilling when it's some far-off distant future that seems like a thought experiment. It's depressing when it reads like the natural conclusion of the events that are unfolding in the current day
I couldn't find anything I enjoyed in scifi and ended up moving to fantasy instead.<p>The number of well supported niches in fantasy is ever growing, some with business models that cut out traditional publishers altogether.
"The golden age of science fiction is 14."<p>If it's 30 year old people reading, sci fi lost its audience.<p>And probably so: mistb14 year olds would rather play a phone/mmo than read
This article seems to stem from a desire to dunk on "evil Silicon Valley robber barons" more than anything else.<p>As others have pointed out here, the premise is based on a linked Washington Post survey that doesn't even really suggest that sci-fi is unpopular (at least no less popular than other "genre" fiction). Also, cyberpunk and other "near-future capitalism-dystopia" stories are only a subset of science fiction.<p>Honestly, I think we're still working through the psychic trauma of Donald Trump's 2016 victory over Clinton. The literary class was SO caught off guard and stunned by that unexpected outcome, that it lost its mind and has yet to recover.<p>I don't remember "Silicon Valley" being used as a scare phrase, or regarded all that negatively, prior to 2016. But immediately afterward, stunned people desperate for explanation latched onto whatever theories they could find. We ended up with Clinton losing "because Russia posted on Facebook too much", and overnight Silicon Valley became a bugbear. Then Elon messed with the rage echo chamber on Twitter, and immediately went from "pot-smoking goofball troll" to robber baron and devil incarnate.<p>In other words, the sort of people who write articles about books are feeling really down on social media companies and tech entrepreneurs these days. And transfer those feelings onto sci-fi, because they're not really into sci-fi themselves anyway, and therefore see all that as one and the same.