A great deal of science fiction is just fantasy with spaceships. It uses technological tropes to seem like it isn't fantasy, but that's just surface gloss.

• flohofwoe

  today at 1:22 PM

  Which is unfortunately true, but also just illustrates how far science-fiction has fallen - not sure when it started but I guess Star Wars played an important role to remove the 'science' from 'science-fiction'.

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sideways into fantasy gained the popularity lost by escapes into the future.

I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls on whether the country is heading in the right direction.

• flohofwoe

  today at 1:25 PM

  I don't know, to the East of the Iron Curtain science fiction wasn't mostly about future optimism, but often a critical mirror of current society transported into the future to escape censorship.

  Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires reading between the lines ;)

• chasil

  today at 12:52 PM

  Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.

  Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).

  We also do not yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets.

  It is not an encouraging line of thought.

  • lotsofpulp

    today at 1:00 PM

    > we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible

    Would any of the stories about the characters’ relationships with people not traveling with them be entertaining given the effects of time dilation?

• pfdietz

  today at 1:19 PM

  Stated with a different spin, the detached-from-reality takes of Campbell-era SF finally became too strained to enjoy.

• Den_VR

  today at 12:38 PM

  I still find myself quite taken by some sci-fi writing. Iain M Banks works, Rajaniemi, and Joan Slonczewski. The “problem” is that they are not popular the way Harry Potter or isekai are.

FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

• flohofwoe

  today at 1:15 PM

  The sad state of the 'science fiction corner' in German book chains is completely real though. Over the last two decades or so you could literally see it shrink on each visit and what little remains is filled with mass procuded trash (Star Wars novels etc). The fantasy section right next to it has been eating into the science-fiction shelf space but is filled with the same trash, just replace your laser-toting space troopers with vampires, werewolves and dragons.

• tialaramex

  today at 12:22 PM

  Yeah, I think at most very literal titles would be a stylistic phase. Even "The Martian" is more a play on words than just a literal title for what it's about.

  Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?

  Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.

  • rybosworld

    today at 1:15 PM

    A bit of an off-topic observation:

    Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.

    • Ekaros

      today at 1:21 PM

      As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of industrial output until some balance level is reached.

      Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.

  • NooneAtAll3

    today at 1:09 PM

    so... it might be a marketing problem?

    no publisher was there to tell author "wtf did you name it, you'll get ignored" or smth?

The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related. I wonder if the trend is space-specific or if other sci-fi topics suffered the same fate (like robots, computers, technology, etc). It does seem to me like society generally became less interested in space exploration after the moon landing (though I wasn't around then so that is really just what I gather from watching/reading things about western society in the latter half of the 20th century).

On the other hand, fantasy includes vampires and werewolves. I guess you could call them fantasy but to me they are quite a different niche to Tolkien. Traditionally vampires and werewolves would probably be considered horror rather than fantasy, though it's a bit more complicated now as Twilight is clearly not horror.

I think the author's point stands regardless, as there has been a resurgence across all of those keywords, but I do think the reasons for the resurgence in magic and dragons aren't necessarily the same as the reasons for the resurgence in vampires and werewolves.

My theory about this aligns with my theory about the disappearance of ‘futurists’ from the popular conversation - we’re living in science fiction. The future is arriving every day. It no longer feels necessary to speculate about a changed world - you need only look out the door.

I say this as someone that still loves (and writes a little) speculative fiction. Just a guess as to what’s happening.

That Berlin bookstore (Otherland) also has great staff for recommendations. The resident scifi attendant was quite knowledgeable about original scifi written in German (as opposed to translated works). That's quite useful if your knowledge of the field is limited to the obvious Andreas Esbach (unsurpassed) and Perry Rodan (pass).

Fantasy is certainly big, but it’s not like there isn’t space sf or space opera out there.

Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal.

To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the settings are SF.

• Freak_NL

  today at 12:57 PM

  And you're not even getting into Baen and Tor books territory, where the hard military scifi lives (David Weber et al).

  (Scalzi is always fun.)

Anime went from science-fiction dominated in the 1980s (Gundam) to fantasy-dominated (Friern) today. The strange thing about fantasy was it lived under the shadow of Tolkien and Lewis which I think suppressed it for half a century.

Quite naturally - 1960s were the time when we discovered that Solar System is a pretty barren place. Mariner IV sent back pictures of craters on Mars - proving it couldn't have an atmosphere dense enough for people. Venera series probes proved at about same time that Venus surface was unsurvivable for anything we could recognise as "life". Stars are too far away. That was about it.

Many people don't get the origins of enthusiasm of first years of the space era, it wasn't because of politics, it was because there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now. And almost total surety of finding at least some form of complex, multicellular life. Disappointment when the real data came in, was massive. That's why space program went nowhere after Apollo, becoming a politicised clown show - by the time Apollo 11 landed, it was abundantly clear there wasn't much to see or do in the Solar System.

• ahazred8ta

  last Tuesday at 5:27 PM

  In 1965, Clarke, Asimov, and other science writers were at NASA watching the first images appear. "Craters. Duh, it's right next to the asteroid belt, of course it has craters. Not that any of us thought of it beforehand..."

• mrec

  today at 11:58 AM

  Yup. One early Arthur C Clarke story had plants growing natively on the Moon.

Where did all the starships go,

Long time passing...

I have been seeing the trend of Fantasy slowly taking over SF for a while, maybe as long as 30 years :(

Real Science based SF seems to have disappeared completely, at least based upon the only Book Store left in my area, Barnes and Noble.