A Thought. Comments? (SF and F Discussion)

[jpskewedthrone]

So this was a random thought I had a week or so ago on my hour long drive to work and I thought I'd throw it out there to see what people thought. In the SF and F industry, there has recently been much discussion about the "decline" in SF being written and published, and that Fantasy has been taking over. Now, I'm NOT going to talk about the "different" between SF and F here, that's not the point of the discussion or the thought. Rather, I had a thought about WHY there seems to be this shift between the two.

I wonder if the shift has to do with society. Specifically, with how the society feels about where we are as a group. "Back then", when SF seemed a little more prevalent (I'm not sure when this "back then" would be, which is why I'm not being more specific here), I get the impression that perhaps we weren't as happy with ourselves and our society. I wasn't around then, or if I was, I was more concerned about my tree fort I'd built in the woods, called the Igloo. But from what I've heard about life then, there were . . . issues. Society itself was in turmoil. We didn't know where everything was headed, where WE were headed, and we looked to the future. Thus we produced more SF themed stories and novels. Our current lives weren't as good or as settled as we would have liked, so we looked forward to a time when things MIGHT be better, where the world might be more simple. MADE more simply by technology. So we were in a bad place and wanted to imagine a better place, but not just ANY better place (fantasy can always produce "better" places as easily as SF). A better place where we could imagine we may be headed. You can't do that with fantasy. SF gives you the hope, or leaves you with the hope, that the world and society may end up in that imaginary place. Perhaps this is why we were so interested in space and NASA and getting to the moon, and now most people could care less what NASA is doing. (Not the fandom of course; I read practically everything that NASA does . . . when it shows up in the news.)

Now, the world did become a "better" place, and by this I mean some of those issues that produced our disillusionment with the world were resolved or were settled in some way. At this point, we didn't need that elusive hope of a better future, because we were more or less content with the world we already had. So we weren't looking forward so much any more. Because of this, the effort to produce SF declined, and we saw an upsurge in the fantasy market instead. Why? Because if you're content with the world you have, you start looking at other worlds. And you aren't looking FORWARD any more for that world, you're content to look at the past (medieval-style worlds) or just something different. There's no need to look forward because everything around you is mostly OK.

Before anyone starts jumping on me about saying the world at the moment is OK and that's why we have a prevalence of fantasy, I'm not saying the current world is perfect by any means. But when we compare our situation now to some of the situations in the past . . . well, we're better off than we've been before. And besides, this is just a thought. It's certainly not a scientific study.

So what do you guys think? Do we produce more SF when we aren't happy with our current situation and want or NEED to see a better future for ourselves? Do we write more fantasy when we're generally settled or our problems don't seem as overwhelming and hopeless? Or am I just totally off my rocker?

Comments

[dqg-neal.livejournal.com]

How does that explain science-fiction subgenres like cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk? It definitely didn't evision a better future.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

I read cyberpunk for some of the same reasons I would hit myself in the head. It feels so good when I stop.

That's not a criticism of cyberpunk exactly, I read that as well as horror and enjoy both. But with both, there is definitely an element of "I've closed the book, I've put it down, I'm out of that world... oh wow, it's not nearly as dark and horrid out here as I thought it was a few hours ago." It's sort of cathartic, I guess: I let the dark side out to play and it just happens to like to play in Gotham, for instance.

[mikandra.livejournal.com]

LOL! If this is so, I think we're headed for a truckload of SF! Bring on astronomic (pun intended) rise of petrol prices, food shortages and financial and health system collapses. Coming to a screen near you real soon. LOL!

snorts. I write SF - how did you guess?

Personally, though, I think it has a lot more to do with fashion, seeing as most stuff that gets published under the moniker SF is really 'futuristic fantasy'. Don't get me wrong, I rather like futuristic fantasy. Space opera would tend to fall under this. They just use space ships instead of horses. Who cares? I rather tend to think that fantasy has hijacked the SFF genre and have a monopoly on anything that's not set in the future. I've seen (quite a bit of) SF that has 'magic' without calling it so. The only difference, as I see it, is that SF in general involves a bit more explanation on how and why things are as they are (but not always), but it most certainly involves a technology level higher than the middle ages *grin*. Otherwise, I think for at least 80% (wild guess, so don't hold me to this figure) of SF and F is remarkably similar.

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

My ex is a romance reader. She claims it gives her something she isn't getting in "real life". Our partnership was hardly a fantasy, and it was only occasionally romantic.

Similarly, when classic SF was being written, there was a universal hope for better things in our day-to-day lives. Even the middle class in the 50s & 60s wasn't getting all it wanted. I myself was a big fan of The Jetsons, and loved the GM Futurama @ the 1964 World's Fair (yeah, I'm that old). But now it IS the future, and most of us have a lot of neat stuff (computers, et al), but the rest of the world is still going to hell regardless and there are a lot more problems. So there is a future shock going on. The NY Times just had an article the other week about the popularity of steam punk as a fashion statement. So people don't want to move into the future without keeping some of the good stuff from the past. This is easily done in Fantasy.

[mindseas.livejournal.com]

Seems to me back in the times of the Space Race, people had a lot more confidence in themselves, believing that their efforts--their intellect, their labor--would make things better. Science fiction was a projection of how this improvement would come about. Now, the heart and spirit seem to have left people, and no one feels that their efforts can make any difference, so they settle for dreaming of better worlds, hence fantasy.

[sabotabby]

I agree. I think jpsorrow's theory is essentially correct but in reverse. We dream of the future when we're feeling confident and the future doesn't look like grim meathooks. We look to the past when it does.

[paradisacorbasi.livejournal.com]

No, I think you've about got it.

Also --a lot of the things predicted in sci-fi have come true, and not been all they're cracked up to be. So perhaps people are at some lizard hindbrain level thinking Sci-fi isn't all that and a bag of chips either.

[suelder.livejournal.com]

I think it's more of a reaction against technology. We have a lot of technology in our lives - computers on our desks and communicators in our pocket - our whole lives are gee whiz and we don't need to find it in our stories.

In SF, the technology gave us power. Point a tricorder at it to learn what it is, point a phaser at it to kill it. But in our lives (mine anyway) technology has made us feel *less* powerful instead of more powerful. Phone Tree Hell, anyone?

John Naisbitt, the futurist who wrote Megatrends, has pointed out that High Touch is a reaction against the coldness of high tech. Some Fantasy offers us a "kinder, gentler time" and magic to make us feel powerful. Many fantasies involve a kind of back-to-nature vibe, too.More High Touch.

I'm not sure if my babbling makes sense, but that's my two cents.

Suelder

[janni.livejournal.com]

I want to say it's because fantasy has grown and changed as a genre more than SF, which still is in some ways focused on nostalgia for the past (and for the space sciences as the be all and end all of scientific endeavor), but it's been so long since I've read the adult stuff in either genre consistently that I don't have any actual data to base this suspicion on.

[shannachie.livejournal.com]

Sorry. This is long. I apologise. Really. I do.

I think SF was always divided - roughly - into social SF and technical SF.
As for “social SF” –books depicting the way people might live together and the development (good or bad) that would lead to the (good or bad) result (Zamyatin, Orwell, Huxley etc.) were political statements. And these reflected the life as it was then or threatened to become, a comment as it were, a contorted mirror vision perhaps, if often a nightmarish one. In a way, this almost bordered on the genre of satire: you had a present state which you commented on by invention and exaggeration. Setting a story into an environment unriddled by everyday problems sharpened the perception of the actual issue presented. With the political world becoming ever more complex – and a great deal more imminent with modern communication technology - , these visions, too, have become more complex and certainly more political.
As for technical SF: Dreaming about a glistening technified future was truly nice and shiny when a radio had an on/off button and little else. In times where you need to read through 150 pp handbook in order to be able to use a goddarn phone, the personal and average allurement of technical development may just have abated a little. We are to the most part already lagging behind the actual development. I know I am. My last DVD player came with three handbooks and I screamed. Where in the sixties the vision of a fully automated and computerised spaceship would have made us starry-eyed, we now would ask “By Microsoft?” and react accordingly.
So there’s fantasy – where swords come quite without handbooks and sorcerers do not ask whether it is politically correct to curse a foe with language unsuitable for underage heroes. “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” (L.P. Hartley). The difference – once found in SF – is so much easier to attain in fantasy. Very often, the moral options are predefined. The goodies are good and the baddies are bad. And looking at them is usually enough to make a moral judgement – a presupposition inherited from the stone age and only gradually perceived as fundamentally wrong.
But it was easier. And human beings like it easy.
Orks will not tell you that you are responsible for your environment. And evil trolls will not hit you on the head because you did not separate your garbage. On the raging ocean of political correctness and everyday life, fantasy offers the deck chair and umbrella drink for those who need a time out from a world where an errant butterfly in China will condition the rainfall in Europe. The cause and effect chain is much simpler. And it would be wrong to flagellate fantasy as “mere escapism” because to understand the complex you might want to step out and look at it from outside some time.
So that is why I think fantasy is winning over SF.
And finally, I was at no time suggesting that an ork might not be a very nice and eco-friendly guy. :-)

[todd-wheeler.livejournal.com]

An argument could be made that early SF was fantasy because of the scientific facts we lacked. Now we know John Carter will not find maidens on Mars and Venus. The sky will not burn when an atomic weapon explodes. But such things were imagined.

I'd say it has become more about the money and media tie-ins. SF seemed to do well in the 80's (I could be wrong) with Star Wars/Trek franchises going strong. Likewise, fantasy is huge now because of Potter/LOTR/Narnia. In my humble opinion.

[gentlyepigrams]

I quit reading SF because I found it less enjoyable to read than fantasy. I strongly suspect this was because my ex (who was a big Heinlein reader) was pushing me at SF I found sexist and woman-unfriendly. Not looking to start the free-floating Heinlein flame war, just offering an anecdote. My $0.02, YMMV, etc.

The SF my friends read and recommend honestly seems a like Soviet art: designed to explore politics I don't care about and don't find interesting. In the Brin Star Wars (science fantasy) vs Star Trek (SF) discussion, I understand that Star Trek is more in line with my real-life politics, but I enjoy Star Wars as a story better for reasons to do with protagonism, plot structure, etc.

I suspect I could be persuaded to go back to SF if someone matched me with a book that I liked, but nobody has done so and I haven't looked for one.

(Also anecdotal: for the length of our marriage and most of the time we were dating, said ex worked at Johnson Space Center. I don't think that has to do with my SF issues, though.)

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

I don't really think it's either. I think BOTH genres deal with dissatisfaction with the world, in different ways.

Fantasy is often described as escapist - to me, that says "I don't like the world I live in, so I want something that lets me live in another world for a while." Something where we can pretend to be mighty warriors and powerful wizards, somewhere where you don't go and work in a boring box sitting at a desk.

Science fiction, on the other hand, is "speculative" in all its many sub-genres. It's all about us and our world (even if the Earth doesn't figure into the story at all). So science fiction approached "I hate this world" with "and here's how we can make it better" or even "but at least we don't have THIS." I think sci-fi is also in a bit of a slump while people work out what IS science fiction. We've progressed so far so fast, that sci-fi now has to figure out how to get ahead again.

Of course, there's some grey area, where fantasy strays into science fiction, and where science fiction wanders into fantasy. My comments aren't really about that grey area in between. :)

[darkspires.livejournal.com]

I will start this again. I had 'help' typing in the form of a fluffy foot. Anyhow, I think you are right in the state of society affecting reading tastes. I would also go a tad further on that score. To attract interest SF needs to be as mind blowing as Fantasy. The object for the reader is to lose oneself in a totally different world/environment that might be possible in the future with a stretch of the imagination,if the science presented is up to suspending the ability to disbelieve.

The problem facing SF is the huge advances in science made over the last fifty years. H.G Wells wrote of man going to the moon and in the sixties, man did. Lots of innovations have started out in the minds of the SF writers, only to be made fact by scientists. What this has done is remove the potential of believing they are about to read wonder from the minds of the reader.

I think a turnaround is possible with something totally different and off the present radar. I also think it would have to be something not straight SF but cross genre to gradually wean readers into a wider reading range. Perhaps I am totally wrong. Who can tell?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a PhD biochemist who writes fantasy. I agree with the less-scientific-knowledge theory about Golden Age SF. Its awe and wonder was more accessible to the common reader because there was more room within the limited scientific knowledge of the day to write more universally awe-inspiring settings and plots. Nowadays, scientific knowledge has gone so deep into the areas SF focuses on, and science in general has become so specialized, that I don't think its awe and wonder still entertain or even interest a wide readership. I know it doesn't entertain me, even though I have a graduate science degree and understand most of the science. But in fantasy, those restrictions from modern science don't matter--the writer can do whatever's necessary to provide awe and wonder for a mass readership without worrying about whether it's truly possible or not. The top priority can be to entertain and captivate rather than to follow science, so much of the resulting fiction is more appealing to a wider audience.

Scott H. Andrews
www.scotthandrews.com

[gryphart.livejournal.com]

Do you think it may also have something to do with markets and publishers? I mean, I can name several recent fantasy novels that are runaway bestsellers. I can't think of a piece of SF that's had the same luck in the past couple of years. It may be a self-fulfilling prophecy - because of the perception that SF isn't selling as well right now, less gets written because it may not sell, and less gets published...

Who knows. I read 'em both, and I seem to see about the same amount of good writing in both categories.

[manzai.livejournal.com]

I totally agree. I see excellent SF novels that never hit the "best seller" lists; at the same time, I see huge end-of-aisle displays devoted to fantasy books. Why didn't the SF books get that kind of treatment? That's a decision made somewhere other than at the retailer.

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

Huh. I'd come up with an analysis that's the complete reverse of yours, actually. That sf has lost popularity not because things are so good, but because things are so bad.

Back in the "golden age" of SF (which included most if not all of the 50's, and some piece of the 60's), there was a sense of hope in general. We'd just finished WWII, we'd done it by having truly awe-inspiring (if also terrifying) technology, and we were at the top of our game as a nation. We could join together and send a human being to the MOON! There was nothing we couldn't do!

Then came cyberpunk. And it reflected the beliefs of its time, too. That it didn't matter how much more advanced things got, that was only going to be for the special class of upper echelon people, and the everyday people were going to be worked harder to get less, then thrown away like disposable sponges when they were no longer useful. That large corporations and government entities were by their very nature inefficient and corrupt, not to mention soulless. That you had to be out for yourself, to get (or take) whatever you could, because no one else was going to give it to you. There were also many popular post-apocalyptic stories that gave warnings of various and sundry evils to befall us if we did not mend our ways.

And finally, we hit our time. We have all sorts of technological advances... and yet, suffer from a general malaise and feeling that none of it matters. The evils of society are perceived as being so omnipresent and crushing that it's difficult to believe any changes can make a difference. Science fiction (at least the stories I've read) is now being set in the extremely distant future, with no clear picture of how we got from now to then, because authors are not able to imagine anything that readers can believe will be possible. Every change we experience only seems to make things worse.

I actually expect that there will be a resurgence of science fiction soon, because there will be a resurgence of hopefulness. Then again, I read fantasy. :-)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Um. I don't think I have an opinion on your thesis, but I think your analysis is upside down. When I was a kid and discovering SF and fantasy - mostly SF - through the late sixties and the seventies, I thought the world was getting better and better and might ultimately prove perfectible. The last twenty years, I've had all of that innocence and most of the hope ripped away; in societal terms, I think we're going backwards, getting worse. Dumber and more selfish, year by year.

How that influences reading habits, I don't know. Except that I'm reading more SF again, and starting to write it, tho' I'm still a fantasist at heart.

[ruthannereid.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're off your rocker, although I'm not sure just how much society's sense of well-being plays into this. It's long fascinated me that the fiction world of SF/F tends to swing on a pendulum. Even in Tolkien's day, it was doing that; I think about what happened with the Star Wars era, and I see it again.

Swing to fantasy: King Arthur is suddenly the rage.
Swing to SF: Star War, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, you name it.
Swing to Fantasy: Tolkien movies, C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter.

I have no doubt it's going to swing back to SF again soon; again, I'm not really sure why, except that (my own bias showing here) people in our culture tend to go, "oh, THAT idea is so last year" and run in the opposite direction, thinking that they're being original and clever.

Wow, that came out sounded a lot more jaded than I intended. :D Anyway, there be my not-really-useful two cents!

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

I think you've got it backwards, personally. I think we produce more SF when we're optimistic about now and the future, and more fantasy when things are bad and we want to escape. Which is why fantasy is so popular now.

[garlikmongere.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem may be the current level of technology and how much its changed in the last half century. A fantasy story written 20 or 100 years ago is still readable (its just swords and magic and creatures). But reading science fiction means having to ignore all the science inconsistencies if its written more than a few years ago or if the author was unaware of or unable to understand a specialized field of science used in the book. Some SF stories seem to hold up better over time than others. And some SF stories are so far in the future that the 'technology' in the book can almost be thought of as a different form of magic (i guess, in my mind, they're almost a kind of futuristic fantasy with metallic/nano/bio/whatever magic).

Personally I tend to favor fantasy because it is an escape for me. Its simpler; there isn't as much of a need to explain a whole lot about stabbing someone with a knife or cutting them with a sword. I don't have to worry about if the technology makes sense and if the author has it correct; I can just enjoy the story.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think you're off your rocker. But I think it's more complicated than that, so I'll throw my nickel into the pot.

I'm Sam's age. I started reading SF when I was 9 or 10, back when dinosaurs still walked the earth. The kids section of the library was where most, if not all, of the Bradbury, Asimov and Heinlein books were. I ate all of them up, as well as the Danny Dunn books and lord knows what else. I loved all of it.

And every single thing in those books didn't exist and was impossible at the time. All of it. Authors I know who write SF tell me the biggest hurdle they face is thinking up something cool enough or far fetched enough it won't be outdated by the time the book is published. Technology and society move so much faster now and keep moving faster. Each new innovation opens the door to another.

That's part of it. Another part is that a big part of SF was co-opted by media. I've heard very convincing arguments that just as much SF is being written as ever, but it's shifted to TV and movies.

When I was a kid SF brought that sense of Wow and Wonder I needed and the characters were enough for me. Sometime in the late 70's I just about abandoned SF completely for Fantasy as a reader. In the search for that next cool idea, it felt to me that authors at that time sacrificed character. If I don't care about the characters in a book I don't stick with it. The Fantasy I began to find not only gave me the sense of wonder I wanted, but gave me characters that were more than central casting spacemen.

The explosion in Fantasy also started around this time if I remember correctly. More Fantasy appeared on the shelves because that was what people were buying. It gave them what they wanted.

Personally, I could find believable women characters in fantasy and the books were frequently written by women. Believable women seemed to go hand in hand with believable men. That was important to me and sadly lacking in the SF books of the time. That's changed a lot in the last five or ten years. More SF is being written by women and the focus is more on the story and the characters. I read more SF now than I have for years.

And I could be totally and utterly wrong, but that's the change I saw.

[a-r-williams.livejournal.com]

stillnotbored wrote:

"
And every single thing in those books didn't exist and was impossible at the time. All of it. Authors I know who write SF tell me the biggest hurdle they face is thinking up something cool enough or far fetched enough it won't be outdated by the time the book is published. Technology and society move so much faster now and keep moving faster. Each new innovation opens the door to another."

I agree with you on this.

I think one of the problems SF currently faces is the ability of writers to dream up new worlds. SF at one time dreamed up landing on the moon and spaceflight when man still thought it was impossible to survive space. SF dreamed of the super computer when computers were still gargantuan behemoths filling up rooms in order to do a simple math function.

I think one of the difficulties concerning the science in science fiction, is that the more abstract an idea the writer creates the more that idea will resemble magic.

Speaking of magic, I think fantasy deals more with myths about mans past. We live in an age where people are so consumed by technology that we have forgotten who we are. I think fantasy is a way to slow down, reconnect with a time when magic was real and things were unknown, but the power of human inventiveness was able to shape the world. In a way man has become his machines and fancy gadgets. Sometimes people just want to remember what they used to be

[libwitch.livejournal.com]

People are certainly not happy with things now. matter of fact, I would argue that some of the highlights of sci fi were written during the immediate post ww2 period, when things looked bright (relatively speaking). Maybe people are writing more fantasy to escape more completely from this world? Anyway, back to my point:

I think its a combination of things:
1. there are/have been huge advances in scitech in the last 50 years - more so, some would argue, then there has been in the last two centuries combined. It takes someone of a huge imagination to create something that hasn't been done or take a technology that does exist and apply it in a new and compelling way.

2. Perhaps because of this, a good scifi writer would have to be someone who knows their stuff, science wise, and also be able to spin a really good yarn . Thats two traits that is hard to find in one person

3. This leaves open the possibility of the genre of cultural/religious scifi (change something about the human condition as opposed to technology), which is perhaps not as much fun to write. And this is also often interspered with fiction. The Sparrow is a good example - it is considered to be a shining example of sci fi in this genre, but many people class it in fiction.

And....

Fantasy is perhaps a pretty easy category to define. But sci-fi is not. i know how I define sci fi - I agree with Robert J Sawyers definitions of sci fi vs fantasy myself, but ask a dozen people and get a dozen answers....

And because of this, it gets watered down. There is a lot of "sci-fi" that also gets mixed in/cross-over'd with fiction, horror, and even romance. that doesn't help the genre any.

[popfiend.livejournal.com]

I meant to pimp this before.

Mind if I do so now?

[jpsorrow.livejournal.com]

Feel free to pimp away. All of my LJ entries are pimpable. (My books too, if you feel so inclined. *grin*)

[jpsorrow.livejournal.com]

PS--I only found your LJ recently, but I have to say it's highly entertaining. Glad to have found you.

[popfiend.livejournal.com]

Thank you sir.

That is much appreciated.

[ulitave.livejournal.com]

You know this is a book by itself, right?

I think a few things are happening. One, our country has taken a definite anti-science and anti-intellectual turn. Being unschooled and unintelligent is seen by many as a plus now.

Also, fantasy examines the myths that fuel our society. (Sci-fi tends to engage the future.) So I think we're seeing more fantasy because there's more interest in the meta-story of our society. Who we are as a people, how did we get to this place, what values should be upheld/denied, etc.

Finally, fantasy engages the past. I don;t think we're producing more fantasy these days (or memoirs, a huge topic at my school) because the future is too grim to contemplate. I think we're writing these books because deep down, we all know that the American empire is ending. We have a hard time looking beyond ourselves.

[tygerz.livejournal.com]

I too think you have it backwards- I think SF is marks a confident willingness to explore our future and F marks a desire to stop worrying about fixing the world and instead just escape into fairy tales...

a lot of the older sf was socially and politically motivated- cautionary tales and speculation with messages and warnings- not only predicting great new worlds and possibilities but also trying to help us see our way there...
a lot of that has fallen away and the bulk of both sf & f I've seen recently seems to be more just about entertainment and watching someone else save the world for us in an epic tale of good v. evil... rather like we've given up on trying to make things better and are just into avoiding issues and escaping into a fantasy where we can sit back and watch some hero make things right.

kindof reflects the trend towards an apparent belief in entitlement v. personal responsibility too

I'm rather curious about the how/why/when of your 'the world is better now' theory? what exactly have we successfully fixed?

[jpsorrow.livejournal.com]

I answered your last question in my next blog post . . . sort of. (I did another post rather than answer everyone individually here.) I'm not sure what was successfully "fixes" since then, but I seem to have a more positive outlook on the world to day than some people, at least based on the responses to this post. But that's why I asked for comments. To see what other people thought. *grin*

[dragontdc.livejournal.com]

I think part of it may be (especially with "hard" SF) that our technological development has gotten to the point where it is getting hard for writers to postulate future tech and keep up the "gee-whiz factor". Look at how dated the original Star Trek TV show seems. Heck, look at Star Wars where the control rooms have banks of blinking lights and computer terminals and communicators that look clunky and crude to eyes that have seen the BlackBerry and Bluetooth Phones. We are starting to push Clarke's Law with speculative Sci-Fi, because to keep that cutting-edge-of science feel, we start gettng into quantum-based theories and exploiting those gives results nearly indistinguishable from the magic of pure fantasy. And the window of acceptance for techno-babble is narrowing rapidly as new discoveries pile up. The techno-babble of even the more recent Star Trek shows rings hollow (sometimes absurdly so) today if you're at all following science.

All this makes writing good SF harder and harder, and Fantasy easier by comparison. Myself, I like a good science-fantasy. Give me starships with plausible drives and aliens and heroes with magical or psychic powers.

[airycat.livejournal.com]

Came over at popfiend's rec. Fascinating topic!

I wish I had all my old SF magazines. I remember an Asimov's editorial by Robert Silverberg in which he discussed this and his own shift from SF to F. I remember him saying it was primarily a financial decision for him because SF was getting hard to sell. Unfortunately, other than that, about the only thing I remember is that he pointed out that a lot of hard SF of the time (50's-60's) was tech oriented, rather than plot or character oriented (not the exemplary SF, but a large volume of hard SF in general). Women were minor figures, mostly sex objects, if they existed at all. This created a negative perception of SF in general. Women were putting up with this attitude much less in real life and didn't want in in fiction either. And women were becoming more of a force as consumers. And more of them started writing in these genres.

Something that caught my attention as I read the comments above is that often references are made to movies (and TV). With Star Trek and Star Wars, the books came after and sell well because the market is already there. I think that the visual media has a major influence over the print media. A lot of people who aren't/weren't particularly readers would read something about or similar to something they saw and liked, which further influenced what was being accepted for publication. Plus we're bombarded with a lot more advertising for visual media than for print media. Outside of this visual media influence, I don't think SF was a very big genre, whereas fantasy has been around forever, but even fantasy wasn't as major as it seems now. Books like The Lord of the Rings were always popular among a select group, but it was the movies that made them commonly known to people. That Harry Potter quickly became a movie series wasn't only the movie industry's marketing. The publishers knew how it would help sales. Some people will become fans of a genre, but others are merely following the fad. The guys who crunch the numbers for the TV, movie and publishing industries want to ride a fad 'til it wears out.

Something else that is an interesting influence, and you gamers can verify or refute this, is rpg's. According to my son, several of his games are merely a new, interactive form of the novel (after print and movie forms). Most of these that I've seen are fantasy (the Final Fantasy series being the first to come to mind) or a fantasy SF. Are there games without "powers?"

Everything ebbs and flows. What is popular in one area influences another. And this isn't merely in forms of entertainment. Science and technology aren't regarded as highly right now as they were in the 60's. "New Age" seems to many of us the closest reality to a fantasy, taking in, as it does, the powers of the mind, a resurrection of Gaia, natural religions (or a resurgence in all religions, some would argue).

I don't suppose this actually answers "Why," but it is part of the answer. This ebb and flow is just the way things go. When we're sated with the current flow, it will ebb and another flow will come in. In general, the pendulum metaphor of opposites works, but in so specific an area, it could be something quite different.

I'll be thinking about this for a while.

[gumnut.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for such a fascinating discussion!

I'd add my two cents, but most angles have already be covered and it's a ghastly hour of the morning here, so whatever my brain might come up with would not do the discussion justice.

In the meantime, I hope you don't mind if I friend you. Your writing stimulates my brain :D

Nutty
(off the edge, but learning to fly)

[jpsorrow.livejournal.com]

Friend away . . . as long as you don't mind me friending you back. *grin*

[gumnut.livejournal.com]

Mind? You're most certainly welcome :D

Though, I have to apologise for my journal's current lack of its usual writing pursuits. My aspirations have been slightly side-tracked by my brand new daughter and I am just now starting to get back into writing a few words every now and again. There will be writing in the future!

And it is great to meet you!

Nutty
(getting there)

[jpsorrow.livejournal.com]

New daughters can do that. If you're getting back into writing, check out the community novel_in_90, where you try to write 750 words a day and report to the community for congrats or for mocking. I use it to help keep me on track, maybe it would work for you too.