“Is science fiction dying?” I posted a blog asking this same question last year – hoping to rile up some hardcore science fiction readers I know – but instead of sparking a firestorm, all I found were literally hundreds of readers who all but accepted the fact that science fiction was already dead and gone.
I’ve read some great articles on this topic since then – and talked with a lot of knowledgeable people – and I thought it would be a good idea to revisit this question, which, in my opinion, is hugely significant relating to the future of genre fiction.
As a longtime genre fiction book reviewer and a moderator for BarnesandNoble.com’s Fantasy/Science Fiction and Paranormal Fantasy forums, I’ve asked myself questions like this countless times over the last two or three decades: Is science fiction really dying? And if so, why? Over the last 30 years – during which I’ve worked as a bookstore manager, editor and a book reviewer – I’ve seen the number of science fiction works released on a yearly basis decrease dramatically while the number of fantasy novels (especially in paranormal/urban fantasy) increase exponentially. But even more telling is what I’ve witnessed over the years moderating BarnesandNoble.com’s forums. When I feature a work from a new fantasy author – like Lamentation by Ken Scholes or N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms or The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss – readers typically show up in droves to talk about the book and discuss the characters, the themes, their favorite sequences, etc.
When Ken’s debut novel Lamentation was featured in March of 2009, for example, the thread was wildly popular and has almost 7,000 visits to date! But when I feature a science fiction novel, even if it’s a critically acclaimed masterwork like Paolo Bacigalupi’s Nebula Award winning The Windup Girl, I’m lucky to get a handful of people to read it and post comments. When I recently featured Norman Spinrad’s He Walked among Us in May – Spinrad is a SF legend and he considered He Walked Among Us his “magnum opus” – the thread barely received 300 hits but that same month the paranormal fantasy release Stormwalker by Allyson James had more than 1,000 visits.
So why aren’t people reading science fiction like they used to? Quality or lack thereof is definitely not the issue here – there are exceptional science fiction novels being released every year. It’s something much deeper, something more culturally significant…
In 2008, George R.R. Martin – who is a master of both science fiction and fantasy and is currently busy with his epic fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire – was interviewed on Public Radio International and was asked a similar question about the future of science fiction. He began his response by stating the obvious: that science fiction is struggling commercially and that “it’s not nearly as popular as it was.”
But when he was asked why science fiction wasn’t as popular as it was just a few decades ago, his response was – in my opinion – profoundly enlightening and spot on.
“…social changes over the last 50 years have made the future something that we no longer want to go visit the way we did when I was a kid. Back in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s when science fiction was perhaps as popular as it has ever been, we really had a lot of belief in the future. I mean, we couldn’t wait to get to the future. The future was going to be much better than anything in the present. We were going to have robots and flying cars and all of these labor saving devices and we were going to take our holidays on the moon and space stations and we were going to go to the stars. When they took polls, everybody gave the answer, ‘yes, yes, my kids are going to have a better life than I do and my grandkids are going to have an even better life than they do and we’re going to go into space and we’re going to go to the stars…
…people take polls now and most people think that their children are not going to have better lives than they do; they think that their children are going to have worse lives. They’re worried about things like ecological problems, global warming, the growing instability of the world with nuclear proliferation, more and more nations having the bomb…. We had the Cold War when I was growing up, we could duck and cover and stuff like that but there was still in some ways more optimism about what the future was like. So I think this is part of the stuff that has affected science fiction. People no longer believe on some level that the future is going to be a good place and they prefer to read about other times and other places that are maybe not so scary as science fiction.”
And Martin’s response – particularly the last line – exemplifies what I’ve been hearing from regulars in the book clubs. It’s all about escapism. Fantasy is what people are reading now. Fantasy writers are today’s literary rock stars – Laurell K. Hamilton, J.K. Rowling, Kim Harrison, Brandon Sanderson, Jim Butcher, Cherie Priest, Ken Scholes, R.A. Salvatore, Charlaine Harris, etc.
Late last year, editor and author Mark Charan Newton wrote an article entitled “Why Science Fiction Is Dying & Fantasy Fiction Is The Future,” in which he stated: “There is no Schadenfreude; I take no pleasure in holding this viewpoint: the Science Fiction genre is dying. Don’t spit your coffee at the computer screen just yet. I’m talking predominantly in terms of sales over time. I know all you belle-lettristic types don’t like to think about anything but Art, but units-shifted is a factor that matters. It is what shapes the literature industry…”
In the article, he points out some interesting factors that may explain in some way science fiction’s slow demise:
• More women than men read books and, according to Newton, women read more fantasy fiction than science fiction. “They are driving forces behind sales of literature, and it is shaping the genre landscape. Women matter.”
• Culture has caught up with our imagination – that visionary, sense of wonder in science fiction is gone. “There is as much sensawonder in an Apple conference as there is in a novel.”
• Literary fiction is eating up SF. “Jeanette Winterson, Toby Litt, Margaret Atwood – the ‘literary’ brigade are taking SF ideas, recycling them as something new, packaging them for mainstream tastes. And more importantly, dragging the ideas to a section of the bookstore or readership that aren’t likely to visit the SF section.”
• The popularity of fantasy movies like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings has created a new generation of fantasy readers. “This younger audience has taken to the blogosphere with aplomb, and run with it. The community grows daily. Just look how many more fantasy blogs and forums exist over those for SF. SF has not received anything like this monumental influence in culture…”
I couldn’t agree more with Newton about young readers growing up as fantasy fans. Just look at pop culture – The Twilight saga, Buffy, True Blood, Charmed, The Vampire Diaries, etc. When I was growing up in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, I was nourished with nothing but science fiction, it seems – Star Trek, The Jetsons, Land of the Lost, Logan's Run, Planet of the Apes, etc. It is definitely a different world today…
In a B&N.com interview in 2008, Orson Scott Card expressed similar feelings and remarked that science fiction is “no longer a cutting-edge genre – the edge is now in fantasy.”
Interestingly enough, Newton’s statements reflect those in a short essay Martin wrote in 1996 entitled “On Fantasy,” which beautifully describes why we love fantasy – and it may also explain why science fiction is experiencing an extended season of wither…
“The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.
Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?
We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to Middle-earth.”
Do I believe science fiction is dying? No, not exactly. I’d call it an evolution, albeit a painful one. A quote from a paranormal fantasy I just read – A Wild Light by Marjorie M. Liu – comes to mind: “Destruction and rebirth go hand in hand…the two are the same. Everything breaks. When broken, born again.”
Science fiction will become popular again, I have no doubt about that, though I believe it will be in a modified form. I can see the beginnings of a transformation happening right now – science fiction is fusing together with a variety of other genre fiction elements, a cross-fertlization of sorts, to create a hybridized kind of read. Although none of the following releases are categorized as science fiction, I see undeniable science fiction elements in many of today’s bestsellers – Justin Cronin’s The Passage, Ken Scholes’s The Psalms of Isaak saga, Mira Grant’s Feed, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Marjorie Liu’s Hunter Kiss novels, to name just a few.
Because of all of the aforementioned reasons, science fiction may seem to be on its last legs. But even as some prepare to lower its coffin into the ground, I’m still hopeful and have not yet prepared an elegy. That’s the beauty of genre fiction – it’s always evolving. Darwin very well could’ve been talking about genre fiction instead of species when he stated: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Or, on second thought, maybe it’s humankind who needs to change, not science fiction – instead of seeking out literary escapism maybe we should begin looking forward once again...
Paul Goat Allen has been a full-time book reviewer specializing in genre fiction for almost the last two decades and has written more than 6,000 reviews for companies like Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, and BarnesandNoble.com. In his free time, he reads.
Science fiction like all other genre's falls in and out of fashion. What was popular in the 1950's and 60's gets rediscovered and reinvented by later generations. Book genre's fall in and out of fashion like everything else.
Nothing is new. Everything gets rediscovered over time.
It is completely understandable that the current generation read fantasy, using the genre as a literary head in the sand approach to the problems of the day.
But, subjects like global warming, population explosion, modern day warfare, famine and exploitation in the third world are all subjects for future science fiction novels, not fantasy, which to my mind is why the current reading fashion decrees that fantasy is, for the moment, king.
Is science fiction dead? No, merely taking a snooze, waiting for fashion and fads to change once more, putting science fiction back where it belongs at the forefront of literary exploration Paul. 
With all the hoopla over Windup Girl, I took advantage of Nightshade's giveaway of it several months back. I found it to be a morose disjointed mess of unsympathetic characters.
If that is what passes for a "critically acclaimed masterwork" these days, then maybe the genre deserves to die.
Ok enough bombthrowing...
I think Mr Newton is dead on, but I would add one more thing:
Politics
