Quote from: Pierce InverarityIt seems to me that the two major and massively popular subgenres scifi has produced after 1980, cyberpunk and transhumanism, contradict this statement.

Massively popular among geeks, maybe. Certainly not New York Times Bestseller popular.

I've worked in used and new bookstores - one a major Canadian chain. Fantasy outsells science fiction by a factor of about 5 to 1. Among younger readers, it's probably closer to 10 to 1. You have to understand that the top selling authors account for a huge amount of the total fiction sales. One figure I saw showed that in any given year, 30 authors account for over half of all fiction sales. Fantasy usually has several authors in that group (Martin, Rowling, Tolkien, Kay, Salvatore, Hobb, Jordan, Pratchett, etc.). The number of sci-fi authors who crack that group is much smaller. Even geek-gods like China Mieville don't achieve broad mass-market appeal. A hack like Salvatore has sold far, far more books than Mieville or Ian M. Banks.

One of the biggest reasons is more than half of fantasy readers are now female. Very few women read scifi. So the potential audience for any fantasy novel is more than twice as large as for a scifi novel.

And I agree with the comments upthread that anti-modern romanticism is a much stronger current in pop culture than technological idealism. Scifi is still the purview of geeks (mostly geeky men). Fantasy has gone mainstream.

Quote from: HaffrungScifi is still the purview of geeks (mostly geeky men). Fantasy has gone mainstream.

More, (written) SF is the purview of geeks over 35. Cyperpunk and transhumanism notwithstanding, there has been no real replenishment for the older SF authors (Asimov, Clarke, Silverberg, Niven et al.) and no replenishment of their audience either. That bird has flown. I'm tempted to say that people just watch TV these days, but people do read fantasy.

Quote from: Akrasia:confused:

I've seen this mentioned many times, yet I do not know what it is.

Save me from my ignorance, someone?

Encounter Critical is a freely downloadable role-playing game which pretended to have been written in 1979 - I think the actual author promoted it as something he'd found and scanned in.

He went to the trouble of making a deliberately poor-quality stapled and photocopied physical document and then scanning that in - to the extent of having pretend rust on the staples from memory.

It seems to be intended to be the ultimate "system from 1979 that attracts well-deserved mockery, but when you play games that fix its glaring flaws, somehow they're less fun." It has Wookies and Klingons as playable races (with one letter of their name changed) as well as dwarves and elves, and it's full of bizarrely unsupported claims that it's realistic and deeply-researched.

Quote from: HaffrungMassively popular among geeks, maybe. Certainly not New York Times Bestseller popular.

Not my point right now, which is rather that cyberpunk and transhumanism have been popular among the scifi readership, not the general one. The new thing I did learn here is that fantasy is now mainstream.

Given that, isn' it rather the case that the readership of scifi has stayed the same, give or take, while that of fantasy has expanded? Honest question, I don't know the answer.

But what still needs to be shown by those who claim it is that the scifi readership actually migrated to fantasy, and for reasons that are to do with some actual letdown on its "promises." Neuromancer sold like hotcakes, so there's pleasure and sales to be gained from dystopia.

Just to be clear, I'm not here to defend 21st-century scifi. I stopped reading cyberpunk at least ten years ago, and I find transhumanism in general unreadable. But these genres didn't disappoint me as prediction, they disappointed me as literature. They're boring.

QuoteIt not a question of naivety, on the contrary. Sci-fi and the technological optimism it accompanied have let us down, People really thought it will be all better. It promised something it couldn't deliver, hence the disappointment.

I'm afraid that people who thought Foundation was some kind of roadmap to the future, and then were disappointed that it wasn't, will have to be called naive. More so if they think they can hide from modernity in the world of R.A. Salvatore.

Quote from: PremierNevertheless, the half century after the golden age of sci-fi has seen World War 2 with the Atomic Bomb, Vietnam with Napalm, the Cold War and a hundred other ways in which technology has made our lives worse, while the benefits of progress were much less than previously expected. Thus the audience has gradually turned away from the naive "technology will create a better future" philosophy of sci-fi, since it just no longer reflected the to world as they perceived it.

And that's exactly why fantasy has been on the upswing for so long - it offers an avenue of escapism towards a never-has-been past.

Well this is a spot on good reason why sci-fi RPGs are less popular than fantasy RPGs. It is also the reason why RPGs became popular in the first place. There is more to it than that though...

If SF can neither be defined as narratives of the future, nor as technological fiction and if it is not realism, naturalism or myth, then what exactly is it?

SF works are not empirical because they describe the outside world as the writer experiences it, they are empirical in their methodology: they are constructed so that they are compatible with a scientifically plausible empirical world, a world where scientific investigation is possible and fruitful. "It is the premise of science fiction that anything shown shall in principle be interpretable empirically and rationally", states Lem. That is to say the SF story must be written in the spirit of empirical knowledge, with what Rabkin terms "the scientific habits of mind." Popkin prescribes that the only source of "information about the world" available "is the impressions that we gain through our senses". The fiction the SF writer creates must be empirical to those beings within it.

There are more people pretending to work on science, and less people actually working on science. Plus the applications of the science being worked on, isn't being applied to science, but is being applied to commerce instead, with all the psychological traps that implies, and few more that are not yet being observed or documented.

It's not a deliberate deception by the scientists, more like a deliberate attempt at gaining a monopoly in the economic realm at the expense of science.

Unfortunately, Sci-Fi is still a primary literature of change...

It's quite a thing to live in fear, isn't it?
~ Bladerunner 1982

Quote from: Calithena3. I believe that things have changed, and that fantasy is now substantially more popular than science fiction, but that back in the early to mid-seventies, science fiction was substantially more popular than fantasy. D&D actually bears a significant part of the responsibility for this shift.

This is very true.  Before LoTR exploded in the 60s, fantasy practically didn't exist as anything other than a children's genre or pulp material. And even after LoTR's arrival, sci-fi was still huge in comparison to fantasy all through the 70s.

In a very real sense, it was D&D and the horde of fantasy books inspired by it that helped shift that weight in "pop" (ie. trash) literature so that fantasy now outstripped sci-fi.  Mind you, its all just licensed retreaded literary-garbage nowadays, so its not like it matters much.

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