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As said above, SF waxes and wanes. There is a reason that many mid-list authors write in a number of different genres.
When I first started buying SF, back in the mid 70's (I started reading several years earlier when I was in grade school), SF&F was under going a big revival, you had such authors as Roger Zelazny, James Hogan, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Michael Moorcock and a host of others. This burst lasted up through the mid 80's and then by the early 90's, the market for SF&F decreased quite a bit.
It was still being written and there were still some very good active authors, David Weber and Lois Bujold for example, but the number of new books definitely dropped quite a bit with only a few publishers really pushing it (Baen, Tor). The 00's have seen the paranormal SF start to dominate the book shelves partially driven by the success of Laurell Hamilton's books starting from the mid 90s.
Obviously it doesn't break out nearly as cleanly as there is a lot of overlap. You still have some top authors writing who have been writing continuously since the 80's. There is quite a bit of hard SF and military SF being written - David Weber, Jack Campbell, David Drake are writers who come to mind, and there are certainly others. But the trends come and go.
I think it will be interesting to see how things break out in the ebook world with SF&F. There is a pretty big group of writers, who have enough fan appeal and name recognition that they could easily make it as an independent like some of the music groups do now. It should be interesting.
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