Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I suspect we're seeing the death-throes of SF (not SFF, though) as a genre, because " science fiction is the one really distinctive form of fiction created by industrial civilization. ... the sales of science fiction novels peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then began a decline that still continues, and a genre that had once exercised a potent gravitational force on the collective imagination turned back into just another option in the smorgasbord of mass-produced popular entertainment." |
Stanislaw Lem quit writing SciFi because he saw the early promise of space exploration evaporating to what we see today. It's pretty clear that we're not making much progress, and there isn't much political will to do so, so expansion into space has dropped from the zeitgeist to idle fantasy. It's no surprize that many have turned elsewhere to do their dreaming.