Quote:
Originally Posted by niggle
I don't know whether this is any more than an unqualified personal observation (because I certainly haven't done any research) but there seems to have been in the last 30 years a huge expansion in the number of books published in the broad "fantasy" genre. When I was a kid back in the sixties the published output in "fantasy" seemed fairly small compared with science fiction. Now it seems to me there is a lot more fantasy (including all the sub-genres) than science-fiction. Does anyone else share that perception?
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Pretty much everybody.
Fantasy exploded in the late 70's and early 80's.
For a time you couldn't walk into a bookstore without running into a half-dozen new fantasy trilogies every week. (Always trilogies, always Tolkienesque--publishers wanted the next LoTR.) After a while the genre started to mature and we started getting new voices and tropes and the genre moved on. Better quality and readability when everybody wasn't trying to be Tolkien or Brooks.
Nowadays the sparkly vamp fad has started to fade just as the tough monster-hunting cute chick fad has faded into a background sub-genre. The good news is the next publisher fad isn't SF or Fantasy but watered down S&M. So we should have a few years of relative peace.
