Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
As someone who has been reading SF since the mid 70's, I don't think the issue is so much people reading less, at least people that I know who read, don't read any less. To a certain extent, it's a chicken and egg thing. The number of books that I'm interested in seems to decrease, which means that I have to look in other genres to find books to read. Ever since the 80's, SF has been in a decline, with authors moving into other genres or dropping out of writing entirely. Right now, the SF/F genres seems to be dominated by pseudo romance novel writers, a la Laurell Hamilton. Of course, that style writing has it's own set of fans and appears to be successful, but I think that it drives out the traditional SF writer and their fans.
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I don't know if decline is the right word, exactly, though a lot of the writing has been more pessimistic and exploring the darker side of human nature and society. I've become tired of that, myself. As for authors leaving the field, that's often because they can't make enough income from writing SF, and they find they can do better in other genres, or other careers. There does seem to be more stratification: the romance-SF (Asaro, Lee&Miller, etc.), the military SF (Drake, Weber), the steampunk and gritty realism SF, the hard SF and space opera.
A more specific problem, in my view (though probably not unrelated) is that the audience is graying. We're not picking up enough young readers. Lots of kids read, and fantasy remains popular, but traditional SF does not seem to draw the young readers the way it once did. Not that they don't like the genre, I don't think--but they seem to get their fix in movies, anime, manga, graphic novels, etc., more than in the traditional form of SF novels. For the writer whose skills are honed in novels, this presents something of a challenge. A lot of us are still trying to figure out how to adapt.