Less science fiction is being written than ever, and the fault does not have the lack of ideas or the lack of readers

Literary science fiction interests less than ever. Devoured by subgenres of fantasy with more popular pull, such as Romantasythe books that were previously guaranteed Best-Sellers are now only oddities, samples of a genre that is disappearing from libraries. Why has a genre that has been so popular now languishes? What has changed since a couple of decades ago was the king of the mambo of fantasy?

Sales fall. In an article on reading habits, The Washington Post revealed A singular fact: only 12% of readers are interested in science fiction. The figures accompany that fall, to the point that in what we have been in, if we analyze the sales figures in the United States which provides publishers weeklyonly a gender book has sneaked into the top 10 of each year: ‘Ballad of singing birds and snakes’, very significantly the sequel to one of the great successes of the previous decade, ‘The Games of Hunger’.

The power of Young adult. The science fiction had never sold as much as in the previous two decades, and all thanks to the dystopic and youth variants of the genre: 12 books sneaked into the best-sellers lists of the Decade of 10 and in the first ten years of the centurywith sagas such as ‘The Hunger Games’, ‘Divergent’, ‘The Host’ and ‘A Time Fold’. There was also space for adult science fiction, no doubt pushed by this receptive state for the genre, especially works of big names such as Stephen King or Michael Crichton.

And now, al Romantasy. What makes all the meaning: simply the same readers who augated youth dystopias are now interested in genres such as light fantasy and Romantasy… And that is what occupies the highest positions. In the last two years, books and sagas of the genre such as ‘Alas de Blood’, ‘A court of roses and thorns’ or ‘blood and ash’ have almost totally dominated (especially the 2023 and 2024) lists. Authors such as Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J. Maas repeat, year after year, with a frequency that was only available to the aforementioned King or Crichton.

Media avalanche. This change in interest within the fantastic genre of readers who propel sales is the most immediate reason for the descent of science fiction in sales lists, but there are other more endemic causes, not so apparent. One of them is the media ecosystem: The public’s taste for science fiction stories is satisfied with films and series, faster and less demanding to consume. As contradictory that may seem, the absolute relevance of fantasy and science fiction in the mainstream audiovisual has played against books: Who wants to read science fiction sagas if In the cinema it has it embodied more spectacularly?

The dystopia is here. From a more sociological perspective, interest in science fiction may have dissipated because reality has advanced to any fiction. It is a recurring bitter joke to talk about how reality has exceeded before planned Future pessimistsas those presented at ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘The maid’s story‘. With the Truncated future sensation That it occurs to generation Z, it is normal for the romantic escapism of ‘blood wings’ to be preferable to reminders that ‘1984’ has come true by advancing on the right and without caught the irony.

Creative crisis. To all this is added the creative crisis that crosses current culture and the fantastic genre in particular. Most of the productions that They triumph at the box office and in the book sales They are sequelae or belong to franchises. Science fiction has always been a genre that has fed on risk, innovation and new ideas and with this panorama, it is normal to be stagnant. A classic like Orson Scott Card (‘Ender’s game’) in an article entitled ‘Are we facing the end of science fiction?‘: It is said that “all the really good stories that were possible within science fiction have been written.”

Is there salvation? Orson Scott Card himself details in that article that a possible problem of gender is that science gives rise to less narrative formats, such as space trips or stellar wars. Now science focuses more on “theoretical, or sub-psychopic, or trans-cosmic” aspects. But in those sections where authors such interesting and renovating such as Greg Egan arise, Liu Cixin either Ted Chiangperhaps away from the tastes of the general public, but more than trained to make the genre remain alive. And perhaps that is the key: what else does it give whether or not you enter the supervent lists, while the genre continues to innovate

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