I have been seeing the trend of Fantasy slowly taking over SF for a while, maybe as long as 30 years :(

Real Science based SF seems to have disappeared completely, at least based upon the only Book Store left in my area, Barnes and Noble.

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flohofwoe 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> Barnes and Noble

...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced trash.

The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that happened to music basically).

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Ekaros 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Not to forget being linked to main-stream publishers that have different editorial goals compared to era when these works were released. Not saying there were not biases back then. But now the biases are different and thus the published output is as well.

	▲	pfdietz 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There was also the "death of the mid-list" which cut out a lot of SF books. The Thor Power Tool decision in the US had a big effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commiss... "The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in order to realize a taxable loss. These books would previously have been kept in stock but written down to reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to sell." Today, I understand mass market paperbacks are dying.