It wasn't that long ago that all of SFF only got one half an aisle at the back of the store. And a front table labeled Science Fiction & Fantasy in a chain store, the one that Mark complained about not stocking much science fiction for the holidays? A true rarity if ever back then. I certainly can't remember one existing before 1995.
Again, in the youth market, SF was
never very present. It was always a tiny minority, which was often complained about, but SF fans were very centered on the adult market. Fantasy has always dominated the youth market, long before Harry Potter. But right now, there's a growing body of YA SF, some of it selling incredibly well. YA SF is not shrinking as a sub-field, although most of it won't be considered hard SF.
In the adult field, the percentage of the audience which is female has risen dramatically in the last twenty years. I've gotten to see it happen, and it's pretty much night and day. There are also more female SF writers than there were before, and they aren't confined primarily to a feminist SF ghetto. So I can't agree with you that SF has not made significant progress with females. What I can tell you is that females get told a lot about what we are not interested in. We're not interested in games (we make up a lot of the gaming market now,) we're not interested in medicine and science (we make up a lot of all but a few sectors of machismo medicine and science now,) we're not into action movies (and yet the female audience has been responsible for much of the blockbuster audiences for the last fifteen years.) Basically, without the female audience that is supposedly so lukewarm about SF, SF might well be dying now. Because the women keep coming in more numbers. It's, again, the guys who left, and they are leaving all of fiction, even fantasy, not just SF.
As for the field overall, again, it took a hit in the 1990's because all fiction took a hit in the 1990's because of the wholesale market shrinkage and consolidation of booksellers. Fantasy stayed afloat and then in the mid-1990's came Harry Potter and the rapid expansion of the youth market in which
fantasy was already dominant. That success helped fantasy expand its adult market too, and the influx of suspense readers into contemporary fantasy helped too. Some of those readers are now drifting over into SF. You may have noticed that SF mystery has been increasing lately.
I think pretty much everyone is in agreement that SF ran into some stumbling blocks in the oughts, or at least was having a slow recovery, most notably a lack of larger hits that lead to attention and film adaptations. But some of that seems to be turning around, and there's a lot of interest in SF. If you constantly measure SF against fantasy, again, you'll be disappointed. But that's not, again, how the fiction market works. The sectors don't compete, they overlap, and SF being tied to fantasy has actually helped it over the years.
Your bookstore is not seeing SF sell well where they are, and so they are stocking less -- or what is also possible, moving a lot of titles to general fiction. My local giant chain has a nice large SF section, but a much smaller romance section. But I'm not assuming from it that romance is dying. You also have to look at what is going in general fiction, and we've got quite a lot of SF there and it's doing well. There seems to be a viewpoint that general fiction SF takes away from the category market, as if there were two SF cities and you can only choose one, but it doesn't work that way.
Recently, we got word that Gary Gibson got a three book SF deal with Tor UK. Kim Stanley Robinson has a new novel, Galileo's Dream, and Connie Willis is back with Blackout, both being heavily promoted in the U.S. anyway by Bantam Spectra. Orbit UK is putting out Michael Cobley. There's more SF horror going on. Tor U.S. is going far future with Tony Gonzales' Eve and the Human Story. Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-Up Girl, from rising small press Night Shade Books, is making all the media's Best of the Year lists. These are not death throes so far.
Yes, written SF is nothing in terms of financials or distribution compared to the games and movie markets. But written SF was never comparable to the games and movie markets. It used to be a niche market. For all its success,
written fantasy doesn't make as much money as the game and movie markets. And to think that written fiction should is an unrealistic benchmark.
So with all due respect to Mark's front table, and your store, and de Vries' attempts to promote his positivity anthology (which I hope is a great success,) I'm more interested in a wider picture. The whole market has a decline in sales of all fiction because of the recession, except for a slight increase in youth fiction, which includes youth SF, which is growing. The signs in the whole market for SF, including more SF titles on publisher lists than in 2005, do not indicate death. In 2008, before the recession, US sales of SF went up.
I understand that people are going to disagree with me. They've been disagreeing for over fifty years. By that strategy, if they're right and I'm wrong, SF still has another fifty years to go before kicking the bucket. So Neal, you've got time.
