Fantasy has increased as a share of the total books coming out but as an avid sci-fi reader I disagree that there’s significantly less sci-fi around than in the past, there’s just a lot more fantasy.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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A lot of sci-fi read as fantasy, including a lot of the competent man genre.
The data the article used to support the thesis is a decrease in the use of specific words that only really apply to space opera style subgenres of sci-fi. Why would cyberpunk include "spaceship" or "planet"?
This article says more about its author's narrow view of SF than it does about the state of SF.
At least the author showed their work? They had a thesis, and set about finding a way to support it, careful methodology be damned.
"I tried Really Hard to find a categorization of SciFi novels, but in the end I just searched for some generic terms limited to the titles."
I'd like the author to know that they missed Hail Mary.
Yeah, it's really bad methodology
Why would cyberpunk include "spaceship" or "planet?"
Almost every cyberpunk novel I have read has space travel (typically at the same level we have rn IRL and reserved for the elite), and all of them took place on a planet. So it's weird if they didn't have those words at least some of the time.
I feel like this might overestimate the decline if there is also a shift in what sci-fi titles tend to look like, which feels plausible to me given that titles follow trends. Anecdotes aren't super informative granted, but anecdotally, virtually none of the more recent sci-fi media that ive seen contains those keywords in the title (and most of the exceptions are newer additions to older franchises), and most titles I can think of with them are quite old. This need not mean sci-fi has given up on starships or whatever, but it might imply that, while we are still a long way off from building one, the concept of such things is no longer new, and so merely implying that a work features them is no longer enough to make it stand out.
Can't help but disagree with the premise of the article. Sci-fi writing is far from dead, it just does not need starships anymore. The "sci" part has gotten more grounded not in terms of what is realizable, but of where in society do we need it or is it harming us.
In all fairness, it might have to do with the fact that the technology we created born from the old sci-fi stories has been made to be oppressing or weapons, and we got scared to give new ideas. As someone who grew up with good old sci-fi stories and hope for a future of space exploration and a better future only to get this shit show, I get why we would see less new stuff.
Isn't that where dystopian scifi comes in?
I recommend reading and listening to utopian sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson. This is a great talk, I found his take on dystopian fiction pretty convincing.
I think the 20th and 21st century are a lot and we sort of have to take it in first, culturally.
I've seen "sci-fi" besides some twists, I'm not sure what the genre currently has to offer that's not either fulfilled or actively being worked on. Or we have no idea how to even approach the issue from scientific basics.
Like, give me a good sci-fi "what if" and I'm in. I just don't expect to find one in a bookstore.
the linked article is much more accurate in its analysis than this clickbait commie doomer lemmy headline