Why doesn't sci fi have the mass appeal that fantasy has?

[CmdrShepN7]

I've only come across one Babylon 5 fan irl and they fit the basement dweller image to a t. It would be nice if more normal people got into sci fi and space.

Remember when the Discovery Channel had stuff like this?

And the Science Fiction channel!

Epic space adventure!

replaced by wrestling, ghosts, and shark tornadoes!

Why did TV become so vapid and stupid in the early 2010s? Why did we stop dreaming of a better future for humanity?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Not sure where you’re hanging around but I can’t move for some kind of Sci fi (and fantasy, normally both) geek around me.
Some ideas:

get involved in your local convention. There will be one and they will desperately need volunteers.
Find out if there is a local sff club - if not start one.
look at the online forums - here is great with a lot of sci fi peeps on it. If you’re on Facebook Scott McGlasson’s Space Opera group is great fun but there are loads of others.

takk to your local bookstore and see if they’d support you setting a sf reading club or if they’d do an event.

seriously, reach out and you’ll find lots of like minded people. But sometimes you need to do some hunting

 

[Robert Zwilling]

I don't know about 2010 as any kind of marker. These answers might depend on when a person was born. If you are old enough, the first Star Trek still means a lot to some people, while newer science fiction fans thought Babylon 5 fans was the absolute benchmark for how expansive and creative TV could do science fiction. It's one of those things where you had to be there when it first came out. TV has always been on the rocks, some years better than others. The anti violence kick in the late 60s didn't make programs more creative in the US.

I think the fantasy audience has always been bigger than the straight science fiction audience, encompassing a wider audience, so some part of the fantasy audience always gets to see something, while science fiction programming is narrower, and is either being shown or isn't. I am wondering how will the current, and up and coming generations who cut their teeth on everything digital change story content? Will the needle swing to fantasy as an alternative escape mode or will they want technology presented as the ultimate conversation stopper. Or maybe neither one, some other fields of interest, like romance stories, something completely different.

Personally I think the shark movies are grade B comedy with a slight touch of gore. A case of going to the wild animal well once too many times. Although if they made a shark movie where the sharks joined up in packs, picked straws somehow, maybe flip an empty shell to see how it lands, to see who gets to sink the boats of the people slashing their fins off, that would probably be okay.

 

[AE35Unit]

Probably because its seen as difficult to read, geeky/nerdy.

 

[BAYLOR]

I've only come across one Babylon 5 fan irl and they fit the basement dweller image to a t. It would be nice if more normal people got into sci fi and space.

Remember when the Discovery Channel had stuff like this?

And the Science Fiction channel!

Epic space adventure!

replaced by wrestling, ghosts, and shark tornadoes!

Why did TV become so vapid and stupid in the early 2010s? Why did we stop dreaming of a better future for humanity?

Because for many people , critical thinking is hard. So, they don't engage in it and, avoid anything that requires them to them to think . The problem is , that people who stop thinking also stop dreaming and believing in better futures .

 

[Montero]

Well I'm a Babylon 5 fan and I don't even own a basement. I've also done 17th century re-enactment - crashing around fields with weapons.

 

[Vladd67]

Well I'm a Babylon 5 fan and I don't even own a basement. I've also done 17th century re-enactment - crashing around fields with weapons.

That could be me. I miss running around a field with gunpowder and a musket.

 

[Parson]

This depends on your definition of S.F. and if you are including movies and anime and graphic novels in it. If you allow superhero movies and anime are S.F. than they are way bigger than Fantasy. If you include graphic novels as S.F. than the book differential might not by that great or negative at all.

 

[Ilikebooksaswell]

I've only come across one Babylon 5 fan irl and they fit the basement dweller image to a t. It would be nice if more normal people got into sci fi and space.

Remember when the Discovery Channel had stuff like this?

And the Science Fiction channel!

Epic space adventure!

replaced by wrestling, ghosts, and shark tornadoes!

Why did TV become so vapid and stupid in the early 2010s? Why did we stop dreaming of a better future for humanity?

I think that there is some promising sci-fi being put out on different streaming services. For all mankind on apple+ is developed by Ron Moore ( the guy behind the newer battlestar). It’s a speculative sci-fi about if the Russians beat the US to the moon and a more developed space race. Netflix has Another Life and the lost in space remake. Amazon has the expanse, which is excellent! I think because of how tv became so vapid it let in the room for the streaming to become a better destination for quality. But now of course there are becoming too many individual streams, so it will probably become like cable tv in another decade or so.

 

[AE35Unit]

I think fantasy is seen as freer. A fantasy world can be whatever the author wants. There are no rules to stick to. Which is probably the reason there is so much of it, and so much dross

 

[The Scribbling Man]

When science fiction is popular, it normally falls into the camp of space fantasy (or space opera). The focus is on adventure, spectacle and aesthetic more than the ideas. Star Wars and MCU are key examples that.

Fantasy will always be more appealing and more accessible than science fiction, but I don't think science fiction has dropped off the face of the earth necessarily. Villinueve I think has been part of a small resurgence, with films like Arrival and the Blade runner sequel. But the fact is that "true" science fiction is ideas based, and therefore more cerebral and perhaps less inviting. I'm not sure it's designed for mass appeal in the same way fantasy is.

 

[Luiglin]

I see it as the opposite.

The plus side of Star Wars, Alien(s), Back to the Future, Star Trek et al is that they brought more mainstream folks into Sci-fi and other media forms of it than say Conan, Beastmaster, Krull et al.

Sci-fi is more acceptable to mainstream audiences as it isn't bogged down with their stereotypical ideas of loin cloth wearing, sword wielding, goblin slaying main characters who hang around either in dingly dell or yet another desert.

It's like another facet of unconscious bias (if you ever get a chance, go an a course for this). People are more accepting of folks who like sci-fi because, to them, sci-fi needs brains to understand it and therefore they must be grown up. Whereas, fantasy is considered something for kids only (despite it being often more violent).

The amount of condescending looks I've had when I've tired to explain to folks that I write fantasy has been so much that I now don't tell anybody outside of other sci-fi or fantasy authors. It just is not worth the hassle (part of the reason why I don't promote stuff I've done).

To me, any genre of entertainment media needs imagination. You need imagination to believe that the spy can extract the code, that the romance can succeed in the face of all those odds, that the cops can find the serial killer before it's too late. It's just a shame that mainstream struggles to to accept that these could also be classed as fantasy.

It is getting better, which is a bonus

Edit: now I'm off to play a session of D&D online via a virtual table top service with some mates with that I've known for 30 years. Here's hoping we don't succumb to the swarms of rats like some RPG noobs. I'm still a big kid at heart

 

[Guttersnipe]

I think it might be because fantasy tends to provide more of an escape than science fiction does. Science fiction often makes stories more rational and familiar.

 

[BAYLOR]

I think fantasy is seen as freer. A fantasy world can be whatever the author wants. There are no rules to stick to. Which is probably the reason there is so much of it, and so much dross

The City Of The Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith . The prose of the writer and the visuals of the story , gave me a sense of awe, wonder and a wish that such place as this city and its flame and it inhabitants existed.

The interesting thing about this story is , that it blurs the line between Fantasy and Science Fiction . It can be read as one or the other.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

What if the intersection of pure science fiction and pure fantasy (whatever they are), is much larger than either of the two. This would make discussions about pure science fiction and fantasy only a small part of the big picture. This makes it far easier to discuss the implications (lack of a better word) of pure science fiction and fantasy as they would be better defined, having fewer elements and far less volume than the area of intersection between the two.

Saying that science fiction and fantasy are equal, this could be pictured as an ellipsoid, with one end science, the other end fantasy, and the middle is fiction, where most people live. It is not static, as some science is shown to be fiction, and some fantasy is shown to be science. If it was felt that fantasy was a bigger field than science fiction, instead of an ellipsoid, a cone could be used, the vertex is science, the open end is fantasy. Writing goes from science to fiction to fantasy. This scenario could explain why fiction and fantasy are so much more popular than science in terms of overall volume of material. It just is.

Discussions about different subjects in the intersection can be hard to reconcile because the subjects in the intersection are from such a vast volume of ideas that they easily can have no easy connections between them. This is similar to the way distinctions are made between science fiction and fantasy, because they are separated by their nonoverlapping features.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

As older Chronners will know, there used to be a genre called Science Fantasy...

 

[Wayne Mack]

I would second @Luiglin and say that I see more mass acceptance of science fiction than fantasy. The Mandalorian helped launch Disney's subscription network and gave rise to baby Yoda as a meme. Avatar the sci-fi movie got far more recognition than Avatar from the Nickelodeon cartoon series. The Martian was a surprise hit, while on TV, The Orville drew debates against the latest Star Trek spin off. We are also only a couple of years removed from a slew of YA dystopian future novels and movies. Yes, there have been many fantasy novels and movies that gained popular recognition, but science fiction has at least held its own.

 

[The Scribbling Man]

I've always seen Star Wars as fantasy/space opera. The science-fiction elements are soft/minimal.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon Five, could be called science fantasy, a category name I wasn't aware of until posting a message in another section. The name has been around for awhile but it just doesn't get picked up. Maybe it includes too much dissimilar territory. Because it is a big tent, this might explain the popularity of these programs compared to other science fiction programs. Programs like The Expanse might have a hard time getting traction because even though it has fantasy elements, it's too close to home, too gritty, too realistic.

 

[The Scribbling Man]

Star Trek and Star Wars are often associated but are very different genres really. Star Trek is far more on the side of science fiction than Star Wars is. I won't pretend to be an authority on science fantasy, because I'm definitely not, but in my mind that conjures something more like Gene Wolfe's Book of The New Sun, which could equally be justified as either a fantasy or a science fiction novel, and does a very good job of blending elements of both.