I was in the sci-fi/fantasy section of my local Barnes and Nobel and noticed that their isn’t nearly as many big name science fiction books on the shelf as there is fantasy. This got me thinking, it seems like fantasy has become the go to genre for geek fiction. But that wasn’t always the case. For most of “geek culture” history I would argue that science fiction was the primary driving force, with fantasy being an even smaller niche within in a niche. When I was growing up stuff like Star Trek and Blade Runner and Tron seemed to be a lot more prominent, and in the anime space, mecha and cyber punk was all the rage. Star Wars was a happy middle ground. D and D and Conan were around, but that was about it as far as big name Fantasy franchises went. I feel the real turn over started to happen in the early 2000, when the Lord of the Rings came out. I started to think about major science fiction franchises of of the last 15 years, and a really worrying trend started to pop up. They are almost uniformly distopian in their outlook.
Is general pessimism about the future the reason why fantasy has supplanted science fiction?
It could also be because familiarity breeds contempt. We are literally living in an age where science fiction is becoming science fact at a pretty alarming rate. Things are going from impossible to speculative to reality faster then any time in human history. This is amazing but it might also be rendering sci-fi slightly less wonderous to some. We’ve went from “hey, aren’t robots are amazing,” to “ hey, robots are taking my job.”