Is Western Science Fiction dying?

[Exastro]

I'd like to suggest an idea that's probably going to be controversial: SF is dying because people aren't reading books any more, at least in the numbers they did 50 years ago.

Too much of the SF we consume has been filtered through the TV and movie industries, which understandably emphasize visuals at the expense of plot and character development.  The writing of most modern video programs (and modern novels, too) is cramped by modern standards that enforce certain types of diversity while suppressing others, and it seems the writers themselves lack talent or the judgment to tell what is and what isn't good.  There are few original plot ideas or even character designs.  Hard SF is essentially dead in video, with the only recent exception I can think of being The Expanse, and even that took a lot of liberties with physics and biology.  As a result, fantasy stories often seem to be ironically more realistic than SF (and better written, too).

Novels have a huge advantage over video: their production cost is orders of magnitude lower, and they can be and often are the products of individual creative minds.  It's true that some of the 'diversity' restrictions get applied by editors, but there are so many novels being written -- hundreds of thousands a year, counting all genres -- that a significant number slip past the censors, and a fraction of those are actually good, and sometimes very good.

If we care about sustaining the supply of quality SF, we need to be reading them, buying them, and spreading the word about them.  There's a lot of shlock to wade through, and bringing the good stuff to the attention of potential readers is a fine way to benefit them and the good writers, too.

[sanman]

Nowadays younger viewers want to be spoonfed their stories in video format, and don't have the patience to read -- even radio is passé. The picture-making mechanism of human imagination has been atrophying from lack of use (perhaps a prelude to the subsequent arrival of AI)