“New Sci-fi” Part Three…. The Soulless Undead

After hearing a group of executives and agents talk about their opinion that science fiction sales were down because the audience had become jaded, I started to consider where they’d get that idea. The tastes of people shift from time to time, but they had this notion that the only way to sell scifi and fantasy was to ground them deeper into our mundane world and use the fantastic elements as little more than set dressing. So I started writing out some of the observations I had when dealing with people who weren’t fans of the genres (particularly scifi).

This particular entry was going to be two different posts. But after sitting and thinking about it, I’ve realized they’re much the same problem – a single problem that kind of appears different depending on what angle you’re seeing it from.

This one problem can be found even in the professional world and has probably led to that recent dip of popularity for science fiction and high fantasy that got me writing these posts. It also leads to problems mentioned in the previous posts. It’s almost the great unifier to all the others, really. And, for those of you who are writers of these genres, this is going to be hard to hear…

For non-fans, our favorite genres often fail to connect and sometimes that makes people think they’re… well… shallow.

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