Comment on osewalrus: The War of SF?

[mabfan]

osewlarus has an interesting post up called The War on SF?, in which he comments on recent discussions about whether or not science fiction is dying. Personally, I think he misrepresents my position as laid out in my posts Thoughts on the End of SCI FICTION and the Status of the Short Fiction Market, Who Mourns for SCI FICTION?, and Short Science Fiction and Communities of Writers. He claims that I said that "hard" science fiction was dying, and that's not what I said at all.

I said that SF short fiction markets which support an editorial staff with money to live on are dying, and that's a rather different assertion. Science fiction is thriving in many other media, such as the novel, the television show and the movie, but the short story is becoming more of a "boutique" item in the field. Writers were never (or only rarely) able to make a living writing short stories, but editors generally managed to carve careers out for themselves by publishing them. That's becoming less of a true proposition.

Anyway, if my original posts were vague enough to be interpreted incorrectly, I hope I've made my position more clear now. And despite osewlarus's conflation of my position with two other other positions, his post is still very much worth reading if you're interested in the future of science fiction in general.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

How many people actually commute via bus or train? I imagine it's a lot less than go by car.

As for their reading tastes, from what I understand many people would rather invest their reading time into a longer work than many shorter ones. They want to dive into a fictional world and spend many pages enjoying it.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Which, really, is a good argument against the "People nowadays have short attention spans" idea.

But I read both novels and anthologies, so I'm just weird that way.