Science fictional economics

How can SF do well in movies, games and TV while getting crushed in the written arena? This has a lot of SF fans scratching their heads. To some extent, this is talking about similar but different products (movies versus books) that have different audiences.

Guys don't read as much as they used to. From kindergarten to college, a big chunk of the male population just dreads reading for whatever reason. No one quite knows why. SF is a male-heavy literary genre. It thrives in video games, movies and other more visual media.

Romance and fantasy, on the other hand, are the opposite. They are booming and have a heavily female following. Women read. Outside of Titanic, there are few mega-blockbuster romance movies.

So what is SF to do? Will it finally break out of its moat of maleness and embrace female readers?

Should it pull in more romance, more heartbreaking vampires, less explosions and Chuck Norris type characters?

Will it try to attract male readers back with ever more male-focused material like battles, alien worlds, hard science, etc.? Or maybe it will shift to the graphic novel arena; less words, more visuals.

Will it sink for decades, like comics did? Is this the end of the silver age then, and are we waiting for the SF Watchmen and Sandman or the 1989 Batman to blow off the cobwebs? Look at what JJ Abrams did with Star Trek: rebooted it in a way that made it better than the original while making it seem more real than the original.

Maybe SF has found its natural home in the blockbuster movie world, and its run in the literary realm is ending. Hell of a time to write a sci-fi novel, huh? And not even have it close to ready for submitting to agents. Argh.

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