When Science Fiction Forgets it is Science Fiction

It has taken me thirty years, but I finally think I know what I like, and don’t like in science fiction stories; what, for me, creates a sense of wonder. Thirty years ago, I was deep into my science fiction education. I finished the month of October 1996 by reading Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. I then spent the entire month of November immersed in the genre: Chorale and Herovit’s World by Barry N. Malzberg, Way Station by Clifford D. Simak, The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles by Bradbury, Sundiver by David Brin, City of Truth by James Morrow. In fact, between 1996-2006, almost one in three books I read were science fiction. Compare that to the last ten years (2016-2026) where only one in 22 books that I read were science fiction. To illustrate this plainly, here is the last three decades of my science fiction reading as a fraction of my overall reading1. What happened?…

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