I ran across this and thought it was an interesting counterpoint to a question I’ve been asking myself for the past twenty years: why isn’t scifi mainstream? Why do people think science fiction begins and ends with superheroes and Star Wars? The sad reality is that scifi, real science fiction, isn’t and will never be mainstream.
That’s a bummer, to be honest. Real scifi, IMO, has some actual science in it and another instance of ‘Marvel Magic Punching People’ just isn’t my cup of tea. Why don’t people get that there’s more to science fiction? This post arrived on Reddit, and explained the reason in cogent, and logical, detail:
So what’s wrong with even the best science fiction? My theory is that science fiction is too concept dense to be communicated in the lush, multi-dimensional form that is expected from literature. Too much of science fiction demands prose that needs to be parsed abstractly and is thus flat by comparison.
So, I guess that to love science fiction is to be an institutional outlier. Tough pill to swallow on a Tuesday morning, but like Louis L’Amour said of a certain cowboy protagonist: ‘You won’t make as many friends, but the ones you make will stick by you.’
I can live with that.