All growed up

Over at filomancer‘s blog, some interesting comments are being made about the apparent decline in SF readership.

Sometimes I think that what’s happened is that sf has become too sophisticated for its core audience, which used to be teenage boys. Their attention span, and maybe yours and mine, isn’t going to last through three paragraphs’ description of the protagonist’s breakfast with his mother when that doesn’t add any dramatic tension or move the plot forward. I’m sure this was true even back in the Golden Age, before everyone’s attention spans got shorter. Science fiction used to be adventure fiction, and that’s what attracted a lot of its readership.

Thanks to genreneep for pointing this out.