The sad state of the 'science fiction corner' in German book chains is completely real though. Over the last two decades or so you could literally see it shrink on each visit and what little remains is filled with mass procuded trash (Star Wars novels etc). The fantasy section right next to it has been eating into the science-fiction shelf space but is filled with the same trash, just replace your laser-toting space troopers with vampires, werewolves and dragons.

Yeah, I think at most very literal titles would be a stylistic phase. Even "The Martian" is more a play on words than just a literal title for what it's about.

Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?

Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.

A bit of an off-topic observation:

Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.

As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of industrial output until some balance level is reached.

Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.

"The future is socialism or barbarism" (Rosa Luxemburg). I fear we have chosen the latter.

The Culture can't happen. It requires Faster Than Light spaceships and that's not a thing in our universe. Also, and I know it's not what you meant, but in Banks' fiction "State of the Art" is specifically a novella about a Culture visit to Earth in the 1970s. They're not us.

Egan's "The Amalgam" is an SF society which could in principle descend in part from some future humanity, and I suppose if you like Banks' setting for its utopianism you'd be satisfied with the Amalgam. Its citizens tend to live long, full lives in which they're definitely mostly concerned with the upper parts of Maslow's pyramid and their practical needs are fulfilled as a matter of course in most cases.

I must say, to the extent we have any future at all, I think probably of Egan's "Dream Apes". An Orangutan-like self-engineered future humanity who have arranged that there are no apex predators above them, there's an abundance of resources for their relatively modest population, and they just chill, believing that if there is something out there it's not their concern. Of course in the story the Dream Apes are all annihilated by a cataclysmic event which destroys Earth, but hey, it's pretty quick.

The part where superintelligent computers keep humans around as pets in a powerful and happy civilization is plausible. The part where there’s hyperdrive and energy grids and fields and effectors, less so.

IIRC Banks insisted in interviews that the culture's citizens aren't pets. The exact relationship is, like the FTL travel and indeed teleportation, very vague and only sketched in where needed to advance the plot.

We have no experience with the extremely asymmetrical relationships which would result. Lem tries to imagine this in Golem XIV - what happens when humans who are used to thinking of themselves as smart are talking with a categorically more intelligent machine - and it doesn't work very well even though it's only a sketch.

"Tatja Grimm's World" has a neat trick where Vinge is able to sidestep this because [[SPOILER]] although Tatja is much smarter than everybody else from her world, that's not because she's smarter than we are, almost everyone born on her planet is an idiot for reasons the story justifies.

so... it might be a marketing problem?

no publisher was there to tell author "wtf did you name it, you'll get ignored" or smth?

Publishers make choices the author had no say in all the time. One of the things commonly mentioned about Phil Dick is that while the movies you've probably seen based on his work (such as "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall") have different titles than the stories they are based on, those stories weren't published under his proposed name in many cases either.

I don't think anyone's failing to recognize modern sci-fi novels because they aren't called "The Space Martians Go To The Moon In Their Starship" or whatever.

Really, I think the most significant trend here is that, between 1950 and 1980 or so, the sci-fi genre grew up and stopped relying on painfully literal titles.

I’d argue that SF should never have "grown up." Look at the works considered classics today, like Heinlein, or even Star Trek. At the time of release, they were often dismissed as unserious (TOS famously had scientific blunders like planets at -290°C), yet they remain cultural touchstones because they prioritized vision over rigor.

SF used to excel at selling "dreams" to humanity. By trying too hard to be seen as "serious" or scientifically airtight, authors sacrificed the sense of wonder that allows for mainstream success. We traded mass appeal for academic validation.

Wait, what's the play on words in The Martian?

Generally in SF genre fiction "Martian" means a space alien, a being native to the planet Mars e.g. the antagonists in "War of the Worlds" are Martians.

However the word can also mean, and does in the case of the novel, a person who merely lives on the planet Mars, as Mark Wayney does.

Hm, right. I somehow never really saw those two as different, hm.

I wouldn’t expect only one fiction subgenre to have such a dramatic increase of proportion of abstract titles while other related subgenres did not. In other words, I would expect all of these graphs to have a negative correlation with time due to a general abstraction of titles across all fiction subgenres. I would be surprised if there was enough consumer differentiation to support abstraction in one subgenre but not the others.

Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract, which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as well.

But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should be chalked up to only title abstraction, and not a decline in popularity. Occam’s razor.

Like none of The Expanse books would appear...

Not one of the culture books either, even though several have spaceships as main characters. And only a handful of Hamilton books. And I reckon a single Polity book.

I was disappoints to go into a large Waterstones in Peterborough last year and not see any Peter F Hamilton books.

> science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the author’s search terms even though you’ll find all five inside the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix’s old kingdom.

And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings of “future solar system”. Not one of the Foundation books would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells’s fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled “the day Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten” like some lone star light novel.

Yep.

In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet" in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...

The genre where we find the "fantasy/sci-fi" books right next to usually mystery books in our German book stores usually is speculative fiction:

- mystery, - horror, - fantasy, - and sci-fi have lots of overlap. - And XKCDs What-If-Books even.

But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened, and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the limitations and effects of their magic system.

Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would never work, when historical torched looked completely differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in fantasy books.

I was thinking that, for example Caves of steel, Childhood Ends, Spin and many others have no starships or space related terms in their title.

All I know is that sci-fi is still producing some great ideas from talented individuals.