This is a bit unusual but I’m actually doing a normal blog post today. Please bear with me, this feels a bit strange. I’m reacting in large part to a ball that’s being kicked around today, largely by Lou Anders who is Getting Medieval on Reality’s Ass (and just to show you how incestous the SF blogosphere is that post title is an excerpt of something Paul McCauley said in one of our Brain Parades. In the second parter he poses the question (again originaly raised by someone else in this case Paul Cornell)

“Where is our Casablanca? That is, an extremely populist work of extremely high quality.”

There’s a simple answer to that of course Star Trek and Star Wars. Both of which are now dead franchises but which served as excellent points into the genre for many people for decades. I imagine a lot of people might scoff at that, after all Star Wars it might be argued isnt’ really Science Fiction (which I disagree with but that’s beside the point). There’s been a lot of concern about the relative decline of Science Fiction book sales in the face of the genre’s rising popular appeal in other media. There’s headscratching over this seeming incongruity. If Science Fiction is dominating film, television and computer games shouldn’t it be rising in popularity in the dead tree format?

No, I suspect the opposite may very well be true.

I’ve got a funny corollary I want to bring up here and that is paper and pencil role playing games vs. computer role playing games. Back in the early to mid 90s I was a roleplaying game publisher. I remember getting into a debate back in a designer emailing list back then arguing the position that computer roleplaying games could never replace paper and pencil roleplaying games, the social element was missing for starters as much of the opportunity for improvisation, etc. The two really were apples and oranges in my view, the oranges would never replace the apples because they were in essence fundamentally different. In fact the popularity of the computer based roleplaying games might bring more people into the paper and pencil market.

I now realize I was dead wrong. World of Warcraft doesn’t let you do all the things that you can do in a paper and pencil roleplaying session but it fulfills a lot of the functions that most people want out of a roleplaying experience most of the time. And while there might be people who drift from World of Warcraft to playing Dungeons and Dragons there are certainly are many more people drifting in the opposite direction. There will always be paper and pencil roleplaying die hards, we even have people playing Dungeon and Dragons in Second Life now but we’ve clearly entered an era when roleplaying games are primarily about computers.

We all have a limited amount of time and money to spend on entertainment. If people are watching spending more and more time watching Science Fiction television and playing Science Fiction computer games they may be doing so at the expense of reading a Science Fiction novel.

We may just have to resign ourselves to the fact that Science Fiction is now primarily about visual media and that such popularity won’t necessarily translate and possibly work against its popularity in dead tree media. That doesn’t mean that Science Fiction books are on the way out or even in trouble but it’s a mistake to think that the hot market in oranges is a good thing for the sale of apples.