As I get older, I find it hard to maintain suspension of disbelief when reading SF. Too many of the tropes have grown old and stale. I also find it hard to maintain interest, since too many stories are describing a time beyond when I can reasonably believe I'll be alive.
It's also clear that predictions of the future in SF stories are no more connected to reality than are outright fantasy stories. So why not just read fantasy if you want escapism? The takeover of SF by fantasy should have been predictable.
I prefer fantasy, over scifi, because, in my opinion, with fantasy, the story is about characters in a fantastic world, while, in science fiction, the story is about a fantastic world, with characters in it.
I do have trouble liking newer stuff, though, and end up rereading a lot of “classic” lit. I feel as if authors aren’t well-edited, anymore, and that can have devastating consequences on the quality of their work. I hope that AI editors may help, there.
One of the things about these mags, is that they were a forge for great style. People learned to develop succinct, effective stories, and the editors for the publications could be brutal.
One thing I've noticed is that sometimes modern authors are too married to their big ideas, and neglect the rest of the story. The example I like to point to this is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. She has fantastic ideas, really interesting stuff. But the plot is awful. There's just no interesting story there, and the ideas aren't enough to carry the book so it winds up being a bore to read. And I don't find that to be the only case of such a thing.
> One thing I've noticed is that sometimes modern authors are too married to their big ideas, and neglect the rest of the story.
IMO that's very far from a new phenomena. Even Tolkien, for all the accolades he got, gets carried away describing absolutely irrelevant stuff that barely anyone cares about (controversial opinion, shoot me, but I know many others love his universe and agree with that take at the same time).
To me falling in love with your fantasy / scifi universe is a huge writer sin. It seriously detracts from the quality of the writing and I've noticed this in authors young and old, and super popular and praised ones too.
Same goes for Asimov btw... he tries so hard to present you a narrative and/or do some world-building that some (if not most) of this characters end up being extremely simplistic plot devices. They don't feel like living breathing humans at all.
