The best current example is Paulo Bacigalupi’s first novel The Windup Girl winning the Nebula Award (Gibson’s Neuromancer would be a past example). It’s about a near future world dominated by Biotech corporations, the genetic manipulation of organisms, especially humans, new–and lower-tech–energy sources, and drastic climate change.

So I don’t think there is a lack of material to stimulate the public imagination. Science fiction dominates in the movies (Avatar!), and it can continue to capture the public imagination in books, perhaps more than ever. Many people are quietly overwhelmed by the pace of scientific and technological change (called Future Shock), and perhaps SF helps them understand and cope and adjust somewhat, even while it entertains. Star Trek had nothing like the iPhones out now.

Bradbury and LeGuin used SF to explore human themes and issues, perhaps today’s SF writers can use it to secretly help readers understand and adjust to the accelerating pace of change, both positive and negative. Future Shock Therapy! For all of their time on Earth, select people have projected change into the future, but now the implications are so obvious that everyone does it. Let the SF writers do it better than anyone else–while still exploring the human condition, like RB and UKLG, and our market stays alive and viable.

I think the decreasing interest in sci-fi is due to the time in which we live. We have to remember, a major part of what made sci-fi so appealing was what was going on during the early years. The turn of the century saw the the popularity of the car starting to take off, flight was something new, exciting and impossible, but here it was; man was flying!

The 40’s during WWII, again, people’s imaginations were starving for good sci-fi. Due to what was going on on the world scene, fiction about attacks from alien races, space wars and the like would have been extremely popular.

Then, the war goes away, the automobile and flight become standard, everyday stuff and in the 50’s sci-fi cools off. Then all of a sudden, in the 60’s, “Hey, let’s go to the moon!”

Boy o boy, how exciting! Our imagination runs wild again! Through the mid-to-late 60’s mankind is rivited to their radios and TVs, gobbling up all the amazing accounts of trips around orbit, space walking then in 1969, we’re on the moon! Is there life there? What does it mean? What does this hold out for teh future??

The 70’s, space flights and moon landings continue. The momentum carried through the 80’s somewhat, but soon, there was nothing else new, exciting happening anymore. Thus, the thirst for sci-fi slowly fades as our collective excitement regarding space exploration stalls. We expected to go to Mars, and beyond. To discover life other than our own. Nothing of the sort would happen.

For sci-fi to thrive again, we need our space program or some incredible new advancement to ignite our collective imaginations again. Unless that happens, sci-fi will continue the slow descent into obscurity.

Whatever sells well is, by definition, commercial. Anyone who has ever made a full-time living as a writer was, at the time, writing “highly commercial fiction.”

The trouble is, what’s commercial changes from decade to decade, if not year to year. Anyone who made a killing selling high-carb snacks in the 80s is probably feeling a bit panicky right now if they’ve not changed their primary product.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, my feeling is that I can either choose to market a product with the hopes of pleasing a large audience, or I can be content producing a product that is meant for myself and a few kindred spirits… and not expect to make a living at it. I can’t be dismissive of the tastes of the general reading population and at the same time relieve them of their equally hard-earned money.

I made about $20k last year as a full-time fiction writer (with a little editing), yet I live in comfortable houses (in some beautiful parts of the world — right now I’m in Australia) and I never have to worry about paying a phone bill or having the heat and power cut off. My secret: I gave up having a home of my own in the fall of 2007 and since then I have also been a full-time housesitter.

That’s the state of play (and pay) in this business today. And, by many standards (a dozen or so books published, three more contracted to write, forty-odd stories sold to pro-paying mags), I’m an established success in sf.

Go figure.

An economist would say that I’m addressing the problem from the demand side, rather than the supply side.