Where Did All the Starships Go?
8th February 2026
As a reader of science fiction, I’ve noticed that the sci-fi aisles in bookstores are getting smaller and smaller. So small, in fact, that I now regularly have to make the trip to a shop here in Berlin that still sells the “good stuff.” Fantasy seems to be taking over, at least commercially. And while this trend is no secret, I thought it would be interesting to visualize it.
On the search for a suitable dataset, I came across the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), a volunteer effort to maintain an up-to-date source of bibliographical information on works of fiction that fall into the genres of science fiction, fantasy, or horror.
Let’s see how often typical sci-fi words have been mentioned in the ~210,000 titles in that database over the decades: