I'm actually RETURNING to F&SF. I was largely out of the loop for a long time... really ever since I got out of High School. Back then, though, the only stuff I was reading that I'd still call any good was Anne McCaffery. I read a lot of Piers Anthony.
I read a lot of out of genre stuff through college, but unlike n8, I find the charge of "over analyzing" to generally be a false charge. I studied Comp Lit though, and have always had a rather condescending attitude toward ENglish depts in general. The problem with academic study setting your precedent is that most institutions are either too accepting of what they allow in (come on guys, not EVERYTHING is good, there's a lot of crap out there) or they're too conservative, and refuse to acknowledge new genres. Often there's an odd mix of the two, like how William S. Burroughs is literate and worth reading but something by Mark Waid or Peter David is not. Foolishness.
During college most of the speculative fiction I read was superheroes or the TLE slush pile. Now I'm finally getting back into reading a lot of prose f&sf, and I find it wonderful, but I bring up the superheroes for this reason:
comics experienced a HUGE boom in the late 80's - early 90's. They were responding to a huge increase in collecting by making stuff worth collecting. Or at least, which they thought would entice speculative investors. Alternate covers, special editions, massive crossovers. In effect, everything was a gimmick. Ever since the industry has flagged. Marvel even declared bankruptcy at one point (largely due to major business misconceptions regarding trying to avoid Diamond distributors and doing their own distributing, however, better sales would have kept them out of bankruptcy at least). But they've learned. Since then you see much fewer gimmick attempts. The writers are getting better and you're seeing a lot more alternative press: even the "big two" which held so long after the folding of Whitman and EC comics has turned into the big four: with Marvel and DC being joined by Image and Dark Horse, and true small press comics getting a lot more attention: Dreamwave and Top Cow have some major titles and big lisences -- and they do a good job, even attracting some of the best writers and artists in the industry.
The drop in sales, ultimately, increased the quality of the output in the industry as a whole.
So why the tangent? I don't see the drop in F&SF as a bad thing, necessarily. It's obviously still big enough to keep going. Eventually, publishing houses will realize that there's still a market for this stuff... if they do it right. The increasing number of blockbuster F&SF films shows there's an interest in the genre, it just needs to be done well.
In comics, more than anywhere else, readers tend to follow characters. Rather than follow a writer or artist when he switches titles, most readers just drop the title when the quality drops. This means that the publishers have to respond by getting good writers and artist on even their most popular characters (like X-Men, Spidey, Batman or Superman) in order to keep them popular. prose publishers will do the same. They'll realize there's still a lot of people out there who want to buy Tolkien, Herbert, or Heinline or Jordan. They just don't want to see the fluff as much. Sure, there are die hard fans still going for Star Wars and Star Trek and Forgotten Realms and other lisences, so those won't ever drop, but the bottom line will make them realize that there's money to be made in finding really good writers and publishing their stuff.
It may take longer than comics. After, companies like Image and Marvel are one trick ponies. If superheroes stop selling so well, they don't have anything to fall back on, while book publishers will turn to spy thrillers and romances and mysteries and whatever else, but where there's money to be made, and there is, they'll see what they need to do.
So maybe there is something to what EUOL is saying. F&SF readers want something more than a nifty premise or the same old plot, only in Florence instead of Rome this time. But publishers will realize that eventually, and we'll get more. After all, it happened before. It used to be all Tolkien clones, as EUOL said. Now fantasy has branched out to many different worlds and ideas. so we plateau for a bit. In a decade or two, we'll be racing back up the slope.
Man, I talk a lot. I could have made that Saint's Letters #1 and started my own Monday column instead of just posting on the thread.
