Where did all the starships go?
Hi, I’m Jonathan, responsible for all things technical when it comes to Datawrapper’s website and blog. In this week’s Weekly Chart, I’m having a look at the titles of science fiction and fantasy novels across decades.
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:
The data tells a clear story: classic sci-fi keywords peaked in the 1950s–60s and have steadily declined since. "Space" saw the sharpest drop, from over 2.5% of titles in the 1950s to under 0.5% today. "Mars," "Planet/s," and "Moon/s" follow the same trajectory. The golden age of space exploration in fiction seems to have ended alongside the Apollo program. (One notable exception is the slight uptick in “Moon” titles between the 1990s and the 2010s that may be explained by the next category.)
Meanwhile, fantasy keywords show an opposite trend. "Dragon/s" barely registered before 1980 but now appears in nearly 2% of titles. "Magic(al)" and "Witch/es" follow similar trends, accelerating sharply after 2000 — the timing aligns with the commercial success of Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings movies. Twilight and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, seem to have revived the vampire genre. Vampires and werewolves also likely contributed to the continued presence of "Moon" in book titles.
Not everything follows the genre shift. Words like "Dark(ness)," "War/s," and "Death" retain remarkably stable presence in book titles across seven decades. These are genre-agnostic terms, equally at home in space opera or epic fantasy — with a slight uptick around the 90s supposedly due to the decade's fascination with the supernatural. And while time travel hasn't yet materialized, time itself continues to be a topic.
Shelves are a-changing
What does this mean for science fiction? I am not so sure. The classic space opera may have ceded shelf space to urban fantasy and dragon-laden epics, but sci-fi themes have become more diverse and partially absorbed into the mainstream. It might even be evolving into something new.
Still, I miss those aisles. There's something beautiful about a paperback with a title and cover promising distant stars, strange new worlds, and most importantly, lots of starships. The data confirms what my local bookstore already told me: if you're looking for the old-school stuff, you'll have to look a little harder (or online, starting with a search on the ISFDB).
What I learned along the way
I originally planned to use existing tags from the ISFDB to visualize the sci-fi/fantasy split, determined to show that sci-fi was becoming less popular. Turns out that only a small fraction of novels in the DB are actually tagged by genre. So that wasn't a satisfying option.
I then tried to categorize all titles from the ISFDB by genre using a combination of web-scraped plot summaries and LLM-assisted tagging. Another dead-end, that taught me not to trust AI with the subtleties of sci-fi and fantasy tropes. Even when I reduced the dataset to award-winning novels only and provided more context, the responses were fuzzy at best and unusable at large.
Ultimately, I took the simpler approach of simply checking how often certain words appeared in the titles of all ~210,000 English-language novels in the database. Sometimes, simple works.
That's it from me this week! Next Thursday, you can look forward to a fresh Weekly from Luc.
