February 7, 2026
In space, no one hears you shelve
Where did all the starships go?
Fans split: did we lose optimism, or just swap “starship” for “vibes”
TLDR: A massive title analysis shows classic sci‑fi buzzwords dwindling while fantasy terms surge, reshaping bookstore vibes. Readers are split: some blame lost optimism, others say sci‑fi just got artsy titles, while fans insist starships still fly—you just need to know where to look.
Datawrapper’s Jonathan crunched titles for ~210,000 sci‑fi, fantasy, and horror books from the volunteer-run ISFDB and found a gut punch for space lovers: classic sci‑fi words like “space,” “Mars,” and “planet” soared in the ’50s–’60s, then crashed to near‑vanishing levels today. Meanwhile, dragons, magic, and witches have stormed the shelves since the 2000s, riding the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings wave. Cue bookstore aisle drama.
Commenters went full warp speed on the why. One camp says reality killed the dream: probes showed Mars and Venus weren’t exactly weekend getaways, and the Apollo glow faded. Another crew claims it’s a branding shift—as one reader notes, this is about titles, not stories; today’s sci‑fi goes for artsy names instead of “Starship This, Planet That.” Then there’s the “don’t count space out” brigade, dropping author receipts—Ann Leckie, Andy Weir, Arkady Martine, James S.A. Corey—to prove starships are alive and kicking, just shelved under slicker titles.
Bonus spice: a cultural hot take says the starships left with the optimism, swapped for dystopias and doomscroll vibes. Others point to anime’s pivot from mechs to mages as textbook proof. And yes, folks joked that dragons ate the sci‑fi aisle, while even the author admits AI couldn’t sort elves from androids—so he went old‑school with simple word counts. Sometimes, that’s the plot twist we needed.
Key Points
- •Study analyzes ~210,000 English-language titles from ISFDB to track keyword trends over decades.
- •Classic sci-fi terms like “Space,” “Mars,” “Planet/s,” and “Moon/s” peaked in the 1950s–60s and declined since.
- •“Space” appears in over 2.5% of 1950s titles but under 0.5% today; “Moon” shows a slight uptick in the 1990s–2010s.
- •Fantasy keywords such as “Dragon/s,” “Magic(al),” and “Witch/es” rose sharply, especially after 2000.
- •Initial genre-tag approaches and LLM-assisted classification were unreliable; simple title keyword counts proved effective.