Fantasy Vs SF: Who Let The Dogs Out? (Updated)

This earlier post where I linked to Mark Charan Newton's post, Why Science Fiction Is Dying And Fantasy Fiction Is The Future, has garnered a lot of comments and discussion worth reading, I think. Here's a response by another Mark, Chadbourn this time. What follows is an excerpt from his blog entry, Fantasy Vs CF: Who Let The Dogs Out?

Surely there is no finer sport than ramming sharpened stakes into the cages of the SF community!

And yet, there *is* an SF community, with reasonably definable boundaries and consumption patterns. In its natural habitat, the SF reader will graze easily across hard SF, space opera, military SF, literary SF, wherever both science and fiction combine.

There is no fantasy community, and this, I think, is where your initial premise breaks down, Mark.

There is NO connective tissue between what has been branded as urban fantasy and secondary world fantasy, anecdotally little crossover in readership, and generally very little love lost between the two camps. Urban Fantasy has more in common with the romance genre (always a big seller) and the romantic fringes of 80s horror, and is a better fit under the Paranormal Romance banner. Yes, there are fantastic elements, but horror is a sub-genre of fantasy, but we don’t lump that in when we discuss this issue.

Strip out “urban fantasy” and there’s not such a great disparity in sales between fantasy and SF.

Update: Mark Charan Newton has a follow-up post.