What makes people not like sci-fi and fantasy?

Well, people are always going to have different views but generally speaking sci-fi and fantasy are bigger business than ever with more mass audience appeal. Biggest show of the last decade was Game Of Thrones (fantasy). Biggest films were Marvel (loads of sci-fi in there, and fantasy with the Thor/Dr Strange parts), and Star Wars (sci-fi fantasy). The geeks have inherited the Earth. When even the stereotypical jock types know their Lokis from their Lannisters - it's fair to say that this stuff has never been more mainstream.

Some people though, will never ever watch anything fantastical. My mother would watch anything cop-related, court-room drama...anything like that. But she wouldn't sit through anything even remotely sci-fi or fantasy. She doesn't "hate" them, she doesn't feel anything for them. In the same way I feel when people at work talk about...I dunno....90 Day Fiance or Say Yes To The Dress - it's not for me so I don't care. We can't all like everything. Some people like things that have a lot of lore, worlds that they can dive into. As BF fans that's us - we wouldn't stop with a TV show, we needed more. Wheras my mother, my work peeps and millions of others just want "easy" TV. A pleasant watch to unwind and move on. They're not there for an obsession or love, just a distraction. When Picard came out and was awful, it actually hurt me as someone so invested in that character and world of Trek. It was abysmal. If my mother watched a show that went downhill...she'd just stop watching and not thing twice.

Different interests, different passions. As long as we all find our own interests and loves, that's the main thing.

For a long time it was because of the cheap magazine origins of a lot of it: a lot of snobbery has disappeared but not too many years ago reviewers/ critics would rather be caught dead than admit to reading genre fiction. They might admit to Lord Of The Rings or Narnia, or Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie - y’know, the clearly good quality rubbish fiction - but getting their hands dirtied any further was to have lost any kind of credibility.

And, to an extent, they were right: a lot of the vintage SF and F from the 20s through to the 60s was rubbish, barely worth the cheap pulpy paper it was printed on. There was a sizeable portion that was of decent quality but you had to do a fair amount of dredging to find it. Literary fiction, which dealt with ISSUES - usually a middle-aged guy contemplating which undergraduate or member of the secretary pool to have an affair with - was deemed to be far more respectable.

A lot of it too is that reading for pleasure has been frowned on and you don’t get much more “for pleasure” than genre fiction.

However, most of the time when I was growing up, when my tastes were denigrated it was because I was “wasting my time.” The stories weren’t deemed to be “about” anything, they were mental junk food that wouldn’t offer me any kind of advice or experience. And, worst of all, they aren’t real, they aren’t aspirational, they just rot your brain. Thankfully, though, television became stupidly popular which meant that we could get away with reading anything because “at least it wasn’t television.” And we are truly blessed with the tv we have these days, even the worst of what is produced these days looks and sounds a lot better than some of the middle-rated stuff of the days of yore.

My own family when I was growing up treated my obsession with genre fiction with a bit of humour: we were all readers and all had wide-ranging tastes so we only sneered halfheartedly at each other’s choices but we’d often be passing them back and forth, though I could never get anybody else as interested in fantasy as I was, simply because it wasn’t grounded in our reality. Consider: throughout the 60s through to the 80s, most written fantasy - and a fair bit of televised stuff - was more about our world than any other and most “popular” or “acceptable” fare was mostly based in our own world with only tiny glimpses of the numinous. I mean, even Who was tasked with telling a big chunk of historical/ educational stories in its early years. But the most acceptable author amongst your literati types who wrote fantasy was Alan Garner who uses fantasy heavily in his stories but with a fairly light touch, so much so that you could almost argue that it isn’t there in some of his fantasy/ magic realist work (Terry Pratchett once described magical realism as “a fantasy novel written by someone the critic went to university with“). Science fiction was pretty strictly out and even classic examples like 1984 or Brave New World were held up as merely using the backdrop of SF to tell a properly literary story. Even Star Trek was lauded for using SF-nal devices for telling stories applicable to the modern age despite it doing what SF had been doing for almost a hundred years by that time.