But on the fantasy side of things, it does seem like an era has ended or is ending, with indeed the YA fantasy cannibalizing the genre. Some of those are good or even excellent, but most of it seems fairly trite and boring. On the other hand, there's certainly also more variety, writers of more varied backgrounds, and generally people trying out new things that push the borders and conventions of the genre - but those generally aren't the biggest sellers.

Well, honestly, that critique is as old as the first Star Wars movie, if not much older even. I'm sure the so-called 'hard' sci-fi is still being written? Pretty much anything is still being written, just not necessarily selling much.

It's certainly a reality that kids today are growing up in a world that leaves less space for sitting down with a book and doing nothing but reading for a couple of hours, as people in your generation and even mine did plenty of. So I guess the best-selling books are indeed those that move fast and don't penalize those with a short attention span - a number of classic novels whether in the SF&F genre or outside it have become almost unreadable to most children today, even among those who like to read. But that's less of a problem if you look beyond only the books that get the most attention, I think.