Yeah, I think at most very literal titles would be a stylistic phase. Even "The Martian" is more a play on words than just a literal title for what it's about.

Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's deeply about space travel. Banks' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to several of the most significant space battles of her era. But like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?

Now, Banks wasn't a hard SF writer. Unlike say Egan's "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.

> science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the author’s search terms even though you’ll find all five inside the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix’s old kingdom.

And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings of “future solar system”. Not one of the Foundation books would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells’s fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled “the day Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten” like some lone star light novel.

The sad state of the 'science fiction corner' in German book chains is completely real though. Over the last two decades or so you could literally see it shrink on each visit and what little remains is filled with mass produced trash (Star Wars novels etc). The fantasy section right next to it has been eating into the science-fiction shelf space but is filled with the same trash, just replace your laser-toting space troopers with vampires, werewolves and dragons.

I was thinking that, for example Caves of steel, Childhood Ends, Spin and many others have no starships or space related terms in their title.

I wouldn’t expect only one fiction subgenre to have such a dramatic increase of proportion of abstract titles while other related subgenres did not. In other words, I would expect all of these graphs to have a negative correlation with time due to a general abstraction of titles across all fiction subgenres. I would be surprised if there was enough consumer differentiation to support abstraction in one subgenre but not the others.

Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract, which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as well.

But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should be chalked up to only title abstraction, and not a decline in popularity. Occam’s razor.

The genre where we find the "fantasy/sci-fi" books right next to usually mystery books in our German book stores usually is speculative fiction:

- mystery, - horror, - fantasy, - and sci-fi have lots of overlap. - And XKCDs What-If-Books even.

But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened, and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the limitations and effects of their magic system.

Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would never work, when historical torched looked completely differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in fantasy books.

Like none of The Expanse books would appear...