When sales of hard SF started dropping worldwide in the late 1990s, there were two, very different reactions in the USA and UK.

In the USA the writers moaned it was down to fantasy taking off, and since they couldn't beat them, they joined them and everyone started writing fantasy. As a result, SF sells about 1/5 to 1/6 the numbers of fantasy.

In the UK the writers, much more accurately, realised it was because SF had become preachy, dull and irrelevant to the average person in the street. They pulled their socks up and started writing decent, interesting, socially and technologically relevant science fiction again. As a result, SF now sells 1/3 the numbers of fantasy and is climbing.

The American SF writers like Gregory Benford who were recently crying about this (blaming fantasy for his declining sales and not, for example, the fact he personally hasn't written a single decent book worth reading in twenty plus years) really need to get a grip, stop blaming other people for their woes and start writing decent, solid SF novels again, like we've seen John Scalzi and David Louis Edelman doing recently, or Walter Jon Williams, Connie Willis and Nancy Kress who've been writing solid, intelligent but under-the-radar SF continuously for years.