It's better than the alternative
In this post, kelly_swails gives a con report, but also mentions this oft-observed phenomenon:
One thing I noticed this weekend: the SF community skews older. It's sometimes strange to go to a panel (or be on a panel) where the panelist talk about Heinlein and Asimov and other writers in the genre that frankly I haven't heard of. I am by no means well-read in the SF genre, and I'm not saying the old-school writers are irrelevant, but ... there are a lot of new-school writers (Tobias Buckell, [info]kellymccullough , John Scalzi, and Cory Doctorow, to name just a few) that deserve just as much admiration. The SF community will die if the new-school writers aren't supported. Same with the Fantasy genre, or Romance, or YA. We have to support and respect the newer generation's perspective while acknowledging the older generation's contributions.
Hear hear.
At Bouchercon a month ago, I noticed something: I felt like a kid. At the age of forty, I was one of the younger folks. The peak of the age-curve seemed to be around 45, with a steep climb from the front, and a pretty long tail that maintained height through 60 or so.
And you know what I didn't hear? I didn't hear a lot of crap about the history of the genre. Sure, there is clear admiration for the older, classic works, and of course there are authors still writing who were writing fifty years ago: Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block.
But you didn't hear anyone talking about how this book or that book is like Agatha Christie only not as good, or why doesn't anyone write like Dashiell Hammett anymore. There were no panels on the aging of mystery fandom and how that implies incipient death for the genre.
No, it was all about the current crop of books, and what people are doing right now, and what they are hoping to do in the future.
Part of that may be because collectively, the Crime Fiction genre is extremely successful. SF is successful, but not as much as CF, which enjoys much more mainstream exposure.
Or perhaps CF is so successful because they look forward, they plan for the future, they try to meet the needs of the current readership, rather than wishing their readership wasn't dying off.
I think it's no coincidence that the most commercially successful SF writers these days--arguably Stross and Scalzi, and a bunch of Baen authors--are those who have worked the internet. I look at the projects that jpsorrow, jimhines, and other DAW authors are doing to generate readership by working the 'net and I think, Hey, that seems to be working.
These are not people who are whining about falling readership. These are people who are going out and looking for readers, who are recognizing that there is a much larger world of potential readers than merely those who identify as "SF fandom." There's no reason to stay in the ghettos.