For decades fantasy and sci-fi has been, no offense, costumed soap opera. They have long since stopped taking the reader on a fantastic journey of the imagination, but instead provide repetitive bloated serials which sooth the nerves as surely as another episode of Dallas (at least for those whose nerves are thusly soothed). Scheming barons, love-struck princesses, noble apprentices, geeky 'magic systems' on one side, on the other--relentless recycling of galactic marines whose recruits discover the value of comrades under fire, of plucky earthmen outwitting technologically superior invaders, of feudal empires re-inacted in space...
It's like for most sci-fi writers the genre peaked circa 1954 and the only thing left to do is to produce endless variations. And I don't want to talk about most fantasy writers. Moorcock was an aberration, not a herald of new genre vistas about to open up.
I think to some extent you're falling prey to "survivor bias". It's the same thing that causes some people to bemoan that "they don't build houses like they used to", pointing to some surviving example from a past century. Given enough time, the "bad houses" fall down, and so the well-built and well-cared-for survivors become the iconic examples of "good houses" that supposedly all houses of that era were built like.
Not so, and I would argue also not so for SF/F. There was an awful lot of pure drek written in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, <insert your favorite nostalgic decade here>. But what we tend to remember are the award-winners that are still in print. Well, of course those are good! They won awards!
And I'd be willing to bet that fifty years from now, people will be ignoring / unaware of much of the drek being written today. It will seem like an age of creative giants.
It's up to all us new writers to re-introduce the old feeling of awe and wonder into fantasy and sci-fi, but until that happens--The New Wave of Space Opera is where epic really resides today. This is where the reader goes on a fantastic journey and returns enriched by the experience, not simply having lost some more time via banal love triangles and evil wizards and ancient swords and saddled dragons and alien barons--if a book is the equivalent of a TV serial, not better, not different, then why bother...
Well, yes, that's an excellent thing to strive for. But writing truly original plots is hard. Perhaps impossible -- on some level, we're probably all recycling classic Greek tales.
There's also the matter of what markets are willing to buy. Truly original stuff is sometimes rejected as being "unmarketable". Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October", Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind", Alex Haley's "Roots" -- all rejected many dozens of times before finally finding a publisher, because they were "different". (Yes, they all did sell eventually, and reap acclaim -- but how many novels don't have authors that keep sticking their ego back into the buzzsaw after such treatment, and die quietly as a result?)
Whereas, write another bloated Tolkein clone, or Star Wars rip-off, and at least the literary market knows how to sell that, what cover to put on it, etc etc. "There's a market for it" is probably why we see so many familiar works. That, and we're not all creative giants (speaking for myself, anyway).
Also, Dan Simmons, who is mostly known to some as a horror or a crime noir writer, has a splendid contribution to epic space opera through Hyperion.
On that we agree.
