I conducted the experiment, as promised. I'll provide a detailed report to my "Trash-Control" raid:
Setting: Saint Petersburg, "Las-Knigas" bookstore. For reference, it's not the most prestigious/popular one out there (leadership is held by "Snark" and "Bukvoyed"), but it was brilliant for the experiment. To be honest, my head hurts a bit after digging through the kilograms of trash I discovered. So, the tally by quantity:
Science Fiction: 885 units of scrap paper
Fantasy: 713 units of scrap paper.
Thus, I admit WisTrit was right. Trash publications indeed predominate in science fiction. For the sake of a pure experiment, of course, it would have been worth doing a few more raids in different stores, but the general picture is already clear—the amount of trash is roughly equal, and readers of both subgenres are suffering equally. I probably thought trash fantasy predominated because of the brighter and flashier cover art—that's where I made my mistake. As far as I understand, the "revote" option is missing—well, just keep in mind that I'm now on the side of fantasy. And strictly speaking, literary genres are not any worse than one another, and I like them equally.

Now for the fun part: I've noted the most idiotic titles of trashy booklets in both genres. Meet the top list of gibberish:
Fantasy
1). "Brotherhood of the End." What did you think? It's just another Tolkien rip-off. But for some reason, more imaginative associations came to mind—I must be a corrupted and cynical person :)
2). "Teeth Wide Open." (Probably going to be a trilogy soon—"Eyes Popping Out" and "Nose Inside" are coming next) :smile41:
3). "Pandora's Stash." (Ancient Greek mythology has always been popular with gopniks :smile10: )
4). "When Zombies Come Back to Life." Beyond competition. The zombies were just dying, minding their own business, and then someone came along and forcibly brought them back to life :smile39:
5). "Through Violet Eyes." This is not a hallucinogenic novel. It's just a fantasy horror story ;)
6). "Narcotics Commissariat of Enlightenment." (Strangely enough, the author is American—perhaps a translation blunder produced this title).
7). "Harvest of the East Wind." Uh-huh. Diamond interest on the northwestern slope of Mount Fuji. Couldn't have named the book any simpler.
8). "The Wizard Out of His Mind." Something is definitely wrong with the wizard. Otherwise, why write four hefty volumes in glossy covers about him?
9). "Dance with a Voodoo Voyageur." It seems this sci-fi writer consulted Daria Dontsova regarding the book title.

Now for the second, equally "stellar" list.
Science-Fiction
1). "Legends of the Black-Void." Most likely, the book tells of the difficult daily routine of intergalactic sewage cleaners.
2). "Moon Sonata for a Blaster." With such "poeticism," you could practically fly to Mars.
3). "Ammo Never Runs Out." Well, we didn't actually doubt that. This is the fundamental postulate of all trashy space action movies.
4). "Stainless Steel Toad." Probably the main character is an elderly female mayor of the city of Solingen suffering from obesity.
5). "Tyutyunin vs. the CIA." Honestly, I laughed so hard I forgot to open it :smile03:
6). "Round Edges of the Earth." The author clearly demonstrates to us that he had a solid 'F' in geometry at school.
7). "Hunting Wild Trucks." It's actually time to stop with the moonshine.
8). "Spring Cleaning on the Sun." Daria Dontsova visited here too, giving valuable advice to the author.
9). "Dark Force of the Universe." Epochal. Except that "Universe" is written with a lowercase letter.
10). "A Pistol with Music." Imagine that. Try releasing a "dancing intergalactic turbo-transformer"—then we'll read it, but for now, keep studying!

...2XEL: I have the 1996 joint edition: "Ast" (Moscow) and "Terra-Fantastika" (St. Petersburg). "Worlds of the Strugatsky Brothers." Includes novels and novellas: The Guy from the Underworld, Anxiety, The Beetle in the Anthill, Waves Extinguish the Wind, Predatory Things of the Century, Extraordinary Incidents, Noon: 21st Century. By the way, I only have two volumes—there are more in the series. Preface by Sergey Pereslegin, notes by Boris Strugatsky.