Fantasy vs Science Fiction

Science should equal reason, right?  Then reason should be common sense?  At least this is what we are taught in the ideologies of our society.  However, if this is the case, then it should be peculiar why with all of the time and money we put into scientific research we seem to prefer fantasy over science fiction.  What I would consider once being a method to teach children morals, ethics, and basic life lessons by using their imagination (hence, the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis) has become a common indulgence even among adults in the forms of Harry Potter and Twilight.  The profession of "cryptozoology" has seemingly been developed from a pastime of fantasy.  The more we become acquainted with science and "reason"...reason being what we want in life...the further we push away from it.  There are several hypotheses that I can explore here, though.  First, we can take a step back and study trends in society over the past century.  You know there is no secret in the rise of the consumerism culture after the birth of the industrial revolution that eventually gave rise to mass produced products and, eventually, mass entertainment via mass communication.  I imagine that novelists, artistic creators and movie script writers were searching for ways to capture the human imagination.  Maybe fantasy has been a way that we have coped through some of the roughest times in humanity, such as World War II, the period in which the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was written.  Producing fantasy I am sure up to that point seemed to be silly.  However, fantasy has long been a way that we have managed to let our minds escape the ugliness, like the Korean War, JFK's assassination, Vietnam War, the Cold War, Embassy Bombings in the 1980's, the Gulf War, Somalia, and the list goes on.  With the rise of the television of the 1960's, writers needed new script, and what was once considered "low culture" became mainstream.  

I could talk all day about the effects of consumerism on generations X, Y and Z, but I can also explore other options.  I feel as though maybe once there became a greater divide between the scientific community and the general public, things might have become too technical to capture readers.  Cryptozoology had long been a tool of the past to unleash playtime upon the imaginations of the public.  Just like hoaxes, people love a good story, whether it is true or not.  I believe this was the ground work of fantasy and as science fiction became too technical for many people, they instead turned to this type of fantasy.  Are there vampires that exist among us?  Are there witches and warlocks?  Most people would say "of course not" but that first, does not keep us from enjoying the chase, and two, you will most likely still find a fanatical following that wholeheartedly supports the fantasy.  We know there are no witches as prescribed in Harry Potter, but it is easier to ignore the complicated science behind it and unleash our minds in a completely uncomplicated way.  This I think is the real reason behind the growing interest in fantasy fiction and the general population's recent repulsiveness of science fiction.  I cannot completely ignore that there is actually quite a large following of science fiction but there, I think, is even a larger group that would rather read textbooks than science fiction and would consider those followers "geeks"!  Maybe this is a result of the lacking scientific education that we receive here in the United States.  We often hear how far behind we are in Math and Science in the world and now, since we are not equipped with the progressing pool of knowledge that is within the scientific community, we are repulsed by the technicality of science fiction that was actually meant to make this type of knowledge more accessible to all.  I think both of these hypotheses are accurate to some degree, but not completely one way or the other.  We are a consumer culture and we do seek to indulge our minds the best we can, especially when the road gets tough, but there had to be some reason writers turned to fantasy in the first place.  Building off of an age-old hoaxish following, and the fact that science was becoming far too complicated than most of us can generally stand, fantasy taps into our desires and explores the world of facts that never came to be.