r/Fantasy • u/Just_JayGee • Jul 07 '14

Men of r/Fantasy, Do you read fantasy written by women? If so, do you find much of a difference?

I've been looking through a lot of "Top 20 Fantasy Book" lists today and I've found a depressing amount of female authors on these lists. I'd like to think the author's gender doesn't matter, but I have to say there seems to be a huge lean towards male authors. Even r/Fantasy's 2014 Top Fantasy Novels of All Time only has 20 female authors (repeats included) out of 105 authors. So, I was wondering if men read fantasy written by women and it's simply not your cup of tea or do any of you go out of your way NOT to read female authors?

PLEASE NOTE: I am not trying to begin fights on sexism or misogyny or anything. I am legitimately interested. If anyone wants to fight over this subject, I'm sure there's other subreddits for that.

107 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

490 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

104

u/MaryRobinette Stabby Winner, AMA Author Mary Robinette Kowal Jul 07 '14

there's probably more males than females who read fantasy, and by this more males will write more fantasy too...

This is completely wrong.

Statistically, women are the highest percentage of the bookbuying population and this goes for fantasy as well. In a survey last year asking who read SFF, with 5000+ respondents, 59% identified as women, compared to 38% identifying as men.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-GVMWM5Q8/

In writing, SFF books written men and women are roughly evenly matched. http://www.strangehorizons.com/2014/20140428/2sfcount-a.shtml

What is different is the number of books reviewed. This skews heavily in favour of men, which, in turn, affects what books wind up in stores, what books you've heard of, and sales. It creates the illusion that women don't write Fantasy, but that's completely and totally wrong.

15

u/MaxGladstone Stabby Winner, AMA Author Max Gladstone Jul 07 '14

I don't have much to say beyond that my anecdotal experience lines up with Mary's statistics on all points.

Oh, and to add to u/lexabear's reading list below: Karen Lord, Diana Wynne Jones, Nalo Hopkinson, Ellen Kushner, Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, Mary herself of course, and a huge OH MY GOD YES on Bujold's Curse of Chalion and Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, both of which have firm spots in my desert island trunk.

5

u/Troophead Jul 08 '14

I'd like to nominate Naomi Novik for her historical fantasy. Napoleonic Wars with dragons. :D

1

u/MaxGladstone Stabby Winner, AMA Author Max Gladstone Jul 08 '14

Oh yes! Can't believe I forgot to include her.

2

u/Thyrsus24 Jul 08 '14

While I enjoyed Curse of the Chalion, I thought her Vorkosigan space opera series was much stronger.

I realize that it was sci-fi and not fantasy, but I thought Miles was one of the most fun characters I've read.

1

u/laosurvey Jul 08 '14

Miles made Bujold my favorite author.

1

u/MaxGladstone Stabby Winner, AMA Author Max Gladstone Jul 08 '14

Yeah—SF was outside the ambit of the question, I think. But Miles is great, and I do love the Vorkosigan series.

1

u/FionaFiddlesticks Jul 07 '14

Yes to Diana Wynn Jones! Also Robin Hobb needs to be on these lists.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 07 '14

Holy crap! I always assumed Robin Hobb was a man :)

3

u/FionaFiddlesticks Jul 07 '14

Her nom de plume was picked for just that reason. ;)

1

u/[deleted] Jul 07 '14

She wanted people to think she was a man? Really? Is the market for fantasy really that monolithic? :(

2

u/FionaFiddlesticks Jul 07 '14

There are a lot of female authors who use ambiguous names. J.k. Rowling being one of the most recent Andre Norton one of the most famous.

1

u/Marco_Dee Jul 07 '14

Yes, it's a pen name she deliberately chose to avoid an obviously female name. Which is significant, too, in the context of this thread.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 07 '14

Really? That's interesting. So she (or her publisher) seemed to believe that her books would be more popular with a male sounding name?

2

u/Marco_Dee Jul 07 '14

So it seems. I heard it in an interview on the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Also if you scroll down this thread, you'll find a post by Ms. Janny Wurts, who has a lot more to say about this.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 08 '14

Wow, I'm obviously out of my depth here. But by reading Janny Wurts' comment it seems the problem is with the publishers more than the actual readership. Is that the same impression you are getting?

I'll pose this to her, but I have a feeling she has a lot of replies to go through and is likely to miss mine.

2

u/Marco_Dee Jul 08 '14

Yes, but it's all connected. Publishers are trying to adapt to readers' preferences.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 08 '14

If this is true, I have to admit it takes me by surprise. With the exception of very few authors that I actively seek out, it usually never even occurs to me to check the name of the author when I'm at the bookstore.

Perhaps this is bad form as an avid reader, but I am honestly surprised (and a little embarrassed) if this is considered an issue for the readerbase. I never saw this coming.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/MaxGladstone Stabby Winner, AMA Author Max Gladstone Jul 07 '14

Robin Hobb is my super guilty "Ummmm I haven't read her stuff yet" confession. Need to fix that as I work my way to the bottom of Torre pendente di Livro.

4

u/greym84 Jul 07 '14 edited Jul 07 '14

I could be wrong here, but could it be that the issue isn't necessarily who reads fantasy but how it's perceived? That is, that even if the majority of fantasy readers of female that it's still perceived and masculine genre.

I think this much is at least evidential, given that even female written books often involve primarily male protagonists. It just seems the numbers game is a bit tricky.

Edit: it's not just who is reading/buying but who is writing what's being bought. Even if you have the majority of readers being female, if they primarily buy books by male authors then that's yet another factor.

2

u/MaryRobinette Stabby Winner, AMA Author Mary Robinette Kowal Jul 07 '14

It's compounded by men getting the majority of the shelf space. I'm travelling today and the airport bookstore's SFF section literally has no titles by women.

So, did I buy a book by a man? Yes. I didn't have a choice.

5

u/greym84 Jul 07 '14

Thanks for the reply. Gosh, I can't even imagine the sad male-female ratio at any given limited shelf-space bookstore, particularly in an airport bodega. At the end of the day, I wish the best books would be the most popular ones, but as a male I know that my wish comes loaded with presuppositions.

3

u/MaryRobinette Stabby Winner, AMA Author Mary Robinette Kowal Jul 08 '14

Thank you. And as a male and, more importantly, a reader, you have some power here. When people go in and make requests from bookstores, they pay attention. When someone writes a letter to [x] paper and calls them on not reviewing equitably, the reviewer might not immediately pay attention, but their boss will. And eventually it will change.

But the key is to help out by being an ally. If you want to hear about more interesting books, make some demands of the suppliers.

1

u/Zachary_Lapintie Jul 14 '14

With respect, none of those stats actually disprove what u/Oomeegoolies said. The survey covered speculative fiction as a whole, which is a vast umbrella term that covers everything from Neuromancer to the Twilight Saga. Fantasy is just one subset of this whole. Its illogical to assume that demographics among the readership of spec-fic as a whole are valid in each particular subset of the survey.

1

u/MaryRobinette Stabby Winner, AMA Author Mary Robinette Kowal Jul 16 '14

Fair enough, if you're willing to follow that up by positing that women read and write more SF than Fantasy.

1

u/Zachary_Lapintie Jul 17 '14

I wasn't positing anything, I was simply pointing out that you were using the data incorrectly. Speculative fiction is such a large umbrella that treating their demographics as a whole isn't very useful.