I didn’t set out to stop reading work by men. And I haven’t, entirely. But writing Sleeps With Monsters has, slowly but surely, altered the way I choose my reading material, and altered the way I respond to many forms of entertainment across a variety of media. When the good people here at Tor.com were brilliant/mad enough to invite me to write a column on feministy things, I had no idea how utterly it would change my reading habits.
It’s now rare for me to read the work of male and female authors in equal proportion in any given month. For, to write about female authors, to sing out their work both new and old, you have to read them. You have to seek them out.
More than that, you end up writing to authors and publicists and putting yourself forward in a most unbecoming fashion. (Because if you wait for certain books to turn up on bookshelves, you could be waiting a long time.) There is a terrible guilt associated with the review copy that one asked for and either hates or bounces hard off, and a terrible fear that the next time one asks, one will be considered a poor return on an investment. I don’t know how many other reviewers/columnists agonise over asking in the first place, but there must be some…
It probably won’t surprise many of you to learn that there are a lot of books in this genre written by women. It did surprise me to learn that there were more than I could hope to keep up with. I’m a fast reader. Not fast like the wind, but three-books-per-average-week-while-doing-other-things, 120-to-150-books-per-year fast. You would imagine that at the very least I could keep mostly on top of a lot of new female-authored releases in the SFF genre and on occasion take the backlist out for a wee spin, in order to find more things about which I could write weekly, enthusiastically.
Oh heaven and hell, dear readers. Keeping up with recent books could be a full-time job in itself! There would need to be three columns like this one just to scratch the surface. I’m not complaining—perish the thought that I should complain: it is an absolute privilege to come here every week and talk about something interesting, something I enjoyed or something I love—but maintaining this women-in-genre theme over the course of a year has done something I never expected.
It has been radicalising. I only recognised how very much when I attended the Irish National Science Fiction (Octocon), and realised that many of the people around me, when reaching for titles to use as examples, or to recommend, were four or five times more likely to mention a male author as a female one. To me, who for a year had read the opposite proportion, this was very jarring. “Well,” said I to myself. “In the UK market, between 15 and 30 percent more volumes by male authors are published than volumes by female ones. Perhaps this accounts for some of the discrepancy.”
On the other hand, the US market has seen near parity over the last three years (which is as long as Strange Horizons has been providing us with these handy little summaries), but the volume of noise on the internet is still, in general, louder when it comes to male authors. Now, I will freely grant that many male authors write rather good books, but the engagement/enthusiasm surrounding them, surrounding their series, and their new releases, seems rather disproportionate by comparison. (It is certainly disproportionate in terms of what is reviewed in genre publications and what makes it onto New And Notable bookshop displays.)
I say writing this column has been radicalising for me because it has brought home in many ways how women’s influence on literary developments in genre is often written out of the general narrative of who influenced what, and when. It has brought home just how many women are writing and have written a broad and varied array of SFF novels, and how seldom their names are brought up, in contrast to men’s names. And it has brought home just how in so many ways Joanna Russ’s How To Suppress Women’s Writing is still immensely applicable.
She wrote it BUT…
It makes me astonishingly, surprisingly angry. But I was always rather on the cranky side.
I want to suggest an experiment, if you think I’m exaggerating. If you think my perceptions are off. For six months, try to read as many new books by women published out of a mainstream SFF publisher (on either side of the Atlantic) as you can. I’ll go easy on you: you can leave out one subgenre if you absolutely must. If they’re in series, try to read the preceding volumes first. If the author of a book you enjoy mentions female authors as influences, try to read them too. If someone recommends an older book by a female author that you haven’t read, add it to your list.
It’s a relatively simple experiment. (Although it may involve a lot of cajoling library staff.) But I’d really like to see if anyone else’s perceptions change, as mine have. I’d really like to see if anyone else’s perceptions change differently.
Liz Bourke is a cranky person who reads books. Her blog. Her Twitter.
Seems here lately the majority of Genre Fiction, especially the YA genre fiction I have been getting from Amazon Vine has been from female authors. It’s not been a conscious choice but has just turned out that way.
Looking over at my nightstand and the bookcase headboard I have. I’d say the scifi-fantasy fiction is about 75%-25% weighted in favor of female authors. The Romance section is weighted even more in favor of female authors but that would be probably expected.
Seems like the stories that are catching my attention seem to be written by my own gender.
Here, here!
I’ve gravitated to reading women more often over the years just out of preference and enjoyment. I still read a fair number of male writers, of course, but women, for me, are often just better. I don’t read romance, as a general rule, or paranormal romance, so I’m not talking about a genre pref.
And I very much agree that “the engagement/enthusiasm surrounding [male writers], surrounding their series, and their new releases, seems rather disproportionate by comparison” to women writers’ works. In fact, I think that’s an understatement. I notice it pretty regularly and I’m so, so tired of it.
I haven’t kept good track of my reading habits this year, but my TBR pile currently contains Chris Moriarty, Barbara Hambly, Patricia McKillip, Kendare Blake, Sarah Rees Brennan, Karin Lowachee, Joan D. Vinge, and…one other woman author whose name I forget. Charles de Lint is the only male writer on the stack.
All of the authors whose next releases I’m eagerly anticipating are women, too. I’m about 90% sure the last book I bought by a male writer was Guy Gavriel Kay’s River of Souls, several months ago.
As for why I’m reading almost exclusively female writers these days? For one thing, they tend to focus less on the standard straight white male protagonist and more on characters I find more interesting: female characters, queer characters, characters of color, characters who face societal disadvantages. (I still love an occasional straight white male protagonist, but there is and should be so much more!) They tend to be more character-centric than plot-centric–that is, the story is about the characters, rather than the characters simply being moving pieces in a cool setting with cool powers and cool fights. (If the fan discussion about your book can be summed up with “Who would win in a battle between X and Y?” I probably don’t want to read it.) They tend to treat women like people.
Of course, next week I’ll probably start binging on Westerns again, but at least with Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour I know what I’m getting myself into.
My reading is across multiple genres including mystery and paranormal romance. I write brief reviews of each book to share with various reader lists I belong to. I went back over this year’s list and did a fast count.
I’ve read 210 books in 2012. 108 have been in sf/fantasy with a majority being fantasy, particularly urban fantasy. Of those, 80 have been by female authors, 28 male.
These last couple of months, the books I read were predominantly by female writers (or near-equal – I don’t keep score), some of them are classics (Joan Vinge, Tanith Lee), one was non-genre (The Coockoo’s Calling) and only one new genre novel – Ancillary Justice. And I didn’t even set out to read fiction by female writers. It just came out that way. But it’s difficult for me to find the type of novels I like and it seems like most woman writers nowadays gravitate towards genres I’m not very interested in. So, reading SF by women? not a problem. Reading NEW SF by women? a different matter. I like SF about posthumanism, consiousess, weird biology, cyberpunk, nanotech, and space opera involving same(examples: Blindsight, A Door into Ocean). I like dark/sensual/weird fantasy that doesn’t tread where others have trodden already (examples: The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Tanith Lee’s Tales from the Flat Earth). These things are hard to come by and so lately I’ve been forced to go back to the classics I’ve missed. I’d love to hear recommendations though – current women writers writing on these subjects – I know they are there!
Michael_GR: I hope you’ve tried Chris Moriarty’s Spin novels (Spin State, Spin Control, Ghost Spin). Spin State is pretty old, 2003 or thereabouts, but Ghost Spin just came out this year…and yes, posthumanism, consciousness, cyberpunk, nanotech, and space opera involving same are ALL major players in her books.
I forgot to mention earlier that I am eagerly anticipating Max Gladstone’s Two Serpents Rise; I loved Three Parts Dead. So there’s one male author to look forward to!
YES! Please a bunch of people do this – it would make me so, so happy. Also, I set out to address the gender imbalance in my own reading a couple of years ago and just have never looked back. I’ve found so many great books by women that otherwise might have had to wait five or ten years for me to get to. You absolutely can’t go wrong reading lots of books by women.
I was reading mostly female authors since about the mid-90’s, probably a 90/10 mix to be honest. It wasn’t a conscious thing; I just gravitated toward their writing more. But since I started reading Tor.com a couple of years ago I’ve been finding many more male authors I like, and I’m at about 50/50. It gives me the widest possible mix of everything I like.
I’m also reading far more female authors than male these days (4-5:1), also not a deliberate choice. I think a lot of this is due to reading and listening to a number of feminist blogs and podcasts, which definitlely affects the books I hear squee about.
Sweeping generalisation alert, but well developed characters and relationships (ie character interactions, not necessarily romantic) are really important to me, and I think that this is more frequently a focus in female author’s work.
I have been thinking that I should make an effort to pick up more books by men…
Already being rather female-centric in my reading choices, this last year of following you here and on twitter has meant that my TBR pile has started to acquire a whole lot of new authors, exactly when I needed it. I tend to binge on subgenres or authors…And now, if I need something new! and exciting! I just browse through your back posts for that which I didn’t pick up earlier. Leaving out the pairs (such as Lee & Miller), I’m probably biased about 70/30. I’ve got a few pairs that skew my proportions more equal, though – Lee/Miller, Illona Andrews, Brust/White.
@@@@@Michael_GR Try Jo Anderton’s “Debris”.
I’ve long had a disconnect between this widely stated attitude that SFF is full of men with hardly any women, because 90% of the books on my shelves are by women and back when I was relying entirely on the library, I was still reading many more women than men. It’s always been a female-dominated genre to me.
I guess I’m completely out of touch. I just don’t get the point of trying to read only books exclusively written exclusively by (enter whatever category you want here).
Is this supposed to make me more tolerant? Informed? What virtue do I need to improve here?
@Lach7,
This is what Liz is after.
So I guess, ask yourself what your perceptions of female writers in genre are? Then read lots of women writers? And note any changes in perception.
Why do it? Why not? To examine what shapes our perceptions?
I am inclined to think that women have always written in/been involved in the genre(s) and that by and large history hasn’t really recorded that involvement acurately see
http://justinelarbalestier.com/books/battle/
I tried focusing on reading female authors as part of the worlds without end reading challenge. While it was a good experience, my reading is naturally skewed towards male writers, and I eventually discontinued the challenge. To some extent I think it is a question of themes and personal interests rather than anything sociological or marketing related. This doesn’t mean I don’t read female authors, but it means I don’t enjoy exclusively reading female authors. Certainly I rate Joyce Carol Oates, Gillian Flynn, and Marisha Pessl as three of the best authors working today.
But if you’re investing hours in a novel, you have to be honest with yourself rather than reading what other people think you should be reading. Also, given the success of J.K. Rowling, I think it is difficult to say the market is male dominated. And commercially it makes no sense to alienate 50 percent of the audience, so the best selling fiction usually holds some appeal to both sexes. Harry Potter, A Game of Thrones, etc, etc. I think this dual appeal of content for best selling fiction is perhaps more telling of the underlying situation than looking at raw data for male vs female authors.
Michael_GR@6: Some authors that might fit are Pat Cadigan (Dervish Is Digital), Elizabeth Bear, Justina Robson (Keeping It Real, a sort of cyberpunk fantasy), Gwyneth Jones (White Queen, near-future first contact story), PC Hodgell (the Kencyrath fantasy series). Several of those I mentioned are British authors, but the state of publishing for sf by women there is simply abysmal and has been for quite a while.
Jonathan_Strange@13: The trouble with your reasoning is one that Liz points out in the original article: there are lots of books written for all sorts of tastes, but they almost never get the same push behind them (and thus the visibility) that books by men do.
Some authors you might want to check out are Elizabeth Bear, CJ Cherryh, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, and so on.
Among older sf you have CL Moore, Leigh Brackett, Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey, and on and on.
Never thought about this so I checked the SF/F books I can see from my desk: Martha Wells, Sheri Tepper, Lois McMaster Bujold, Marjorie Kellog, Ursula Le Guin, Megan Whelan Turner, Kristin Cashore, Jo Walton, Justine Larbalestier, Emma Bull, Michelle Sagara, Tanya Huff, Barbara Hambly. About 70/30 female/male authors. Then there’s the Jennifer Crusie but that’s another genre.
I do not have enough YES for this post.
One of the most world altering experiences I’ve had was attending an all women’s college. And suddenly having all the STEM students around me be female. All the student goverenment officers be female. The founder of the school be female. All the alumnae* who went off to become famous scientists and leaders be female. etc.
Growing up, I always felt stuck in this weird sort of limbo, where “being good at science” was a huge part of my identity” but so was “being female” – and a part of the cultural definition of “female” included a lack of female scientists. It took several years at an all women’s college, doing electronics experiments surrounded by only female students, etc. to make any sort of dent in my subconscious when it came to science and gender. Despite always being really good at it myself. Despite having plenty of female classmates in high school who did as well as I did in our science classes.
Also, I have a question for those of you who are looking at your shelves and finding mostly female authors (me too, but well, there’s a story there too). Do you think the percentages of whose books you talk about is any different from what you read? I’m rather curious – although I don’t know how one would measure that accurately….
*Even now I still sometimes want to type that as “alumni” nonononono
“Also, given the success of J.K. Rowling, I think it is difficult to say the market is male dominated.”
As evidenced by the fact that she made up a second initial just so that she could hide her femaleness.* And chose a male nom de plume when she wanted to write a novel and have no one know it was her.
In any case, no one is arguing that the market is male dominated, Liz is suggesting that our perceptions of male and female authors, including the number of must read authors in each of these categories, may be a bit off. And that this means books by men are more likely to get publicity. And then become part of the history of SFF that we tell ourselves.
It’s one thing to argue that your own reading skews male just because. But to argue that it’s just personal preference when most SFF “must-read” and “what’s new” lists skew male as well – that’s something else altogether. It’s worth it to examine the connections between those things, which is really what Liz is talking about.
* This factoid always frustrates me particularly, because my first two initials – and nickname – have always been JK. So I take it as a personal affront that she had to come up with a middle initial – and chose mine. Also, I find it slightly insulting to be told that my initials sound masculine. They aren’t! They’re mine – and I’m a girl! so how can they be masculine?! I know this makes no sense, but the point is that it means I’ll never forget that she did so and why.
One woman being successful doens’t do anything to disprove the fact that the market is dominated by men. If anything, the fact that she stands out so much as an example of a successful woman writing in genre shows how unusual it is for a woman writer to reach that level of success.
But J.K. Rowling is not the only example by any means. Take Stephanie Meyer and Suzanne Collins. I’m not disagreeing that the stats aren’t skewed in favour of men in certain respects, but if you were to collectively look at Stephanie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, and Suzanne Collins they’ve all had outstanding success and they’re all writing genre fiction. I just think that the issues here are quite complicated and that things might not be as straightforward as expected.
I really can’t think of any big-name male SF author of the last few years (besides George R.R. Martin) who has had that level of success in terms of multiple Hollywood movie deals and popular acceptance. Not that I’m moaning about that, but it’s just a thought.
I don’t think we can put YA/middle-grade SFF in the same category as SFF for this discussion. I noticed a few months ago that when I thought of the “big names” in fantasy, the gender ratio is completely flipped in adult fantasy vs. YA SFF (I can’t speak for adult sci-fi, I almost never read that genre).
For YA/middle grade SFF, you have Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, Veronica Roth, Tamora Pierce… the only two ‘celebrity’ male names I can think of are John Green for YA and Rick Riordan for middle grade.
For adult fantasy, the names that come up over and over are Patrick Rothfuss, George R. R. Martin, Scott Lynch, Neil Gaiman, and Brandon Sanderson. I can’t think of a single female adult fantasy writer today that gets as much hype as any of those guys.
The usual caveats apply here–this is one person’s observation, and other people might have had different experiences. I’d quite like people to prove me wrong as far as adult fantasy goes…
@@@@@ Durand S Welsh
You do realize you just listed three different YA authors, yes? The genre that has exploded in the last decade? And whose authors still regularly get derided because they 1) write for teens and 2) they tend to write for teen girls, specifically?
And as far as the movies go, please also keep in mind that until movie exes starting noticing that many/most of the fans in line for the later Harry Potter movies were teen girls, conventional wisdom was that movies whose main target audience were teen girls just couldn’t do well at the box office. These books are being made into movies in large part because Hollywood hasn’t a clue how to capture this “new” audience any other way. Not because adult SFF fandom has any major respect for most of these female authors.
In the meantime, Gaiman has had several of his stories made into movies/shows, despite none of the adaptations being more than a moderate success, financially. Try finding a female SFF author that that’s true of. Also, convenient of you to fail to mention Christopher Paolioni, Michael Crichton, Orson Scott Card, Rick Riordan, PD James, just about every single superhero movie ever, Richard Matheson, Steven Gould, or JRR Tolkien. Just to name a few authors who have had books of theirs made into movies in the past 15 years.
I mean, really, we’re talking about gender and publicity and respect in SFF and you mention Twilight? As an example of what, precisely? Because we’re talking about books here, not movies, and Twilight didn’t get any publicity as SFF until it was already big enough to get a movie deal.
Here’s a thought: maybe the three women you mentioned stand out in your mind because they are an exception to the rule. Or maybe it’s because of the way that people tend to see gender equality as women dominating, and any percentage of women around 25% as being “equal.” Or maybe these movies have just done better financially – possibly because until recently there have been so very few movies aimed at teen girls.
Because it sure as hell isn’t because as many female SFF authors have had their books made into movies in the last 10 to 20 years as male authors have.
@@@@@ Durand S Welsh Can we unpack that a little? I’m not going to say that Rowling, Meyer, and Collins aren’t a success. They are and everyone points to them as shining examples of successful women authors. Everyone trots out their names.
But there is more to this than being able to point to three women who have film deals and sold a lot of books.
I’m going to take the two biggest names on that list, Rowling and Meyer. The books that everyone associates with their names are YA novels. YA is fairly well populated by women authors, so having two major successes in that sub-genre, both by women, isn’t a huge surprise.
But you have to look at what they wrote as well. The title character in Rowlings series is a boy, a chosen one boy even. Because boys are always special and destined to save the world.
Would the books have been as sucessful if the protag had been a girl? I’ve asked myself that question often. I keep coming up with “probably not”.
Meyers wrote a series about an unbalanced relationsip between a teenage girl and a hundred year old stalker vampire. How…shackled to cliche in terms of tradional male/female roles these books are really makes my skin crawl. Edward has ALL the power in these books. Bella has next to none. You may have missed the debate raging about the power dynamics in these books, but it is out there.
Can you name any adult SFF books written by a woman that have had the same popularity as GRRM, or Gaiman, or King? Any that are viewed as the same type of serious, worthy of undying slavish devotion books?
The only books I can think of are all UF, which is seen by many critics as “lesser” than the serious work of GRRM or just about any male author. Tanya Huff and Charlene Harris both had a TV series based on their books, but they were seen as escapist vampire shows, a guilty pleasure on the level of reality shows. They were never spoken of as serious drama or critcially aclaimed, or the work the authors put into the stories acknowledged.
The hard truth is that there is always an edge of dismissal and disdain when it comes to the work of women writers. The reception a woman’s genre work recieves is different from day one. We aren’t reviewed in the “right places”, we have to struggle to be taken seriously, or have our work viewed as worthwhile.
And trust me, it is a hard, never ending slog to have any kind of visibility at all. Women work twice as hard for half the notice. And often for our troubles, we get called lovely names such as “fake writer girls”.
That was a big portion of Liz’s point. Notice the women writers out there. Take them seriously.
@Zylaa
It depends on what you mean by ‘celebrity’. Walter Dean Myers, MT Anderson, Sherman Alexie, James Dashner (oh, hey, look another male YA author whose books are getting made into movies), John Flanagan, Anthony Horowitz (who also had a book made into a movie, but writes about spies, not SFF), Jay Asher, David Levithan, Paolo Bacigalupi, Christopher Paolini, and Scott Westerfeld are hardly unknown, just to name a few.
Also, it depends on what you mean by ‘YA’ – Orson Scott Card, Neil Gaiman, and James Patterson all have SFF titles that are shelved in the teen section of most libraries, but writing YA is not what they are famous for.
But yes, YA does seems to skew female – although in reality not nearly as much as most people perceive, I suspect.
Doing a quick count on Goodreads for the last three years for myself I see the following percents for books I read by women:
2011: 20%
2012: 28%
2013: 32%
So, my percentage does seem to be climbing and I would say that it is because of these and other reviews bringing very good books to my attention.
Outside of books by authors I already read, I tend to start new books based upon recommendations from people who have given me good rec’s before. So, I think one implication would be that I am getting more books by women recommended to me.
A deeper insight as to why the percentage isn’t closer to parity will require a bit more digging on my part involving why I read a particular book at the time I read it.
@jennygadget– Fair point, thanks! The authors I listed all seemed like very clear YA celebrities to me (of the list you gave, Paolini is the only one that would have met my arbitrary standard), but my opinion was very much informed by popularity among my own group of friends and corner of the internet.
Thank you also for comment 24, that put into words so many things I wasn’t sure how to articulate.
@@@@@ 24 jennygadget
I agree with your point, but a minor correction: I’m pretty sure PD James is a woman. As a crime writer, I think she’s less relevant to this list anyway. There are a number of big name female crime writers who have had film or TV adaptations, such as Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and Ellis Peters.
@@@@@ Carrie80 – Thanks! I didn’t know that! :)
Although that’s rather an interesting data point itself – yet another female author who goes by her initials rather than her female sounding first name.
@@@@@ Zylaa
You’re welcome. :)
@@@@@ Jamie L Moyer
Yes, to everything in your comment.
@19, I tend to discuss the books I read with other women that I know, and most of them prefer female authors.
But there are women in my sf book club that make a point of saying that they do not like “girly stuff” or “smooshy stuff” in books and they will often not try anything by women that looks as if it might (to their minds, men don’t write that- they haven’t read The Notebook). They seem to think their serious reader card will be revoked if they’re caught reading too much by women that fits this category. I make a point of discussing books by female authors with them, not that it does any good. They just think my tastes aren’t to be trusted.
I also discuss books with my hard-sf loving husband. Gender in authors seems to be invisible to him, and all his favorite books but one are by women. They aren’t neccesarily hard sf, but contain interesting scientific ideas mixed with great characters (Bujold, Wen Spencer, Kage Baker, Cherryh). I just asked him and he said he’d not thought about it, but now that he did he thinks women tend to write sf characters that interest him more, and don’t just depend upon the idea. They have the ideas *and* the characters.
I do agree with the movies that have been mentioned, especially Rick Riordan and Gaiman. Neil Gaiman certainly has done all right on the film front. I stand corrected because despite being regularly subjected to the trailers, I completely forgot about Percy Jackson. :-). But superhero movies are tricky, because if people are at odds about whether to include YA in the mix, then where do comics fit in??? I’ve got no dispute that superhero comics are totally dominated by male writers, but I don’t think it’s possible to include superhero movies and exclude YA from the assessment.
And PD James and JK Rowling raises a fair point about using female writers using initials. It is a way to bypass audience preconceptions or biases. But this also works the other way, such as when Tim Pratt released Blood Engines as T.A. Pratt just after Laurell K. Hamilton made paranormal romance huge.
But YA is really the market audience, not the genre, so I don’t think success in YA can be discounted as not being part of the SFF genre. I’ve been told (hey, don’t quote me here) that at least half the YA market is adult.
@@@@@ 24 jennygadget “I mean, really, we’re talking about gender and publicity and respect in SFF and you mention Twilight? As an example of what, precisely?” I’m mentioning it as an example of publicity and popularity of the novels. Content aside, Stephanie Meyer wrote a SFF book that sold, whether or not the SFF community ever embraced it as a SFF book or not. It never would have been optioned if not for the established fan base. And one of the topics we are talking about is publicity of women writers in SFF.
And I’m glad Charlaine Harris was mentioned. Her fiction is escapist fiction, a guilty pleasure, but I think that’s always been something that has seperated SFF as a whole from the mainstream and something we’ve never been ashamed of. Paranormal Romance is a huge part of SFF as well. I read a lot of Laurell K. Hamilton books when I was younger (people have varied and sometimes strong views about their literary merit, but at the time I liked them).
This is the sort of open discussion that makes the community stronger and certainly has made me think twice about a few preconceptions. Very interesting. :-).
@19, @31 Agreed that the books you talk about is also interesting.
I think I’m doing ok. I do talk about books by women to friends where we’ve established shared tastes. I’m trying to remember what I recommended to a colleague who was into Ben Aaronovitch last year; I’m pretty sure it included female authors, but was more male heavy than my own reading is.
For my bookclub, I’ve nominated 6 books by women and 2 by men; in the last year we’ve read equal numbers by men and women. The book that generated the most discussion was by a man and the one that had the least was by a woman, but there are other factors (eg more participation earlier in the year), and in general I don’t think the discussion level is correlated to author gender.
>and how seldom their names are brought up, in contrast to men’s names.
As a fan and blogger of science fiction romance (thegalaxyexpress.net), I encounter this all the time. But I also see marginalization in things like “women in genre” lists, which tend to omit or severely underrepresent women authors of digital-first SFR titles. (I’m not sure which is the stronger bias at work: the one against digital-first titles or the one against the idea of including romance in SF. Probably a combination of both.)
I read a lot of SF/F growing up and on into my adult years and gravitated to the more character-driven stories, but it wasn’t until SFR started coming into its own that I realized how much I craved its unique blend. I love stories about the intersection of romance and technology. SFR is character-driven and plot driven and “what if?” driven all in the same package (stories vary in how they mix the three, but I personally love the variety).
Once I changed over to reading SFR, which is written primarily by women, I discovered the beauty of the female gaze. To quote Mary Beth above, I also like SFR because it has “characters I find more interesting: female characters, queer characters, characters of color, characters who face societal disadvantages.”
I can’t wait to discover more SFR, and am currently enjoying the bounty coming from digital-first and indie authors.
I like the idea of this challenge. My reading this year has been about half female authors, but that’s largely driven by my finally discovering Georgette Heyer (and Elizabeth Moon!). Past years it’s more like 1/3 or less. Depending on how you count Lee & Miller. ;)
To quote a Lois McMaster Bujold line… let’s see what happens.
Also take a look in the Romance section. Because Romance is made up of more female authors than male many women who actually are writing in another genre get published in Romance if they have even the smallest of love stories. And the publishers have capitalized on a lot of it. Look at all the SF, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal etc, that is published under “Romance.” The Luna line from Harlequin is shelfed in Fantasy is one of the rare exceptions. Seriously, don’t discount something just because it got first classified as Romance, often that is the only genre that the publishers will publish these women as even if the story really is more mystery, SF or Fantasy.
@firemermaid
So true.
I’m going to stick with being sex agnostic in my reading choices.
I love Le Guin, Moon, McCaffrey, Bear, Kurtz, Cherryh, Duane, Lee, etc. and don’t usually pick based on the gender of the first name. If its good or might be good I will read it.
Currently reading Trade Secret by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller so I win either way…..
one thing I noticed from reading all these posts, nobody has listed a new author published in the last six months. I’m a genre bookseller, and I’m having trouble listing new authors (aside from Mur Lafferty and Ann Leckie) that have been through the store (im sure there must be some, I just can’t name them….). Where as in the same time I’ve seen through half a dozen oddly similar grimDark fanasy novels that have each out sold everything else at the time.
Can anyone else name a new author they’ve picked up recently?
Okay let me get this out of my system before we proceed: STOP PICKING BOOKS BASED ON THE GENDER OF THE AUTHOR, ITS SILLY & DOESN’T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT THE QUALITIES POSSESSED BY THE FICTION IN QUESTION!
*Ahem*
Okay moving on: The writing industry is not male dominated at all. The inclusion of PoD & vanity publishing has brought about a revolution in publishing & men are still more likely to be writers than women are.
This is not some kind of conspiracy to keep women out. The author mentioned “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” which details 11 ways this is done: Prohibitions Bad Faith Denial of Agency (deny that a woman wrote it), Pollution of Agency (show that their art is immodest, not actually art, or shouldn’t have been written about), The Double Standard of Content (one set of experiences is considered more valuable than another), False Categorizing (women artists are categorized as the wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, or lovers of male artists), Isolation (the myth of isolated achievement: only one work, or a short series of poems are considered great), Anomalousness Lack of Models Responses Aesthetics… None of those are the reasons why in the contemporary world there are more author that have outies than innies.
Heres the real reason: Because more men than women want to write novels.
Want a radicalised idea about reading? Heres a doozy for you: Just read the books you think look interesting & stop reading based on the authors gender.
“STOP PICKING BOOKS BASED ON THE GENDER OF THE AUTHOR, ITS SILLY & DOESN’T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT THE QUALITIES POSSESSED BY THE FICTION IN QUESTION!”
Actually, statistically, it does.
Picking a female author means I am:
1) more likely to get a female main protag
2) more likely to get female supporting characters
3) more likely to get well rounded female characters
4) more likely to get female characters that do fun things
5) less likely to get the male gaze
6) less likely to read descriptions of sexual assault that makes my skin crawl
Which, now that I can go onto goodreads and amazon and other corners of the internet and get information quickly, and now that I have people I trust to suggest books to me, people who review books with these qualities in mind, the statistics don’t matter nearly as much. What matters is what individual books contain.
But back when I was 15-20? And the internet was non-existent to new? And all I had to rely on for suggestions were displays and flyers in Barnes and Noble, and the blurbs on the back of books? And what I knew of the gender of the author?
That was when I made the decision to only read SFF written by women (unless it came strongly recced by a limited number of people). Because reading SFF only by women may not mean that all the books I read were “quality” but it did mean that I would avoid being punched in the face by bullshit like Piers Anthony’s misogyny and male gaze – which is what mostly got recced to me at the time. Because reading only SFF written by women is not at all a guarantee that the books I read will have the qualities listed above, but it sure as hell increases the odds like woah.
And now that I do have the advantage of the internet, and have found all kinds of wonderful female authors in the meantime, the question I keep wanting an answer to is: why do all these lists by people who claim they are being “gender neutral” end up so stacked in favor of men?
@Morningstar: I’ve just unpublished your last comment–oddly, putting the phrase “no offense” before an incredibly offensive comment doesn’t quite cancel out your overtly condescending tone or haphazard generalizations.
Everyone else: Please don’t feed the trolls.
all the YES.
I started doing this in my 20s, a good 30-odd years ago. Now I try to make a point of recc-ing mostly women authors because they should not be lost or overshadowed. And of course I hand books to my kids, their friends, my friends, their children… I get a lot of great work into people’s hands.
I don’t want to sound like a racist but as I recall, there was a moment in the late 1970s when I realized most of the interesting new SF authors I had discovered were women, people like Lynn Abbey, Eleanor Arnason, Octavia Butler, Moyra Caldecott, Jaygee Carr, Joy Chant, Suzy McKee Charnas, C. J. Cherryh, Jo Clayton, Candas Jane Dorsey, Diane Duane, Phyllis Eisenstein, Cynthia Felice, Sheila Finch, Sally Gearhart, Mary Gentle, Dian Girard, Eileen Gunn, Monica Hughes, Diana Wynne Jones, Gwyneth Jones, Leigh Kennedy, Lee Killough, Nancy Kress, Katherine Kurtz, Tanith Lee, Megan Lindholm, Elizabeth A. Lynn, Phillipa Maddern, Ardath Mayhar, Vonda N. McIntyre, Patricia A. McKillip, Janet Morris, Pat Murphy, Sam Nicholson (AKA Shirley Nikolaisen), Rachel Pollack, Marta Randall, Anne Rice, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Pamela Sargent, Sydney J. Van Scyoc, Susan Shwartz, Nancy Springer, Lisa Tuttle, Joan Vinge, Élisabeth Vonarburg, Cherry Wilder, and Connie Willis. Of course some were more interesting than others but noticing that led inevitably to reading authors like Marcia J. Bennett, Mary Brown, Lois McMaster Bujold, Emma Bull, Pat Cadigan, Isobelle Carmody, Brenda W. Clough, Kara Dalkey, Pamela Dean ,Susan Dexter, Carole Nelson Douglas, Debra Doyle, Claudia J. Edwards, Doris Egan, Ru Emerson, C.S. Friedman, Anne Gay, Sheila Gilluly, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Lisa Goldstein, Nicola Griffith, Karen Haber, Barbara Hambly, Dorothy Heydt (AKA Katherine Blake), P.C. Hodgell, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Tanya Huff, Kij Johnson, Janet Kagan, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, Katharine Kerr, Peg Kerr, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, Rosemary Kirstein, Ellen Kushner, Mercedes Lackey, Sharon Lee, Megan Lindholm, R.A. MacAvoy, Laurie J. Marks, Maureen McHugh, Dee Morrison Meaney, Elizabeth Moon, Paula Helm Murray, Rebecca Ore, Tamora Pierce, Alis Rasmussen (AKA Kate Elliott), Melanie Rawn, Mickey Zucker Reichert, Jennifer Roberson, Michaela Roessner, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Melissa Scott, Eluki Bes Shahar (AKA Rosemary Edghill), Nisi Shawl, Delia Sherman, Josepha Sherman, Sherwood Smith, Melinda Snodgrass, Midori Snyder, Sara Stamey, Caroline Stevermer, Martha Soukup, Judith Tarr, Sheri S. Tepper, Prof. Mary Turzillo, Paula Volsky, Deborah Wheeler (Deborah J. Ross), Freda Warrington, K.D. Wentworth, Janny Wurts, and Patricia Wrede, to name a few.
@39: Yoon Ha Lee’s Conservation of Shadows? Ann Aguirre’s Perdition? Evangeline Walton’s She Walks In Darkness?
@39 & 46: Let me second Conservation of Shadows. I’ve also recently enjoyed collections by Maureen F. McHugh and Kij Johnson.
I started reading women in SFF back in the 1970s, and have continued to look for women who write since then. I’d like to see Lois Bujold’s books made into movies just as Heinlein and Card and Tolkien and Crichton and Matheson have. Sure, JK Rowling made it, but as pointed out above, she’s one of the exceptions that prove the rule. Mr. Nicholl at #45 has a lovely list of writers who happen to be female, and they need far more publicity than they’ve been getting. Brava and kudos to Liz, for pointing this out again.
And once again, your readers are either people like you (who read more women by conscious choice) or clueless gaslighters, who insist gender isn’t so important any more. Yes, it gets more and more obvious that feminists still need to call out the opposition, and womens’ work is still under-valued.
My experience in this respect has been somewhat different – I’ve always liked reading plenty of female writers. But I live in a small non-English speaking country and only had access to translated editions until several years ago. And the SFF publishers here have always been very sexist in their choices, especially when it comes to science fiction. Bujold and Le Guin are literally the only female writers who’s had more than two science fiction novels published here. In fantasy the situation is better, but still the men are preferred. So I was forced to read mostly SFF books by male writers even though I loved reading Le Guin, Bujold and Hobb’s works.
But once I was able to buy and read English language books, I’ve been reading more and more books by women. Especially last year. In the last two years I discovered for myself Caitlin Kiernan, Seanan Mcguire, Karen Joy Fowler, Kate Elliott, Aliette de Bodard, Carrie Vaughn, and quite a few others. There is so much great stuff, in all subgenres and writing styles that when I hear someone claim that there aren’t really good female writers of SFF, or in science fiction, or in whatever subgenre, I just know the speaker hasn’t really been looking much for them or is extremely biased.
Cool… So, is there a list or something…? I don’t even know a great deal of current writers male or female. Current writing doesn’t seem to catch my attention. But it’s true that all the “big” books newly out seem to be mostly male. Maybe it has to do with series-writing? In my perception women writing is mostly associated with series-writing, or the lowest common denominator (not by way of being written by women but by way of the market place, and by not seeing many women writers in general). But I’m not even sure what this article is about… That your perception has changed of writing styles and seeing the world? Or that you notice that there are a lot of women writers?
Or that you’re noticing yourself reading a lot of women writers?
It’s one of these articles (commonly perceived on the internet), which never state clearly what they mean and what is the signficance about them, but articulate it all in a big cloud, and yes of course.
I’d say my ratio of female to male authors remains fairly 90-10 in favor of the women. Probably because I go on author benders where I try to read everything a newly discovered author has ever written… I’m bookmarking this thread.
I’m all for that, if someone could compile a list of female-author must-reads in the sci-fi genre (I’m not much for fantasy). The only sci-fi books by females that I can recall reading in recent history were different Star Wars:EU novels, but those books differ greatly in quality.
@52: The following two lists, from Worlds Without End, may be of interest:
https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_women_winners.asp
https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_sf_mistressworks.asp
I’m actively trying to read more SFF by women — I just finished the astounding “Ancillary Justice” by Ann Leckie. One thing that makes it just a bit harder is that many female SFF authors (for understandable reasons) use ambiguous names. For example, I didn’t realize that Chris Moriarty was a woman. I can wish for a better world, but while we’re waiting, please understand that I really appreciate people putting together lists of SFF by women. It helps me a lot, and I’m sure there are many others that find it just as useful.
@52: Since the links didn’t get through, I will mention that Worlds Without End has two good lists, “Award Winning Books by Women Authors” and “SF Mistressworks”.
I tend not to like restricting my reading by category (as opposed to expanding my reading to include people I didn’t know before). I do read quite a lot of SFF by women and quite a lot by men too. I have two observations to make though.
I don’t reread books very often. Out of curiosity, I recently compiled a list of all the books I could think of that I had reread as an adult (read twice or more since the age of 16). These were mostly but not all SFF. Of the ones I could remember (surely not all!) there were 17 authors represented of whom 15 were women and only 2 men. Considering I feel like I read a much more even split, this struck me as interesting.
The second thing I noticed was the reviews/attention my favorite authors recieve. By favorite, I mean authors that so far I’ll read just about anything they publish. Let’s take Goodreads reviews, looking at the book with the most reviews/ratings per author. Martha Wells 1,500. Jacqueline Carey 31,700. Brandon Sanderson 79,000. Patrick Rothfuss 135,900.
(Let’s also toss in some other favorites like Kate Elliott 4,300. Connie Willis 17,300. Robin McKinley 38,900. Orson Scott Card 490,000. Neil Gaiman 223,500. And yes some less-rated male authors like Vernor Vinge 19,100.)
This really blew my mind. I knew that Wells was “obscure” compared to the “big name” SFF authors I also follow. But the jump from Carey to Sanderson really broke my brain since I think of her as being a wildly popular writer who happens to be a woman. Actually a number of the jumps in numbers, sometimes by an order of magnitude surprised me, but the trend towards a breakdown by gender was really striking.
I’m very late to the party and I’m not sure you’ll read it, Liz, but I really felt compelled to comment on this post. Because I don’t think anything has had a bigger influence on my SF reading habits in the last decade than this blog (OK, availability of e-books probably competes).
I’ve been loving SF since I read “Foundation” as a 12-year old (quite funnily I had huge prejudices about the genre before that!) and my experience is similar to Bergmaniac’s – tiny non-English speaking country (in my case, post-Soviet) with a limited and very sexist selection of translated SF. So I read what I could and mostly enjoyed it. Even after I was able to order books in English, the pattern didn’t change much: I operated pretty much in isolation and didn’t know any girls who liked SF, and only a few boys. So my reading was mostly based on must-read lists and well-publicised titles.
I do remember being upset about how women were treated in some of those novels. Robert Jordan specifically tipped me over the edge once: I wrote a lengthy rant on Facebook about the ridiculousness of his gender presentation and dynamics, but I had kind of resigned myself to the fact that one has to put up with that sort of thing, at least if one is interested in epic fantasy.
Things were slowly improving (I mean, I wasn’t a total ignorant, I had read the big names), but then I came across Sleeps With Monsters and everything changed drastically. I discovered Martha Wells, Kate Elliott, Elizabeth Bear, Roz Kaveney, Violette Malan… I’m not saying I’ve been reading only female SF authors since then, but mostly. And I can confirm that this changes one’s perception, or at least it did change mine.
Quite frankly, my main emotion at first was relief: that I had been in fact right and women CAN write good SF and actually have been writing it for years. And then just the joy of realizing that some of the elements I disliked about the genre were not necessary at all! I recall reading through Martha Wells’s books and Elliott’s Jaran in a sort of daze – the women! The ideas! The societies! And such fun, too! So I would argue that reading more female authors does change the way one views them and also male authors. I am much more aware of gender issues – and related matters – when I’m reading. I am also much less tolerant now, because I know that I don’t have to put up with certain things, as there is so much good stuff to read that doesn’t include this s***.
After all this relief and happiness, I’m now in the state of righteous anger – why are these books not better known? How COME there are people out there who say women cannot do guns/battles/science/whatever? I’m still thinking what I personally can do to change that. If nothing else, I can redress the balance on Goodreads a bit.
Apologies for this monster post, as everything in it could have actually been said with two words: thank you.
PS I’m not saying all male authors are sexist pigs, far from it, and I continue to read the best books from them with pleasure. If anything, I appreciate it even more now, when men get the women right – because the issue is never far from my mind.
Annikky @57:
I’m not much in the way of participating in the comment threads lately – time marches ever on! – but I just want to say that I really appreciate knowing that this column has been of use to you. Thank you.
I got into sf&f by way of fairy tales and realised most of the stuff I enjoyed was written by English authors (US and UK), Germany not having a huge tradition of that outside of children’s books. So when I got to read in the language I bought what was imported (in the 80s so before Amazon), so I mostly read men’s version and kept wondering where the women were who weren’t prize or fridge-bait.
Fortunately we at last (especially since Mists of Avalon) got MZB and Anne McCaffrey, so I did get some and there was the Janny Wurts & Raymond Feist crossover, and David Eddings did some great women (although I will never forgive him and his wife completely for X’Nedra, even though she got redeemed mostly).
Long story short – I started to selectively read more women-written sf&f because the men had agency anyway (that’s how the lady writers roll, they don’t mind more than one important character most often, as long as everyone works together) and the women were not just stereotypes or absent.
These days, the choice is so big that I don’t have to even try a new male author to get some reading material that might be interesting, there are always new books by female authors, known and recommended.
It does have the whiplash effect that I only come across mysogyny in real life now, not in my entertainment and it highlights that much more. I’m 46 and very grateful for this state of affairs. Sure, I’d like it if we got more female written movies or tv series of sf&f, but in comparison to my youth we have it so much better.
A HUGE shout-out to DAW in the 80s, who singlehandedly made me realise there were other women writers apart from MZB and McCaffrey. A really good tip was looking for a Jody Lee cover – I really like her work – that mostly was on female written sf&f. I’m so glad she still gets to illustrate all the Valdemar Lackey and the Michelle West Essalieyan universe.
I think Charles de Lint does great female characters, by the way.
Liz – so, it took me a while to find this article – I thought it was written much more recently than it turned out to be! Anyway, I remember when I first read this article, I was a bit – shall we say – doubtful. Surely I was pretty well-rounded in my reading choices. Maybe the majority of books I read were written by men, but so? It wasn’t purposeful on my part – I’m not a misogynist.
But, for some reason, your challenge here stuck with me…and over time, I’ve become a bit more self-critical. And realised that because of the “way things are”, unless I deliberately set out to change my reading habits, I’m never going to get out of the rut of reading works predominantly by white guys(obligatory disclaimer – nothing wrong with white guys, I am one myself). I also came to the realisation that because of my hectic life, I really don’t read that many books. Maybe three to four a month? With all the great books that come out ALL THE TIME, I decided to actually *make an effort* to choose the ones that were written by either women or non-American authors when I had a book buying choice to make. I hoped this would help.
And…I know this sounds a lot like I’m patting myself on the back, but really just wanted to write this to encourage you and thank you for this – and hopefully encourage some others too to be more deliberate in the books they buy, and the authors they explore. My bookshelves have become a bit less homogeneous (nothing drastic! Again, I’m still buying books that sound interesting and I want to read…!!) But just now, as I was reading an article here about five new books I haven’t heard of, decided to add one to my Amazon cart, and realised that – without any conscious choice!! – I’d chosen the one by a Mexican woman(Silvia Moreno-Garcia). Anyways, thanks for this article, a few years later. It’s definitely changed me in my book buying habits. For the better, I’d say.