Who reads epic fantasy?

[rachelmanija]

This post was not only prompted by a remarkably stupid NY Times review of the "Game of Thrones" TV series, in which the reviewer thought the story was a polemic against global warming, claimed that women don't like fantasy, and further claimed that women do love sex, so the sex was gratuitously crammed in to please them

Comments

[sleary]

On my shelves, the only woman besides Carey and Smith who'd fall into the epic camp is Melanie Rawn. IIRC those were successful books, for a number of reasons, she stopped working in that genre in the late 90s and is now into urban fantasy.

I think your observation is pretty accurate. Depressing, but accurate.

[sillylilly_bird]

What about Mary Gentle's The Book of Ash [4 volumes]?

[rachelmanija]

They're great! But not bestsellers, so far as I'm aware.

[sillylilly_bird]

no, which is unfortunate - she's an amazing writer

[auroraceleste]

I've long wondered if it is because female authors get pushed into YA. I know that Tamora Pierce tells the story of how her Song of the Lioness story was pitched to fantasy publishers but she was told to split it into four books and publish it as YA. That was 30 years ago, but it does seem that stuff written by men is still more likely to get published by adult fantasy imprints and shelved in adult fantasy sections that stuff written by women, even when you consider the age/gender of the protagonist.

[rachelmanija]

You may well be right. Certainly YA has many more female writers with clearly female names writing bestselling epic fantasy. And many "adult epic fantasy writers" also have young protagonists.

[auroraceleste]

To be fair I have no proof, just personal experience and a sneaking suspicion. It does seem, however, that the more "feminine" a book is (female writer, female protagonist, romance, intrigue-not-fighting, etc) the more likely it is to be published in YA.

[marycatelli]

Youth solves so many narrative problems at once with epic fantasy protagonists that it's not exactly surprising to see it everywhere.

[cassiphone]

The perception of epic fantasy as a masculine domain always knocks me sideways, because it's the exact opposite in Australia. Our first BIG bestselling fantasy author was Sara Douglass in the mid-nineties, whose books launched HarperCollins Voyager, our oldest & longest standing SF/fantasy imprint. Since then, the majority of big name fantasy authors in Australia have been women, with only a few outlier male names doing well - and of those male authors many, like Garth Nix, are outside epic fantasy.

Certainly the female fantasy reader is heavily courted by those Australian publishers who do publish/promote epic fantasy as a genre.

But it has not escaped my notice that the Big Name fantasy authors we import tend to be male, and particularly that the longer careers (ie the authors still in print on the bookshop shelves that were also there 15 years ago) seem to belong to international male names.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks, that's very interesting.

[rachelmanija]

I think it's nearly always easy to discover an author's gender if you're really curious. The initials are there for the people who are prejudiced but not curious. Perhaps it would never occur to them that a book they enjoy could be written by a woman.

Comments on DW suggest that they are indeed bestsellers, perhaps for loose values of the term. (Top 10 on Locus.)

[rachelmanija]

Sorry, I didn't mean the initial comment about you personally. I meant that in general, that's the purpose of initials for female writers. (Ignore if you'd rather not answer, but if you don't mind: Why do you use initials?)