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

[bookelfe]

I absolutely believe that a lot of the stuff that would be published as 'epic fantasy' if it were not written by a woman tends to get shifted over to YA; the Tamora Pierce anecdote mentioned above is one example of this, but I am pretty sure not the only one. (Another one that comes to mind is Alaya Dawn Johnson's Racing the Dark, which does not really read as in any way explicitly YA - it's an epic apocalyptic fantasy, and listing it as YA I think actually does it a disservice because it leads people to go into the book with very different expectations than what the series is actually trying to do. But of course it's about a woman who starts off the series young, and it's about magic, which seems to make something almost automatically YA these days

[lenora_rose]

Here at least (Winnipeg, Canuckistan), Alaya Dawn Johnson is shelved in the adult fantasy section.

That being said, I overall agree that men seem more likely to be dual marketed. I've seen it done for Robin McKinley and Patricia C. Wrede (and Rowling, but Rowling is an exception to a lot of rules) but I think that's it.

[undomielregina]

McKinley's an interesting anomaly to me, because she started out writing YA(/children's even, given that The Hero and the Crown won the Newberry) and was later bumped up to dual market, I think after she wrote Sunshine, but possibly after Briar Rose? Either way, I'm pretty sure they started dual marketing her after the YA fantasy boom started, so it's curious that the publishers bothered.

[katie_m]

Katherine Kurtz?

[lenora_rose]

Carol Berg fits, not a bestseller but somewhere in the higher end of the midlist (Her Bridge of D'Arnath and Rai-Kirah series' are definitely epic, and an argument could be made for the Cartamandua Legacy duology. The current project is less epic but still strongly secondary world). Very dark in places, but not bleak

[cat_i_th_adage]

Barbara Hambly's other fantasy series are pretty good (they don't continue the happy ending of the first book with crushing disaster for example, though many of the endings are on the line of "Yay, we survived this month!" over "happy happy").

I particularly like the Darwath books for putting a lot of focus on Gil, a PhD student in Medieval History whose scholarliness is important to the plot in any number of ways (I like academic types who kick butt).

[murderershair]

Delurking to say that I've never met a man who was really into fantasy- especially not epic fantasy. If anything, among those of my male friends who are readers at all, I've had to defend some of my reading choices while they wave Steinbeck and King in my face. I'm sure there are guys who love fantasy as much as I do, but personal experience suggests women are the major audience for the genre.

[3rdragon]

Delurking to reply that my father read me Lord of the Rings almost every year when I was a child, and would happily tackle fantasy, epic or otherwise. I will admit that despite the fact that LotR is probably his favorite book (hush, it's one book!), I usually classify him as a "sci-fi buff." But I think I may be using the older definition of "sci-fi" that was prevalent when he was a kid -- as a friend of mine recently pointed out, The Dying Earth is pretty much swords and sorcery, for all that it's advertised as a "science fiction classic."

My brother reads fantasy, too; he's read almost everything on my bookshelf, and I trend very heavily towards YA fantasy (less so to epic, but I have a decent collection), and he was definitely asking for a particular high fantasy series several years running. (Not having read them myself and currently unable to come up with either author or title, I can't say whether they're epic or not.) He's a pretty big Paolini fan, as well.

[lady_ganesh]

Your dad sounds much like mine!