ROMANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION, AND THE PUBLISHING GENDER GAP

It started with this question: Is Romantasy Killing Science Fiction?

Stephen “Outlaw Bookseller” Andrews says, “Yes.” Please watch this video for his take on the subject…

It certainly seems to be true that fantasy-romance (aka “romantasy”) is eclipsing all other sub-genres of fantasy, and science fiction on the whole, but is there a different way of looking at it that makes it less about what romantasy is doing and more about what science fiction is not doing? Is it that young female readers are pushing out young male readers, or is there something else at foot?

In his video Stephen Andrews says that, “What happened was that young women started writing fantasy for a young female audience, predominantly.” This is undoubtably true, and a brief glance at the various bestsellers lists tends to prove this out. The New York Times Combined Print & E-Book Fiction list for May 19, 2024 features fewer “romantasy” titles than I’ve seen there in a while, but it’s hard not to notice that four of the fifteen best selling books for the week are fantasy-romance titles by Sarah J. Maas and two are by Rebecca Yaros, so that these two authors account for more than one third of the fifteen best selling novels in the US this week. Of the remaining nine books, only two were written by men (David Baldacci and Rupert Holmes), and the Rupert Holmes book (Murder Your Employer) is arguably a “romantasy,” as well.

Not a single one of the best sellers could be described in any way as science fiction.

So, indeed, as in the UK, fantasy-romance written by women (at least largely) for women is dominating the best sellers lists. People are buying these books and reading these books, and it doesn’t seem to be fading.

Where I started to pull away from Mr. Andrews, though, was in the “why” of it, prompting me to leave the following comment on his YouTube channel:

Fantasy-romance, YA or otherwise, is doing no harm. Science fiction has never dominated the best sellers lists, and it isn’t being killed by “romantasy” any more than it was killed by thrillers, mainstream romance, etc. in decades past. What romantasy has found is a huge community of readers who tend to all gravitate to the same titles at the same time, largely via Tik Tok. What you’re missing here isn’t that the girls are pushing out the boys but that the last couple generations of boys do not buy or read books. We have lost them, almost to a man, to video games. If any genre or category of books—especially one as traditionally male oriented as SF—is struggling, that’s why.

To which Mr. Andrews replied:

You make some good points, but… First of all, let me remind you of something you are missing—of a caveat I mentioned early in the video in question: the fact that I’m a book trade insider, who has for four decades spoken to and observed readers on a daily basis for all that time and seen all sorts of changes. A bookseller will speak to more readers in a few months than any writer or publisher will in a lifetime. With that caveat expanded, let me address your points:

1) Historical Context: You’re right, SF has never dominated the Fiction bestseller lists, it has been General Fiction (and as I mention in the video) Crime Fiction that has long predominated. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, several of the founding authors of SF’s Golden Age (1939-1946) such as ‘The Big Three’ (Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke) plus Frank Herbert (who completes ‘The Big Four’ as Aldiss put it) all had huge bestsellers throughout from the 1960s through into the early 1980s (see the chapter headed ‘Day of the Dumpbin’ in Aldiss’ Trillion Year Spree). The most influential bestsellers of the 1960s in the USA—reflecting the counterculture as a mass movement—were Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Herbert’s Dune and Lord of the Rings (LOTR hadn’t been a massive commercial success before this). All of these books were much bigger than the average novel and influenced publishers to gradually push writers to produce bigger books and series. The average novel is now 300-350 pages, when until quite recently, it was 250 pages. Fantasy, however, had no bestsellers until LOTR took off and the Fantasy boom started in 1977, when Lester Del Rey signed up Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara. This was the start of the dominance in the SFF/Horror axis of Fantasy—or more accurately, Sword & Sorcery/High Fantasy, which are (as The Encyclopedia of Fantasy says) virtually indistinguishable. I cover the rise of the commercially-created Fantasy series in my video “The Artificial Fantasy Trilogy Since 1977”). Until 1977, there was so little Genre Fantasy published that in the UK, if you ordered in every title in print for your bookshop, you would fill 2-3 shelves. By 1984, you could fill a bay (a bookshop case of 6-7 shelves). Most Fantasy published in the 1960s and 1970s was labelled ‘Science Fantasy,’ so booksellers felt comfortable shelving it with SF. SF outsold Fantasy massively until the boom started and sales were fairly equal until the mid 80s, boosted by Douglas Adams, the Dune series and the new blockbuster novels by Asimov and Heinlein and the arrival of Cyberpunk, followed by the New British Space Opera Renaissance from 1986 onwards, fronted by Iain M Banks. The bestselling S&S writer in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s—Tolkien aside—was Michael Moorcock. It’s no coincidence that the Fantasy book kick-started at the same time as Star Wars was released, which led to a “back to the 1930s” dumbing down of SF’s reputation in the popular imagination and marketplace: it primed young readers for simple adventure, familiar tropes and comfort—Star Wars owes more to Fantasy than SF in many ways. So in terms of SFF’s shared Genre origins in pulp magazines—which led to one budget for both at most publishers, Fantasy actually has harmed SF sales. But people made their choice en masse and that’s their lookout/right.

I’ll drop back in to address this point, which I in no way disagree with. Indeed, science fiction used to sell more than fantasy, until the rediscovery of Tolkien and one thing he’s missing in that timeline: Dungeons & Dragons.

It was D&D that turned my entire friend group from science fiction fans to science fiction and fantasy fans, and we all started reading Tolkien, et.al. right in that timeline. D&D in its first iterations had an audience so male-dominated it may have passed the 90% mark those first, say, ten years. And there was something about D&D that encouraged us to read, and that may be the fact that in the pre-Internet days, getting a group of people together to play D&D was, even in high school, not always easy to do. There was a lot of “down time” to the gaming aspect of fantasy fandom… downtime filled by novels written by both men and women for an audience of young men/teenage boys like me.

2)Tik-Tok: yeah, obviously. One factor here is the general—but real—difference between male and females in youth: girls tend to be keener on sharing, community activities and fitting in, while boys tend to be more competitive and happier with outsider individualism. This manifests itself in book collecting—young women may now be buying “pretty” editions of Romantasy novels with toned text blocks, decorated endpapers, etc. from both bookshops and sites like Illumicrate, but it is male readers who become serious collectors concerned with first printings, provenance and associational copies. I’ve moved in collecting circles for as long as I’ve been a bookseller and have never known females who collect in the same way as men—they are very uncommon. The point is that Tik-Tok will work differently for the two sexes much of the time, though there are, of course, exceptions—but these tend to prove the general rule.

I’ve seen some women on YouTube collecting books, but certainly it’s true that the generally male point of view of older (Golden Age, etc.) SF might appeal to contemporary women even less than they did women back in the day. As anyone who’s seen any of my own book haul videos or have seen me talk about the pulps, etc. will know, I adore SF from the 30s through the 70s and still read it regularly—and enough to see a preponderance of outmoded gender roles. In any case, I’m all for anyone collecting whatever they like, since I’m sure my own book collecting habits would surely be sneered at by the serious antiquarian. But alas, sneer not, lest ye be sneered at.

3) As I’ve said, the problem is the Female-centric nature of publishing and bookselling and it is this that is “pushing out” boys—there is simply not enough choice of titles published to offer them a level playing field. If you look at a YA or SFF section in a bookshop now, you’ll see that the former offers hardly anything “male” and it is getting far more that way in SFF too since the Romantasy boom started. Fans of “Epic Fantasy” are complaining too about how the money in publishing is not going on the next Grimdark talent, but on Romantasy. I see boys looking for current titles to suit them and they are bewildered by the lack of contemporary works aimed at them. It may not be fashionable to say so in these days of Identity Politics, but male and female readers are more often than not different, especially in youth.

Again, this is not untrue, but let’s put a pin in this, since it goes to what I think is the bigger issue.

4) Male-oriented SF: You’re generally correct here—except that in recent years, the number of female writers of SF entering the marketplace, winning awards (which are mostly nepotistic these days) and reducing much of the genre to Soap Opera (pace Becky Chambers) has swelled considerably. It fits “the narrative” to have women finally dominating SF. Although female SF writers have always been with us—and most of the great feminist ones started working in the 1960s—female genre authors have usually tended toward Fantasy.

Okay, though I wouldn’t necessarily use the term “Soap Opera” to describe SF authors like Essa Hansen, Emily St. John Mandel, Anne Leckie, etc.

5) The best point you make is video games: I have seen this happening increasingly and it is harder and harder to fight—once someone gets to a certain age, there is now every probability they’ll never become a reader. It is affecting boys more than girls, I agree and this is a big factor. To finish, I’ll reiterate my point that in a publishing/bookselling industry where women outnumber men massively—especially in marketing roles—and it is understanding of how to market books to men that is the main issue—there are clear signs that proportionally, male fiction readers of all ages are not being effectively published for or marketed too. Incidentally, my book 100 Must Read Books For Men (2008) was aided by an all-female team at A&C Black, who were brilliantly supportive of the book.

So then, my reply in his comments section:

It honestly appears that we’re on the same “side” here. It comes down to a question of who is the dog, and who is the tail. Having seen the exodus of young male readers from the inside at Wizards of the Coast, I can tell you that we were absolutely publishing and marketing to a predominantly male audience but watched that audience age year after year. Finally WotC simply abandoned their publishing program entirely (which was a mistake, but alas…) instead of shifting to an evolving (increasingly female) readership. Publishing really has no ability to set trends, they follow the money, and the money, right now, is in “romantasy.” It was the readership that changed, and the business followed.

And his response:

Yes, agreed on that point—I think Fantasy is a little different in the UK (and of course Wizards is game-related, right) and very often the gaming/reading Fantasy markets don’t always intersect here. I’ve often found that with Warhammer titles—for example—who publish books related to their gaming business—are generally bought by readers who I don’t see buying other Fantasy. I’m in total agreement about video games stealing the attention of young men to a degree though.

This, to me, is the umbrella under which all of this sits:

We have lost the last two generations of boys to video games.

Well back in the dark ages of the late 70s through the mid 80s when all of my friends and I were playing D&D and reading science fiction and fantasy, I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t an avid reader of genre fiction. It was the world I inhabited. When I went to work at TSR in 1995, this was only more true: a male-dominated company still publishing both games and extremely successful novels to a massively one-sided male audience (I saw the demographic data from the inside, y’all).

Over the fifteen years I worked  at TSR then Wizards of the Coast I saw that demographic data change. At first we were happy to see more women entering the hobby—and reading our novels, too, especially Dragonlance. The slow influx of women was, alas, not enough to stop the hemorrhaging of the male audience. It used to be that a new batch of, say, twelve-year-olds stepped in every year, and maybe a few thirty-year-olds slipped out. But year after year our demographic stayed mostly male but got older and older, and smaller and smaller, so we were selling maybe 10,000 copies of a novel we used to sell 100,000 or more of a decade and a half before.

And it was not only us. It was everywhere in the book business, and like any for-profit enterprise, publishing reacted accordingly, pushing the product that sells. Does that then create a sort of closed loop in which boys stop reading fantasy, girls start, so now there are no fantasy (or SF) books for boys so boys continue to not read and the business continues to cater more and more solely to female readers, and on and on…? Maybe. But the only way to break that cycle would be to convince young boys, those twelve-year-olds TSR always depended on, to spend any time reading books that aren’t being forced on them by teachers, which they probably now listen to on audio while playing Fortnite.

I wish I knew how to do that.

From the mid-1990s on, men like me continued to read, but our sons never started. My son, age twenty-three, lives in a house filled—over-filled, one might even say—with books of all genres and categories, and he reads none of them.

None of them.

He plays video games. Exclusively.

I went into the publishing business. He’s in the video game business.

This is the change, not that girls pushed out the boys, but that boys simply stopped showing up.

—Philip Athans

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