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Is that becoming less of a problem, seems like much, if not most fantasy is written by women nowadays.
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Aug 17, 2023 15:58
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Every Wurts book I read was extremely boring except the series about the lady ruler in Feist's universe.
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Aug 17, 2023 15:59
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Everyone posted:Otherwise publishers and readers will go "Ewwww! No grrls allowed in the fantasy riters club!" Readers maybe, but publishers? You look on the publishers websites and you see plenty of men and women being promoted. I just opened up tor.com and checked the last 10 bylines on their articles and found 7 women and 3 men. Clicking on fiction, the ones above the "see more" are 5 women, 9 men, and 1 NB person. For awards, of the last 7 years of writing hugos (novel, novelette, novella, short story), I think the only man who won was part of a man/woman writing team. If I didn't miss anyone, that's 28 straight awards for women. I am not in the industry at all, so I may be totally mistaken and if someone more knowledgeable wants to correct me, please do. All I can say is that as a reader who wants to see women get the opportunities and recognition they deserve, it appears to me that major SFF publishers are doing a good job of promoting and recognizing women authors this decade. (And Hugo's are committee-nominated and audience-voted, right? So at least the readers committed enough to have a membership are very supportive of women.) I would love to see data from the same time period (post sad puppies) on what effect the gender of an author has on sales in the SFF market. Is any such data available? I teach stats and it would make a fun little project for me to analyse it. **Also note that I just gathered my data for this post by opening up websites and googling any names I didn't recognize. I know that this is a convenience sample and certainly not rigorous. If I miscounted or misgendered anyone, it was accidental. (E.g. maybe there's another NB author but I saw an article call them by a binary pronoun and drew the wrong conclusion.)
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Aug 17, 2023 16:23
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I think these days we’ve hit equality or close to it, but in the 90s? Nooope.
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Aug 17, 2023 16:26
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I know that back in the 90's and prior it was virtually a bedrock assumption that the reader base was teenage boys. This is one reason Heinlein flourished so much, all his writing was aimed squarely at 13 year old boys. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the readership of fantasy especially is a LOT more female today than it used to be, percentage wise.
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Aug 17, 2023 16:30
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Yeah, it was still pretty bad in the early 2000s too, but it’s definitely not like that in publishing anymore—that was what the goddamn puppies were backlashing about last decade. White dude fantasy author’s fans still suck all the air out of the room in lovely spaces like r/fantasy though  There was always space for female fantasy writers and fans, but it used to be a lot quieter. They got lots of space on the shelves in my local sff-dedicated book store cause they had a solid female geek clientele alongside the dudes. But big-chain bookstores seemed to have nothing but the Big Boy’s Club back then What’s really loving sad is that local nerd store has been downsizing their book space in favor of more Warhams, and in the process they’ve stopped ordering much outside the old Big Boy’s Club. I rarely saw anything by the new diverse Tor authors, so I eventually stopped going there and pretty much switched to ebooks cause fuckit Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Aug 17, 2023 |
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Aug 17, 2023 16:48
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Everyone posted:Gotta have that extra "h" to signify that this is a "He-person." I thought Cherryh's 'H' was just because there was already an (obscure) author named Cherry, and the publisher didn't want to overlap. (Though if I recall Cherry may have been a romance author, so maybe gender came into it.) Hieronymous Alloy posted:It wouldn't surprise me at all if the readership of fantasy especially is a LOT more female today than it used to be, percentage wise. There's a awful lot of Booktok YA fantasy written by (and for) women, so I believe you are correct.
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Aug 17, 2023 18:41
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Hobnob posted:I thought Cherryh's 'H' was just because there was already an (obscure) author named Cherry, and the publisher didn't want to overlap. (Though if I recall Cherry may have been a romance author, so maybe gender came into it.) The explanation she'd given at one point was that her publishers thought "Cherry" was too normal or not exotic enough for a sci-fi book cover and there was a trend in sci-fi fandom for a while in the 70s/80s of adding Hs to words to make them seem more fantastical, so it may have come from there. The choice to go by "CJ" instead of Carolyn, though, she's basically confirmed was because the publishers thought they couldn't sell dense sci-fi novels with a woman's name on the cover.
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Aug 17, 2023 18:54
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Doktor Avalanche posted:Every Wurts book I read was extremely boring except the series about the lady ruler in Feist's universe. The fantasy plot of the first mistwraith book seems fine but I have bounced off the writing pretty hard.
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Aug 17, 2023 18:56
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I liked her Master of Whitestorm
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Aug 17, 2023 19:22
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I can see where the complaints about Wurts come from, but I find myself enjoying the slow told tale and spending ages with the characters. It's just a... pleasant? read, for me so far - despite some pretty dark stuff happening. I think people are expecting Earthsea from it when they should be expecting, I guess, a better Wheel of Time. (Not sure on that comparison, but it feels the most apt I can think of). Going in to that thinking you're getting Earthsea would drive anyone to hate it, that's like the polar opposite way of telling a story.
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Aug 17, 2023 19:32
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I just want to have authors that don't have so many skeletons in the loving closet as Piers Anthony and David Eddings, and that's coming from someone who runs on puns due to Xanth and got babby's first milquetoast LOTR-knockoff through the Belgariad/Mallorean
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Aug 17, 2023 19:50
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I never realized "Janny" was a gendered name in the first place - I've never heard of a single other person with the name.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:28
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John Lee posted:I never realized "Janny" was a gendered name in the first place - I've never heard of a single other person with the name. It's close to Jen, Jenny - to my American ears it sounds feminine.  Also I can see people not gelling with her style. I personally love it, but I love love love big florid prose that luxuriates in describing everything. I think she's like Tad Williams but with a lot of restraint. (Someday I'll finish Dragonbone Chair, but also oh my god it's like opening up an adventure game, clicking look at every item on the screen, and then discovering the descriptive text for even the most mundane item is multiple pages long lol)
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Aug 17, 2023 22:36
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MockingQuantum posted:The explanation she'd given at one point was that her publishers thought "Cherry" was too normal or not exotic enough for a sci-fi book cover and there was a trend in sci-fi fandom for a while in the 70s/80s of adding Hs to words to make them seem more fantastical, so it may have come from there. cherryh is a badass name tbf. Cherry makes me think of, well, fruit.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:39
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dervival posted:I just want to have authors that don't have so many skeletons in the loving closet as Piers Anthony and David Eddings, and that's coming from someone who runs on puns due to Xanth and got babby's first milquetoast LOTR-knockoff through the Belgariad/Mallorean I can't actually think of many fantasy authors other than those two with those levels of skeletons (except Marion Zimmer Bradley, of course).
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Aug 17, 2023 22:47
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quote:The book was accepted. Wollheim and Cherryh became close friends early on, with Cherryh often staying at the Wollheim’s home when she visited New York. As they readied the book for publication, Wollheim asked Cherryh to change her name: Her given name, Cherry, sounded too much like that of an author of romance novels, not science fiction. And that is how Carolyn Cherry became C.J. Cherryh. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/worlds-cj-cherryh/ As a huge fan of Cherryh and romance novels... I think it's a really cool shift on her name to add that H. Shows how brilliant she is, as it sounds sci-fi and weird without, y'know, we still call her cherry! Also to be honest Carolyn Cherry sounds like the most stereotypical romance author novel name I can think of, and I read those by the dozen. It's written in cursive on a cover with a windswept couple kissing, as the inside is florid and turgid.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:53
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Ceebees posted:I don't want to take away from the daily deals, which i really do like seeing. Yeah, I thought about adding a disclaimer that the plot devolves into nonsense. The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087C3G2T3/ Mélusine (Doctrine of Labyrinths #1) by Katherine Addison - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C461NVJP/ From the author of Goblin Emperor. Never seen it come up in discussion. Anyone have impressions?
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Aug 17, 2023 22:56
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Silver2195 posted:I can't actually think of many fantasy authors other than those two with those levels of skeletons (except Marion Zimmer Bradley, of course). As far as I know Anthony doesn't actually have any skeletons in his closet. His writing is obviously sketchy as hell, but he himself never did anything.
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Aug 18, 2023 03:11
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Patrick Spens posted:As far as I know Anthony doesn't actually have any skeletons in his closet. His writing is obviously sketchy as hell, but he himself never did anything. Skeletons on the front lawn.
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Aug 18, 2023 04:14
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I finished Too Like the Stars. I had to take a break while reading when I went on a business trip, but just finished it. This book is nuts, like all the ambition it had in challenging the reader in the first two books, might have actually crossed a line into actually being too challenging. I can see how people would be put off by the gundams; it's intentionally ridiculous. For me, I can see why it makes narrative sense as Mycroft/9A go insane since they subsume their own identities and are left with "Greek" as the unifying trait, but having them refer to every previously mentioned character as either a Greek god or a Homeric figure was...a decision. I genuinely don't know if I can recommend it. I couldn't stop reading the first three, but there were times where I was just trying to get through it. As a rebuttal to the last few posts about it, I think it's a very poor interpretation that Ada Palmer thinks the Terra Ignota world (as described in the first book) is a utopia, given the framing of the first two books is a history of how the government collapsed. All the stuff that seems bad, yes, does turn out to be bad in the later books!
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Aug 18, 2023 06:01
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RDM posted:Even for fantasy books they're written with a lot of evocatively palavering rhetoric, culminating in florid nomenclature full of a'post'rophe's, like a drunken toddler flailing around the simile factory. If you do not like her prose style then I do not recommend delving into more of it. Her style is strong and she's consistent about using the same style across all her books. AARD VARKMAN posted:I can see where the complaints about Wurts come from, but I find myself enjoying the slow told tale and spending ages with the characters. It's just a... pleasant? read, for me so far - despite some pretty dark stuff happening. Yep, this is me too. And she does the emotional pay-offs so so so well. By the way, my book happens to be on sale! If you trust these lovely goon recs: tildes posted:Just finished the Petition, and can also confirm it’s very good. Everyone posted:Petition was really good and now I'm going to have to physically stop myself from pestering the hell out of Leng because I want to read the sequel right this now. Dilber posted:I just ripped through Petition by Delilah Waan, whom I think is a goon. I'm pretty sure that I found the book through this thread, and I just wanted to say it's one of the best things I've read recently and I'm excited for book 2. A Small Car posted:I intended to read Petition a little at a time while I was on vacation, and ended up staying up all night and reading it in one go - needless to say, I was hooked, and want more. Go buy her book! then you can pick up my book for $0.99 at all major ebook retailers: https://books2read.com/petition (free to read if you've got Kobo Plus) There's also a bunch of other indie books for $0.99 or less up for grabs this weekend (18-22 August 2023): https://talesfromthecircle.com/epicsale2023.html Includes a whole bunch of books from past self-published fantasy blog-off finalists. I've already grabbed Blood Over Bright Haven which is the latest standalone by M.L. Wang since I enjoyed The Sword of Kaigen. This one is supposed to be dark academia? I hope I like it more than Babel. If the price hasn't dropped yet maybe give it a few more hours as I think Amazon prices typically update around Seattle time. Leng fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Aug 18, 2023 |
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Aug 18, 2023 06:36
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Patrick Spens posted:As far as I know Anthony doesn't actually have any skeletons in his closet. His writing is obviously sketchy as hell, but he himself never did anything. Anthony has straight up said he's attracted to pubescent girls, but no, he hasn't been convicted of anything afaik.
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Aug 18, 2023 07:34
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Leng posted:There's also a bunch of other indie books for $0.99 or less up for grabs this weekend (18-22 August 2023):
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Aug 18, 2023 11:33
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I read an Orson Scott card book that I remembered and holy poo poo the bit where the middle aged man is watching the wet naked 14 yo boy fend off some kind of toothed penis was uh
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Aug 18, 2023 13:10
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That's an author I feel so comfortable never revisiting
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Aug 18, 2023 13:46
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got some chores tonight posted:As a rebuttal to the last few posts about it, I think it's a very poor interpretation that Ada Palmer thinks the Terra Ignota world (as described in the first book) is a utopia, given the framing of the first two books is a history of how the government collapsed. All the stuff that seems bad, yes, does turn out to be bad in the later books! Of course, the cynical reading that Madame orchestrated all this to rule the world through a brainwashed JEDD is still available, she "dies" off screen and in an extremely perfunctory way. In this reading, Mycroft is a creative serial killer who is captured by Madame and in return for freedom helps her convince people that Utopian toys are the result of Bridger's "powers" when actually he was a regular kid (or didn't exist at all).
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Aug 18, 2023 17:50
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got some chores tonight posted:I genuinely don't know if I can recommend it. I couldn't stop reading the first three, but there were times where I was just trying to get through it. I have a lot of thoughts on the book, but its been so long since I read it that I won't go into it except to say that I was hoping the JEDD plot would go in a different direction.
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Aug 18, 2023 18:33
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Lex Talionis posted:It's true that there are some structural changes, but after JEDD saying his followers had to allow him to completely dismantle the world and all the really grim war stuff, I was pretty turned off by all the same faces from both sides remaining in charge of the slightly modified hive system. I didn't believe for a second the suffering people of this world would accept that (assuming they had any choice, which it didn't seem like they did) after what they went through and I as a reader didn't accept it either. And as a political solution, "give absolute power to this extremely weird dude who has convinced a small minority that he is a god" is one of the most toxic endings ever. I love the books but come on. It reminds me of John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar in that it achieves its happy ending through a means so outrageous that it loops around and becomes depressing. I think the series does leave it open that maybe Bridger's god-hood was just fabricated by Mycroft, but the amount of material that would have to have been fabricated becomes enormous. The gundams, the cybernetics in Achilles and the doctor, the animated dolls, the various incarnations of Mycroft, etc. Particularly the gundams, since Achilles stopping the missiles would have required the Gordians and Utopians working together in a massive conspiracy to have been faked. At that point you'd have to doubt that basically anything in the story even happened at all. I think it's more useful to just accept that Bridger was a god, and that JEDD very likely was one too. And I don't think it's just a small group who believe that JEDD is a god -- both the Gordians and the Utopians seem fairly convinced. But yeah, the ending turns out a bit depressing. I think it's a bit of a product of the author being a historian of the Renaissance, a time more defined by big personalities than popular movements. OTOH it does have some strong parallels with the rise of Gaius Julius Caesar, as the book kinda points out.
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Aug 18, 2023 22:12
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The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0047Y0FM8/
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Aug 18, 2023 22:31
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pradmer posted:The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington - $1.99 Brothers Grossbart is the best of the three imo, but all terrific.
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Aug 18, 2023 22:39
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Remulak posted:His other novels are also on sale, buying them all will be one of the best, and most depressing, not-quite-$6 you can spend. Darn, for some reason this one is out of stock.  The glowing center and the "Baste Lubbe" in the lower left corner threw me for a moment.
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Aug 18, 2023 23:06
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Ninurta posted:Darn, for some reason this one is out of stock. what, no ring?
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Aug 18, 2023 23:58
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pradmer posted:Mélusine (Doctrine of Labyrinths #1) by Katherine Addison - $1.99 Almost a decade ago, wow, as a teenager I bought this from amazon because it was a fantasy novel with queer characters. I then proceeded to bounce off of it because I couldn't handle the dark content matter - the main character is addicted to an illegal substance, and some rear end in a top hat takes advantage of that to make him do really bad things. I couldn't get much further than that, and years later I don't really want to try again.
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Aug 19, 2023 00:26
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I believe those books flopped so very hard that it's the reason why goblin emperor had to be done under a pen
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Aug 19, 2023 01:03
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Remulak posted:His other novels are also on sale, buying them all will be one of the best, and most depressing, not-quite-$6 you can spend. I really liked The Folly of the World. He ekes a lot of horror out of a flooded Dutch landscape, it’s almost post-apocalyptic. Great characters too, especially the protagonist. Kind of a brute but still sympathetic, seriously mentally ill, gay and aware he’s getting jerked around by his shady grifter not-quite-boyfriend/crime partner. Kind of a Coen brothers character, almost, but less played for laughs.
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Aug 19, 2023 07:35
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The Cosmic Puppets by Philip K Dick - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LVQZFM/ Our Friends from Frolix 8 by Philip K Dick - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008P9241G/
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Aug 19, 2023 16:39
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New Humble bundle has a big chunk of Malazan for around 20 bucks. https://www.humblebundle.com/books/steven-eriksons-malazan-book-fallen-tor-publishing-group-books
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Aug 19, 2023 19:15
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HopperUK posted:New Humble bundle has a big chunk of Malazan for around 20 bucks. Not just a big chunk but EVERYTHING by Erickson and not even a Kobo exclusive
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Aug 19, 2023 22:31
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Safety Biscuits posted:Anthony has straight up said he's attracted to pubescent girls, but no, he hasn't been convicted of anything afaik. If the only way he expresses that is in his writing (and then relatively subtly), that's a pretty good outcome for that situation. I mean, as far as I know, there's no real "cure" or fully effective treatment for something like that. There's just trying to train the person with those desires/urges to avoid indulging/expressing them in ways that victimize and harm real children. Pedophilia/etc. is as far as I know (and if somebody knows better, please comment), a really hosed-up horrifying version of a sexual orientation. That's not something you can change or cure (though it didn't stop a bunch of nasty religious whackos from trying to "cure" LGBTQ+ kids through conversion camps). You might be able to teach/change behavior but not the underlying aspect. You might be able to get a pedophile to not molest children, but you're never really going to stop them from being aroused by and attracted to children. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PERMABANNED FOR THIS POST) Everyone fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Aug 19, 2023 |
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Aug 19, 2023 22:46
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