fantasy – Elspeth Cooper

Folks who know me know I read fast. I always have done. As a kid, my school called me in for a special reading class – sadly, the moths have been at my memory so I can’t recall whether it was because I demonstrated advanced reading skills, or they couldn’t quite believe that yes, I really was reading adult books when barely into double digits in years, and wanted to see me prove it.

Anyway. Here we are, many (many) years and many hundreds of books later, and I’m back on my reading habit. Rather than buying scads more new books (although I have bought some, because reasons) I have been making steady pace up the south ridge of Mount Toberead. Here’s what I’ve checked off since the end of March:

Cover of City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett — of Stairs - Robert Jackson Bennett

Cover of Sovereign by CJ Sansom — Sovereign - CJ Sansom

Cover of A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan — A Natural History of Dragons - Marie Brennan

Cover of All Systems Red by Martha Wells — All Systems Red - Martha Wells

Cover of Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal — Shades of Milk and Honey - Mary Robinette Kowal

Cover of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin — The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - NK Jemisin

Cover of Artificial Condition by Martha Wells — Artificial Condition - Martha Wells

Cover of Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells — Rogue Protocol - Martha Wells

Cover of In Midnight's Silence by T Frohock — In Midnight's Silence - T Frohock

Cover of Threading the Labyrith by Tiffani Angus — Threading the Labyrith - Tiffani Angus

Cover of Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone — Three Parts Dead - Max Gladstone

Cover of The Once and Future Witches by Alix E Harrow — The Once and Future Witches - Alix E Harrow

Cover of Planetfall by Emma Newman — Planetfall - Emma Newman

I enjoyed all of these reads in their own way; there’s not a duff choice in the lot. Several different takes on the idea of a fantasy novel, from fully-realised secondary worlds like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms to Los Nefilim‘s historical fiction with a quarter-turn to the fantastic, which subgenre has always been a particular favourite of mine.

Some observations, in no particular order:

City of Stairs, The Once and Future Witches and Three Parts Dead were stand-outs.
Greek myths, my beloved! I have had a soft spot for these since I was small, so I found Circe a delight.
Who doesn’t love Murderbot?
I have now added The Divine Cities, The Glamourist Histories, The Craft Sequence, Inheritance Trilogy, Los Nefilim, Planetfall and The Memoirs of Lady Trent to my list of series to finish, which now numbers 30. I don’t know whether to be proud of that or embarrassed.
As a self-confessed fan of Guy Gavriel Kay, I am frankly shocked that I managed to buy Ysabel on or around publication and then just . . . not read it for close to 17 years. I am telling myself that since I switched to ebooks, my shelves have looked the same for so long now that I’ve just stopped seeing what’s on them. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
It’s amazing how much reading you can get done in hospital waiting rooms when the patient transport flakes out and doesn’t send a driver for you.

In terms of continuing the TBR readathon,, there’s a difficult traverse looming, across the Wheel of Time glacier (book 9 onward). For years I re-read the series to date each time a new book came out, and round about Book 8(ish? I think?) I just stopped, although I continued to buy them up to Book 10 (Crossroads of Twilight). Usually I can rely on my memory to hold enough detail about previous instalments that I can handle a break between books in a series, but the last WoT I read was so many years ago that I might need to go back to the beginning to avoid being lost.

On the other hand, starting again from The Eye of the World feels daunting, I’m not gonna lie. Part of me wants to complete the whole series, because warts and all it is part of my fantasy journey, and remains a significant work in the genre. At the same time, another part of me is muttering about sunk costs and more books in the sea. Hmm. Will have to think on this.

So what’s next? I have stuck a bookmark into Chapter 1 of The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison. This is another book that has been patiently waiting since publication day (I know, I KNOW!) and I’m keen to continue my Murderbot adventure. We shall see what else the summer brings.

Happy reading, everyone!

29.08.19 – EC – article edited to clarify male authors account for about 55% of fantasy titles, rather than 55% of books, which could be misinterpreted as books sold. That is an entirely different discussion and outwith the scope of this post.

Some of you may know that I’ve had a little side-project on the go over the last year or so, called Beyond the Boys’ Club.

Fantasy as a genre has tended to present as by blokes, for blokes. Blokes tend to dominate the recommendations from bookshops, the shelves in airports, the best-of-year lists and all those 25 Fantasy Books To Read If You Liked Game of Thrones listicles. Despite this, male authors account for only about 55% of fantasy titles published in a year (as of the most recent authoritative stats I’ve got).

And if readers and writers challenge all those lists that skew so heavily male (bar a token Le Guin or Hobb), sure as sunshine someone will pop up in the comments with the tired old refrain of “But there’s just not that many . . .”

That sound you can hear? That’s my teeth grinding.

So I started Beyond The Boys’ Club out of sheer spite. I wanted a list that I could shove in the face of the next person to “not that many” me. I started with the fantasy books I owned or wanted to read that were not by men, then began paying attention to publisher announcements, recommendation threads on social media, and what my friends and follows on Goodreads were reading.

Then I put the results into a Google sheet, and as of today, 27^th August 2019, I have a list of 653 fantasy authors who are not men. You can see them here.

Each entry has a Goodreads link to an example of the writer’s work, and the book’s GR genre tags. I even did a couple of simple charts that will update automatically as I add more data. And there will be more; I have a feeling I’m just getting started.

653 fantasy authors who are not men . . . I have a feeling I’m just getting started

Some takeaways from the list so far

Highlights that jumped out at me as I wrote this post:

About 45% of the works listed are tagged YA, although there’s some crossover with middle-grade in that category, I note. This is by far the most populous subgenre in the list so far, but it’s still not the majority. That’s a genre myth busted – you know, the one that says only men write fantasy for adults.
Only around 28% of the list is categorised as romantic. So much for another genre myth, that non-male authors only write romance.
Just under 16% is categorised as epic/high fantasy.
Over 9% has QUILTBAG themes.
It trends series-heavy vs standalones, by about 3:1.
Over 21% of the list was tagged as SF-ish by Goodreads users
Anyone who says “I bet it’s all self-published” is getting a smack: 93% of the list is trad pubbed.
I clearly need to add more columns – ‘fantasy of manners’ is starting to pop up, and I had to omit a whole bunch of others like ‘mythology’, ‘Arthurian’ etc. Maybe I need to add more hours to the day while I’m at it.

Obviously as the list grows, these figures will change, but I think 650+ is a reasonable sample from which to start seeing trends. At times like this, I kind of wish I still had access to the database & software development tools I used to work with in Ye Olde Day Jobbe. I could pull out much more complex reports on this dataset and have fun *for DAYS*.

But yeah. 653. Not that many of us at all, right?

Caveat emptor!

1) This sheet is a WORK IN PROGRESS. There are new authors being added to GR every day. Every week, publishers launch more debuts. I’ll try to keep up, but see above re: fallible human with limited time.

2) Let me be perfectly clear: this is in no way meant to be a rigorous statistical analysis of the genre. It was a project I started on the spur of the moment, purely for myself, and it will continue as long as I’m still having fun with it. I do not expect it to satisfy the internet rules-lawyers for whom no source is authoritative enough, no numbers hard enough, no lived experience valid enough – especially if it tells them something they don’t want to hear.

The crunchy stuff

Here’s all the TMI about my data source, limitations and assumptions.

Source

This list is compiled from Goodreads entries, and uses the GR genre tags listed under each book. This is the wisdom of crowds writ large, with all that that entails. I am entirely dependent on third parties for the quality of the data. For example: books that have 3000+ user tags have probably got their subgenres broadly correct. Books with only 20-odd shelvings? Eh, not so much. The smaller the sample, the greater the effect of outliers and user errors.

Books

For each author, I have listed one book to represent their work. This was either:

the title that had been recommended
where a series was recommended, the first book in the series
where only the author was recommended, a title I had heard of
where only the author was recommended and I had not heard of their work, a title that was well-rated on GR

Definitions

1) I have had to limit the number of columns I used, because GR is hardly prescriptive in its subgenres, and it was not practical to attempt to reproduce the same degree of granularity. SFF subgenre definitions are notoriously blurry anyway, so I took a broad-brush approach.

2) Every entry on the list has Fantasy as one of its genres.

3) Many books have been assigned genre labels on GR which amount to a dozen different ways of saying the same thing. For example:

Fiction > Young Adult
Fantasy > Young Adult
Fiction > Young Adult > Teen

have all been counted in Column E as YA. I’ve done similarly with all varieties of Steampunk, Historical etc to keep the number of columns manageable.

In a similar vein, Epic Fantasy and High Fantasy were aggregated, and Dark Fantasy and Horror.

4) One particular column that has bugged me to no end has been the SF one. I’ve seen an awful lot of what I would class as traditional Epic Fantasy listed also as Science Fiction Fantasy. Is this different to fantasy with SF-nal elements, like time-travel or steampunk? Is this people just classifying all fantasy as a subgenre of Science Fiction, the way bookshops do sometimes?

I don’t know, and there’s no way tell, so if any variant of Science Fiction was included in the book’s genre list, it got a tick in that column.

Errors & Omissions

I have not read every book in the list, much as I would like to, and neither have I applied my own interpretations/used my discretion over genre tags. Any mistakes/omissions I will gladly hold my hand up to; I am, after all, only human and I have but one life to give.

Tag: fantasy (Page 1 of 7)

Project Read the TBR – an update

But there’s just not that many . . .

29.08.19 – EC – article edited to clarify male authors account for about 55% of fantasy titles, rather than 55% of books, which could be misinterpreted as books sold. That is an entirely different discussion and outwith the scope of this post.

Some takeaways from the list so far

Caveat emptor!