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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2235 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 30, 2025

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I was on goodreads, and out of curiosity, I took a look on final 10 Readers' Favorite nominees in SciFi category. I generally never use contests like that as a guide, but I saw an ad and I was curious about what I'd find there and if I recognize any names (spoiler: I recognized one). What I saw made me ask some questions. Out of 10 top candidates, 8 are female authors. I read the descriptions - I have never read the books themselves and likely never will, so that's all I have to go on - and in 7, the main protagonist(s) are women, in one they are bots, one had a mixed crew and in one I couldn't determine it. In young adult SciFi category, all 10 nominees are female. So my question is - why? I also checked last year winners - 11:4 female authors.

Since we're living in a clown world in clown times, I must post a disclaimer that I have no problem with either female SciFi authors or female sci-fi protagonists, and enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) books with either. Yet, somehow I didn't expect this situation. Why is it so - is it the case that 80+% of SciFi writers are now female? 80+% of good ones? Goodreads sample is skewed? Vote is rigged or meddled with somehow? Note I am not seeking a value judgement on this situation (as ultimately I personally don't care at all who is nominated or wins), but would like to understand its genesis.

Part of this is the standard stuff. Among mainstream publishers, and mainstream awards, there's a ton of pressures against recognition of new male authors (and, increasingly, even previously well-recognized ones); the male authors who are successful tend to take a cult following approach that leaves them less benefit from begging for reviews, or write in ways that don't really pull reviews, or not be willing to play the social media game.

((for a low culture war example, I will defend literally every Timothy Zahn book, even the kinda-trite Quadrail series. But the well-received and genuinely strong pieces get low-double-digit reviews. If you've read one of his books, what is there to say that doesn't detract other readers from the story?))

An increasing emphasis on novella-length novels by standard publishers at higher prices on one side and Kindle Unlimited on the other has also put some weird pressures into the mainstream system. I don't have a very complete mental image, but from what I have seen, a lot of conventional ways for workday authors to make a living publishing conventional stories that can take off been smothered or at least greatly reduced, the remainder have increasingly become the domain of the greats, while most of the novices and introductory writers -- even within the -- have gone to edistribution approaches that make it hard to get mainstream applaud or concentrate a large number of readers. The few who can tend to be Jemisins, as skilled at handling the social side as they are at writing character play, and that's traditionally not an area men have focused.

There's also just the flow and the fixtures; you're seeing the detritus accumulating at points of friction, rather than the motion of the waves. The Puppies tend to call them SFWAs, but there's a decent amount outside of that set, and a lot other other incestuous interactions (how many Goodreads-Top-Tens would you expect to be LA Times Critics At Large? Might surprise you!).

((for a low culture war example, I will defend literally every Timothy Zahn book, even the kinda-trite Quadrail series. But the well-received and genuinely strong pieces get low-double-digit reviews. If you've read one of his books, what is there to say that doesn't detract other readers from the story?))

I like your choice of examples, because Icarus is basically a much better-executed Quadrail.

I read around 25-30 books a year, and looking at my notes I've only read a handful of new books this year. Despite a conscious effort to read the NYT book review most weeks, and trying to make a real effort go to local small book shops and buy new books, I just don't end up reading many new books.

So it might be that women read more new books than men. That seems intuitively likely.

No one involved in this cares specifically that women read more books, though its almost certain that they do. The important fact is that they buy more books. The difference is subtle but important. All these lists and awards etc are just marketing aimed at their currently primary demo. That it also lets them denegrate and ignore male authors is just a happy coincidence that fits the zeitgeist. How convenient. I've read thousands of books in my life, fiction and non, and I don't think I've ever once been influenced by any form of advertising or marketing or 'buzz' of any sort over a book. For me this is an area of the economy that is blessedly free of this scourge, and at least for the books that men are still buying this is still true. I'd be fine if male authors were officially barred from all best-of-lists and book awards as I consider them to be negative influence on the space as a whole. Like forbidding my favorite male actors from appearing on reality tv or political ads. Que horror.

That's a good point, looking at my reading list, probably the newest books I read in 2025 are Murderbot series, which, ironically, are written by Martha Wells, and Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I've read about 25 books this year, but the rest of them aren't new.

And of course we can chicken and egg it as to whether the publishers don't publish books for men so men don't read them, or men don't read so publishers don't publish books for them.

But the fact remains. What's the last really male oriented "it" author or book of the year? It used to be common.

A Song of Ice and Fire surely qualifies?

So...1996 or maybe 2005?

ADWD was goodreads choice of 2011.

I mean sure, but still written by a boomer and part of a series starting in 1996.

Forgive me for asking the obvious question but – were these writers "female" in the biological sense or in the "identify as" sense?

Heck, with authors you can even go as far as "writes under the pen name of". For example, here is a mirror to "JK" Rowling.

Yes.

Goodreads choice awards usually come from the most popular books (on Goodreads) read that year published that year. Since publishing and readership overwhelmingly lean female it's not surprising that there's such skew. Goodreads choice isn't a great indicator of quality (rather popularity) so I'm not super bothered by it.

Since publishing and readership overwhelmingly lean female

Why? Males stopped reading? I certainly didn't, and I know many people who are male nerds like me and who read. Is it the millennial/gen Z thing? Are males only doing tiktok or games now?

so I'm not super bothered by it.

I'm not bothered at all - my concern is not having time to read what I already want to read, not to find more reading based on somebody's opinion - I am just curious as to what is going on.

The last time I was in a physical bookstore(a few months ago) and browsed through the sci-fi/fantasy genre, the majority of new books seemed to be overwhelmingly written by women in a quirky, post-2000 semi-ironic genre-smacking type style that comes across as a 'serious parody/satire' more than anything.

So if you want to find anything written that will appeal to men, you either need to go old-school or down the indie-rabbit hole, not exactly an easy thing to slog through.

Conversely, if you're being uncharitable, when women brag about how much reading they do, they're bragging about stuff like this and booktok(IE, it's all porn).

Well, I didn't read the GR tops but I am pretty sure it's not porn - at least not the thing I'd call porn - at least in the SciFi and YA SciFi categories.

Most males in my circle overwhelmingly read fanfiction and/or mass-produced male-oriented original fiction that usually involves isekai, magic nobles and harems (basically wuxia but not Chinese). I suspect neither is a category that takes top places on Goodreads.

Millennial and gen Z men basically don’t read. In my undergrad (MIT), and my PhD, basically none of my male friends read at all. Podcasts have become the dominant medium instead.

Reading has declined across the board, but it seems to have hit men harder for some reason. I don’t have the full answer but I think Jared Henderson has a video about this, I’ll try and link tomorrow if I can find it.

Reading has declined across the board, but it seems to have hit men harder for some reason. I don’t have the full answer but I think Jared Henderson has a video about this

I don't think this was intentional (if it was, kudos), but "reading is dying out, here's a video about it" is very on-the-nose.

In my undergrad (MIT), and my PhD, basically none of my male friends read at all.

My bubble is split roughly 50/50: some don't read at all, the others are probably top 1% readers. But even those guys practically never read anything written in the last 20 years. The backlog of classics is just to long.

I resemble this remark. I read a ton, but I'm not reading stuff that's been written recently (with a few exceptions). There are a ton of classics to read, and also frankly I don't think most new releases are actually good.

How does this compare to sci-fi novels by sales? Entirely possible good reads just has a slanted user base.

I know for my part I might recommend a book in person, but I’m unlikely to post about it on goodreads, and don’t actually know what good reads is.

I mainly use goodreads for cataloguing my reads (since it has a list of books and UI to manage reading lists, and I am lazy enough to use whatever is there instead of building my own) and seeing what my friends (people I actually know, not facebook kind of "friends") are reading. I sometimes also review, but definitely not all books I read.

Contemporary fiction literature is female-dominated across the board. We have a few threads a year on this (which I don't usually pay much attention to, since I don't read contemporary fiction literature). Try typing "Hugo Awards" in the search box.

If I had to come up with a non-social-justice based explaination for why this happened, I would guess that the invention of video games provided a superior substitute to books for male entertainment demand, and that this caused a cultural vacuum which was filled by women.

I lot of the men I know personally that are Readers pirate a great deal of books. I generally do for anything that isn't a new release by an author I support, in which case I buy a copy on release, then read the pirated copy anyway as its often more convenient to do so (and I can copy text out of the pirated file to search on the web with, Kindle makes you manually retype anything you want to search from the book). Books files are very small. I have an old external drive in my desk with about 90,000 books on it, including p much the entire cannon of western classics and all popular fiction published before about 2014 or so.

I think I've circled around this point without hitting it so neatly. As games increased in quality, I found my burning need for books to be diminished.

There are still so many types of stories that don't work as a video game, but I think men migratting to them and culture war junk are to blame.

Well, I know about all the Puppies saga and that stuff. I have some idea how that mechanics works. I wonder if it's the same in this case.

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