{"id":9156,"date":"2025-07-28T00:04:59","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T05:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/?p=9156"},"modified":"2025-07-21T16:36:21","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T21:36:21","slug":"male-vs-female-readers-and-science-fiction-vs-fantasy-is-modern-publishing-targeting-one-more-than-the-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/male-vs-female-readers-and-science-fiction-vs-fantasy-is-modern-publishing-targeting-one-more-than-the-other\/","title":{"rendered":"Male vs. female readers, and science fiction vs. fantasy: Is modern publishing targeting one more than the other? \u2028"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Michael Grossberg<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old cliche: Men prefer science fiction; women prefer fantasy. (Of course, that\u2019s a half-truth at best: After all, many men enjoy fantasy, and many women, science fiction.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Left to right: The planets Mars, Earth and Venus (File photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yet, if men are mostly from Mars and women are mostly from Venus, how is today\u2019s publishing world appealing to both?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Not very well, Kristin McTiernan argues on her Fictional Influence<\/i> <\/a>website and blog.<\/p>\n

When McTiernan posted a video about the absence of contemporary men\u2019s fiction, it went viral.<\/p>\n

\u201cI struck a nerve that resonated far beyond my usual audience,\u201d McTiernan wrote on her Fictional Influence <\/i>website.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe comment section flooded with responses from men who felt invisible in today\u2019s publishing landscape – readers hungry for stories that spoke to their experiences (from their perspective) without apology.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And Beau L\u2019Amour, son of legendary Western author Louis L\u2019Amour, strongly agrees – prompting McTiernan to post an eye-opening interview with him about the crucial importance of targeting male readers – especially the next generation of boys and teenagers.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, in one question to L\u2019Amour, McTiernan mentions that \u201cindie\u201d authors like Devon Eriksen and Matt Dinimann have carved out a space for male readers and \u201care steadily gaining traction (in sci-fi and fantasy) respectively.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Eriksen\u2019s Theft of Fire<\/a>,<\/i> the first novel in his protected Orbital Space tetralogy, was a 2024 Prometheus Best Novel finalist. (And Eriksen reportedly is making real headway in completing its sequel, Box of Trouble,<\/i> which has a chance of being published in 2025.)<\/p>\n

McTiernan asked L\u2019Amour if there are any current authors or publishers who are carrying out his father\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n

His lengthy answer begins by highlighting Taylor Sheridan, the screenwriter and director of the popular TV series Yellowstone.<\/i><\/p>\n

More broadly, L’Amour reminds us that not too many decades ago, when he was growing up, adventure fiction was published far more widely, including within the SF genre.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was very male oriented, with lots of action, exploration and gadgets,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>L\u2019Amour mentions the special appeal to boys and young men by the writer Lester Dent (1904-1959), best remembered today for the Doc Savage series. (He wrote 159 Doc Savage novels under the house name Kenneth Robeson.)<\/p>\n

BURROUGHS, HEINLEIN AND NIVEN<\/strong><\/p>\n

As examples of mass-appeal writers who also were favorites to read by boys and young men, L\u2019Amour describes how he \u201cdevoured\u201d Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein and later, Larry Niven.<\/p>\n

Edgar Rice Burroughs is best known for creating Tarzan, who appeared in 24 of his books, and John Carter, a recurring character in 11 of his books about a human transported to a Mars civilization.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Robert Heinlein in 1969 examining his library (From the Heinlein Trust archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Of course, Heinlein (1907-1988) is a huge Prometheus Awards favorite. He is the author most often honored and recognized, with a grand total of nine Prometheus awards.<\/p>\n

Of those winners, two of the best (which also strongly appeal to boys and men) are The Moon is a Harsh Mistress<\/i><\/a>, one of the first two works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 1983, and Citizen of the Galaxy<\/a>,<\/i> perhaps the best of Heinlein\u2019s \u201cjuveniles\u201d (written for a young-adult audience) and inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2022.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Both works still resonate today with a broad audience, but also embody much of the types of fiction and narrative tropes that traditionally have appealed to especially to boys and men.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Larry Niven, a still-living master of science fiction and the author of a collection of novels and stories all set within his galactic-future Known Space series, won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 1992 for Fallen Angels<\/i><\/a>, co-written with Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn.<\/p>\n

To his credit, L\u2019Amour also praises the great Ray Bradbury (1920-2012.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Ray Bradbury in 1959 (Creative Commons license)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cA lot of kids of my generation read Ray Bradbury, a real poet. He might be kind of under-appreciated these days \u2026 certainly he was under appreciated by us when we were youngsters,\u201d L\u2019Amour said.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bradbury, a master of the short story, may be best remembered for his dystopian and civil libertarian novel Fahrenheit 451,<\/i><\/a> an early inductee into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of this was hard hitting, fast moving and relatively short fiction. Great stuff! Today the material for kids and young people is too careful\u2026 or too transgressive! It\u2019s too inward looking, too slow paced, and not technical enough to really activate a boy,\u201d L\u2019Amour said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoys need to search maps, wonder how the gravity well of a neutron star could solve a murder, and imagine how the track of an outlaw decays after days of exposure to the weather. Boys need to read edgy, funny, dangerous feeling material,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>L\u2019Amour\u2019s answer delightfully ends with a lengthy quote from Heinlein\u2019s novel Glory Road<\/em> that evokes what he and other boys most wanted to read while growing up.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an enticing excerpt from that Heinlein quote:<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances.. I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted\u2026 Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, \u2018The game\u2019s afoot!\u2019 I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin\u2026 I wanted to sail with Ulysses\u2026 I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be \u2014 instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

About Fictional Influence<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

McTiernan\u2019s website aims to bring her expertise in editing and ghostwriting to a platform offering tips on narrative development, editing guidance and broader insights into fiction and publishing.<\/p>\n

For the full interview<\/a> between McTiernan and L’Amour, titled \u201cThe Last Frontier: How Louis L\u2019Amour\u2019s Son Is Fighting Publishing\u2019s \u2018Men Don\u2019t Read\u2019 Myth,\u201d visit and subscribe to McTiernan\u2019s blog, Fictional Influence<\/a>.<\/p>\n


\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

ABOUT THE LFS AND PROMETHEUS AWARDS<\/b><\/p>\n

*\u00a0Join us!<\/b> To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, \u00a0join<\/a> the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans.<\/p>\n

Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future.<\/p>\n

In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other\u2019s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.<\/p>\n

* Prometheus winners:\u00a0<\/b>For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees \u2013 including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the enhanced\u00a0Prometheus Awards page<\/a>\u00a0on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards\u2019 distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog\u2019s\u00a0Video page.<\/a><\/p>\n

* Read \u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/a> an essay in the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/i>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.<\/p>\n

* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society\u2019s Facebook page<\/a> for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Michael Grossberg It\u2019s an old cliche: Men prefer science fiction; women prefer fantasy. (Of course, that\u2019s a half-truth at best: After all, many men enjoy fantasy, and many women, science fiction.) Yet, if men are mostly from Mars and women are mostly from Venus, how is today\u2019s publishing world appealing to both? Not very … Continue reading Male vs. female readers, and science fiction vs. fantasy: Is modern publishing targeting one more than the other? \u2028<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1585,2201,1860],"tags":[2638,1312,2633,641,2634,2635,1086,955,2636,97,2632,2639,2631,2637,68],"class_list":["post-9156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction-in-the-news","category-ray-bradbury","category-robert-heinlein","tag-boys","tag-citizen-of-the-galaxy","tag-doc-savage","tag-fahrenheit-451","tag-falling-angels","tag-fictional-influence","tag-glory-road","tag-heinlein","tag-kristin-mctiernan","tag-larry-niven","tag-louis-lamour","tag-male-readers","tag-mctiernan","tag-men","tag-ray-bradbury"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-2nG","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9156"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9159,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9156\/revisions\/9159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}