When I started reading science fiction as a teenager in the late 1950s. it was a male-dominated field. Both writers and readers were predominately male. Writers like Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Clifford D. Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Harlan Elison, H.L. Gold and Philip K. Dick ruled the roost. We teenage boys loved them. Girls had other things to read.
Sure, there were a few female writers in the game. Writers like Anne McCaffery and Ursula K. Le Guin were popular outliers. And then there was Alice Sheldon, who fooled readers and editors alike by writing under the name of James Tiptree Jr.
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| Martha Wells |
Look at the science fiction shelves in any bookstore today, however, and you will find almost as many female authors as male. And perhaps even more. One finds veterans like Connie Willis, Martha Wells and Octavia E. Butler, as well as younger writers such as Becky Chambers, Sarah Brooks, Bethany Jacobs, Alexandra Gleeman, Emily Hamilton, Sierra Greer, Lindsay Ellis and Dani Francis. And then there are writers like Peng Shepherd, who write imaginative science fiction but don't call it that.
If greater numbers of women are writing science fiction, it stands to reason that more of them are reading it, too. As a consequence, unless it is just my imagination, sci-fi books are gaining a more prominent display in bookstores than they once had.
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