The Gender of Genre Fantasy during the Del Rey Era

What's the gender of genre fantasy during the 1980s, you might ask? Luckily for you, I've spent the last few weeks researching exactly that question!

So, I've lately been studying Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, the founders of Del Rey books, to see how exactly they achieved their extraordinary success. To that end, I've compiled a spreadsheet exhaustively analyzing every fantasy title Del Rey Books published during their hegemony. Of the many things I'm studying, one is gender.

Long story short: a large part of mainstreaming genre fantasy relied on the del Reys realizing that, in order to find a mass audience for fantasy fiction, a genre then-current consensus considered unsellable, Lester and Judy-Lynn had to target an audience that was (a) young, and (b) mostly male.

Mind you, this isn't necessarily a ground-breaking revelation. Still, it's one thing to appeal to popular perception ... and another thing to draw conclusions based on hard data. And the data tells a more nuanced story than people might initially realize. Here are the gory details.

Criteria for my data set

For this data, I selected fantasy novels that saw their first paperback publication --  usually mass market, not trade  -- with Del Rey Books. This covers the period between 1975 and 1991 ... the time between when Judy-Lynn hired Lester at Ballantine and when Lester was forcibly retired from there.

For accuracy's sake, I'm excluding Stephen R. Donaldson's last four Del Rey novels. Although these all had had female POV characters, Lester had ceased being Donaldson's editor during The One Tree, mainly because he opposed how Donaldson made Linden Avery, a woman, his dominant POV character. I also can't guarantee that Lester, during his last few years, oversaw all the fantasy novels published by Del Rey Books, but I worked with the information I had.

Furthermore, since Lester ran the fantasy line, I'm only looking at "cockatriced" books -- that is, novels that bear Lester's special fantasy colophon. This includes three Ballantine novels from 1976 and one from 1977, but it excludes Anne McCaffrey, whose Dragonriders of Pern series, which often had female protagonists, is actually science fiction, even if many readers mistook it for fantasy. As such, the Pern book usually bear Judy-Lynn's vortex colophon, not Lester's cockatrice.

Moreover, another idiosyncrasy affects the overall results. Lester believed that, while SF readers might tolerate fantasy elements, fantasy readers wouldn't ever tolerate SF elements, so he and Judy-Lynn marketed novls that blurred SFF boundaries -- such as Julian May's Pliocene Exile books -- as SF. Many of these blurred-genre books had female protagonists, but since they don't bear the cockatrice colophon, I've excluded them from this data set.

I'm also excluding all fantasy reprints published with a cockatrice colophon. These include many titles from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (1968-1972), which predates Judy-Lynn and Lester's time at Del Rey. I'm also excluding first-time paperback publication of books by Tolkien as special cases. Thus, in order to specify books handled by Lester himself and marketed explicitly as fantasy, I'm looking at novels

• published by Del Rey (or more rarely just Ballantine) between 1976 and 1991; and
• novels that bear a cockatrice colophon; and
• excluding Donaldson's final four Del Rey novels; and
• excluding reprints of older titles and all books by Tolkien.

Without further ado, here we go.

The results

• Sample size: 163 distinct novels (this includes multiples, such as the prolific Piers Anthony);
• 108 by male authors (66.3%)
• 54 by female authors (33.1%)
• 1 by split male/female authors (0.6%)--a collaboration between L. Sprague & Catherine de Camp.
• Authors. From these titles, Del Rey published 48 distinct authors
• 30 (62.5%) were men.
• 18 (37.5%) were women.
• Debut novels. From this total, Del Rey published 22 debut novels by first-time authors.
• 13 (59%) were by male authors.
• 9 (41%) were by female authors.

Discussion

So ... these numbers tell a pretty consistent story. In the fantasy fiction handled by Lester himself, his male authors outnumber his female authors by a factor of roughly 2:1. However, let's use some caution here, plus some common sense. Do these numbers prove that Lester was biased in favor of male fantasy authors?

Not really. Not by themselves, at least.

For one thing, that's still a good number of female authors, many of whom got their start with Del Rey. More importantly, it's surprisingly easy to draw poor conclusions from a data set. Since I don't know (yet) the gender imbalance of Del Rey's competitors (Ace, DAW, etc.), we can't determine how well Lester compared to them. Maybe Del Rey had less gender imbalance than those other lines. So that's an area of uncertainty. Likewise, we don't know the gender breakdown of submissions to Del Rey Books. For example, if 80% of the submissions received by Lester came from male authors, publishing "only" 66.3% would be more than equitable.

In fact, the Del Rey situation looks better when we include McCaffrey, the other Donaldson books, The Mists of Avalon (which never had a cockatrice because it never had a mass-market paperback edition), and every book that blurs the boundaries between SF and fantasy. If we consider all these fantasy-esque titles, the gender gap narrows by nearly three percentage points:

• Sample size of all fantasy-esque Del Rey novels (includes multiples): 188 distinct books.
• 119 by male authors (63.3%)
• 68 by female authors (36.2%)
• 1 by split male/female authors (0.5%).

Now, granted, I do think Lester strongly favored male authors for his fantasy line. This, though, I'm thinking, had less to do with any anti-feminist bias -- Lester had several liberal sentiments -- than with his assessment, possibly a realistic one, of the true market for fantasy fiction during the 1970s and 1980s. 

For instance, if we ignore the gender of the author and focus on the gender of the POV characters for each book, we find a slightly different story. Although I couldn't always determine this information with complete certainty from online plot summaries, here's what I uncovered for Lester's cockatriced fantasy line:

• Sample size: 163 distinct novels.
• ~134 (82.2%) had male primary POV character
• ~14 (8.6%) had a female primary POV character
• ~11 (6.7%) had a split male/female POV character
• ~ 4 (2.5%) were not determinable.

That's pretty wild. Regardless of the author's gender, male or female, the vast majority of Del Rey titles emphasized a male character's point of view, and given the quest structure for many of these series, it seems clear that Judy-Lynn and Lester marketed their imprint mainly to the same young male audience then reading S&S fantasy fiction, the adventure fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard, and hard sf fiction.

We can ascertain the male gendering of genre fantasy one further way. I've written before on how completely Del Rey Books dominated genre fantasy from 1977-1990. So, if we again exclude Anne McCaffrey, who was science fiction, we can see that thirty-one different fantasy novels from Del Rey Books reached the bestseller lists .... and of those thirty bestsellers, 30 of them (97%) came from male authors.*

And that's even wilder. For some reason it was the men, not the women, who tended to subscribe whole-heartedly into the Tolkienian model of epic fantasy, and it was to these Tolkien-esque male authors that Del Rey Books threw the largest chunk of its marketing budget. So while Del Rey had some established female authors such as Katherine Kurtz, Barbara Hambly, and Pat McKillip, these writers, financially speaking, merely kept the lights on. It was Brooks, Donaldson, Eddings, and Anthony who made Del Rey Books the powerhouse of fantasy publishing it became during the 1980s.

By the way, only five of those bestsellers had a main POV character who was female ... but four of them hailed from Piers Anthony, an author often unfairly maligned for sexism. The fifth belonged to Terry Brooks in Wishsong of Shannara, and I credit his Elfstones of Shannara as having a split M/F POV character.**

So that's the gender of genre fantasy, at least during the Del Rey Era. Dudes, dudes, dudes, most of the way. Again, it would be premature to read a sexist bias into any of this. But that's an argument for another time, and even if there was some sort of discriminating bias involved, it's by no means clear that any other method than that used by Del Rey Books would have successfully mainstreamed genre fantasy the way they did. Genius doesn't grow on trees, and sometimes genius is just seeing the possibilities hidden to others.

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* Patricia McKillip's The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976) had fourteen printings, so clearly sold well, but never formally reached a Publisher's Weekly or New York Times bestseller list. Same with Katherine Kurtz's Camber of Culdi (1976), which had eleven printings.

** Stephen R. Donaldson also had four books with a female POV character reach a bestseller list, but Lester didn't edit any of them.