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The other day I came across this article in The Independent: Is this the death of the male novelist? The lonely life of a man writing fiction in 2025.

It reminded me of something I'd been thinking of for a while, especially every time I picked up a book in a genre like science fiction/fantasy written by a man, to find he'd written yet another book with mostly female protagonists (sometimes with laughable results, where the protagonist is dressed up as a woman but behaves like a stereotypical male rogue. Yes, Jack McDevitt, I'm looking at you!).

Don't get me wrong, I love books with female protagonists, especially since as a woman it's easier to identify with the characters. But I like more variety than that.

Up until around 2000, I felt I was reading fiction written by both men and women, in all genres. Some writers completely transcended their sex, but others provided either a male or female gaze with which their protagonists viewed their world, and I thoroughly enjoyed being exposed to both. As a woman, it's also interesting to get a peek into the mind of male protagonists, when created by a strong male writer.

Now, it's hard to find any novels by men, including in genres like science fiction/fantasy, which just a few decades ago, they dominated.

Because it seems, men have stopped reading fiction, while women today are the prime readers of it. Most of us who have men in our lives have heard them say they prefer non-fiction, but even so, if they're from earlier generations, they got encouraged to read when students, with a wide range of books to choose from, many written by men, if they needed to identify with their own sex. In my youth, I knew men who were as excited by fiction as I, and even had their own ambitions to be writers. A long long time ago...

And now, without a market, unless they are able to or want to create strong female-driven narratives, a lot of men just aren't bothering to write anymore either.

While I've thoroughly appreciated the representation of my sex across the literary landscape, with strong independent female characters and all that, I find I'm really missing the male gaze in fiction.

I wonder, if any women are reading this, do you feel the same way?

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Triggers for writing fiction are different for everyone, I think. 

Mine can be landscapes hurtling by on a train in a foreign land, astonishing confidences of friends, my own adventures, especially those not easily explained.

My instinct when feeling a writing trigger coming on is to write something otherworldly in the realm of science fiction or fantasy. 

The story I'm writing right now is like that.  My dreams had been surprising me lately.  Then they gave me an idea....

The Dreams of Others

He drew his hand back, his fist the size of a ham, and swung at me, missing as I skipped out of the way. A rush of excitement and fear jolted through me as I raised the baseball bat and struck his red thick-jowled face once, twice, thrice.  

At first he howled, but once his nose broke and blood spewed from his mouth along with a few of his teeth, he made a choking sound.  As I bashed him across the face a final time, he fell on the kitchen floor, silent. The bat hung limply from my hand, blood dripping from its tip. At last, I thought, at last. 

The walls of my kitchen blurred, then I was outside, the bat gone from my hand, watching my little brother swinging on a tire hanging from the tree at their cottage. I was so happy, there were tears in my eyes. Why had I thought him dead?  I started running towards him and then….

I jolted upright in my bed, my heart thundering in my chest, my eyes a bit wet. For a moment I felt so disoriented that I was surprised to see Henri lying beside me, before I remembered he was right where he was supposed to be. 

I just killed my husband, I thought muzzily. And my brother was alive. I shuffled off the bed and to the bathroom where my head cleared, the dream hangover gone. I never had a brother, and my lovely Henri looked nothing like the lout I’d struck with the baseball bat. 

As I returned to bed still emotionally wrenched, I promised myself, as I had many times before, to see someone about this. It happened almost all the time now, leaving me exhausted throughout the day.  
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​I was dreaming the dreams of strangers.....

More to come soon!

If you write or are thinking of writing, what has inspired you lately? ​
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Welcome to my page.

A couple of years ago, Josy and I got together to support each other as we pursued our writing goals.

Our new anthology, "This Is What We Are", is the result of our collaboration. We had a fabulous time putting it together!
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​For a taste, here's a quick bite from "Witness", one of my stories in the anthology: 

​A streamer of light, the vessel shot across the void stretching between the nine planets, hurtling toward a little blue planet, third from the sun.

​The witness had been there before, and shuddered to recall the pain of entry and transformation. It had been a shockingly primitive world. What changes had been wrought since the last time? Had the creatures of that world risen or fallen? Likely fallen, since the witness was returning once more, and another event was imminent.
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​Stayed tuned!  Our anthology is launching soon.

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Nora Bencsics

I enjoy imagining other worlds and writing about them in science fiction and fantasy. I hope to take my readers on journeys that excite them, frighten them, and ultimately, deliciously entertain them.