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?