Not to detract from these authors, many of whom I also enjoy and admire, and who have been influences on my own work, but there are always so many female authors missing from the list. Over and over, when I see polls on forums listing the best epic fantasy writers, both historical and current, the same names appear, and they’re almost exclusively male-or to be more specific, cisgender heterosexual white male authors. Even the young grandson in The Princess Bride relents by the end to admit, “I don’t mind so much, Grandpa.” All the epic fantasy trappings of farm boys and pirates and princesses, swordsmen and giants and feats of derring-do, magic and torture and quests for vengeance, are in that particular box, but above all, true love.Īnd yet it’s also a movie written, directed, filmed and produced by men, featuring a predominantly male cast and a heroine with zero agency. It’s a pity that the word “romance” has taken on such a negative connotation for a large swathe of the fantasy-reading audience. According to Steinbeck, his longtime friend and editor came upon him carving a wooden figure, and asked that he make him a box. When I wrote Kushiel’s Avatar, the final volume of the original trilogy, I thought a lot about the dedication that John Steinbeck wrote for East of Eden.

And defining genres can be tricky, because sometimes books-often, in my personal opinion, the best books-span a number of them. The Kushiel’s Legacy series does contain elements of romance-gloriously, unabashedly, sometimes brutally so. Of course, romance fantasy does exist, and it’s surely not my intention to denigrate it in any way.

A significant portion of the audience consists of male readers, and a significant subset of that readership assumes that epic fantasy written by women must surely be tainted by girl cooties.īased on personal experience, my take is that this is shorthand for “romance” and that there’s an underlying assumption, consciously or subconsciously, that fantasy written by women must perforce be romance. As a female writer of epic fantasy, this is a phenomenon with which I’m all too familiar, and the same holds true for many of my female colleagues in the genre.

Kushiel’s Legacy by Jacqueline Carey