I am currently in the middle of reading CJ Cherryh's really very good Ealdwood books - a superior example of the fantasy-knights-slip-into-faerie subgenre. Cherryh is an exceptionally skilful craftswoman and a brilliant prose stylist - one of those who Stanley Fish called the 'tribe of the sentence-watchers': every single sentence of hers is polished like a gem. There is not one sloppy word, one bad or clunky phrase, one stumble or misjudgement in the many books of hers that I have read so far. I would put her firmly in the category of the 'best of the rest' - not a genre-surpassing talent like Wolfe, Tolkien, Lewis, etc., perhaps, but among the very finest that SF/fantasy literature has to offer within the bounds of genre writing itself.
She is also an interesting example of that fairly rare phenomenon in the field: a female writer who often uses male protagonists. This makes for a fascinating experience - it gives the characters much more of a complicated inner emotional life than they would otherwise have. In fact I would probably use Cherryh's fiction as a good case study into the phenomenon of sex differences in authorial voice - she is, ostensibly, quite a stereotypically 'masculine' writer in terms of subject matter, but it is still I think fairly obviously writes the male perspective from a feminine point of view. I will of course cover my backside as required these days and point out - this really ought not to need pointing out - that there is no value judgement implied in making the observation. But there really is a difference, by and large, between male characters as imagined by male writers, and male characters as imagined by female writers - just as, as we all know, male authors will tend to write female characters very differently to how female writers do. There is nothing wrong with this, and in fact it makes life much more interesting to acknowledge and study it.
That is a bigger subject that might be for future posts, but in the meantime reading Ealdwood got me wondering about other examples from the genre of female writers who often use male protagonists. The other notable one that springs to mind is Lois McMaster Bujold (we can take it as read that JK Rowling is included); are there any other recommendations you would like to make?
From recent reading of 20th Century Historical fiction on the Classical world, there's a few things to point to.
ReplyDeleteMaguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian - which is framed as the memoirs of a man, and a man who did manly things like hunting, building walls and imperial administration. Thoughts here: https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2024/08/july-august-24-miscellany.html
See also The Corn King and the Spring Queen - not purely with a male protagonist, but very willing to use many of them (and contrast them with the women involved). https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2024/05/corn-king-and-spring-queen.html
Contrast with Lewis's Till We Have Faces - with its female protagonist in the (periphery of the) Classical world, written by a man (soon after an irregular marriage).
"Genre-surpassing talent like Wolfe, Tolkien, Lewis, etc."
ReplyDeleteI'll grant you the first two, but Lewis? Are you sure you don't just have a predilection for Christian authors?
Lewis is a great writer. I’ve been further convinced of this by the Planet Narnia book, which I read recently.
DeleteAnd I have found his blatant propaganda and fearlessly fighting strawmen to be boring even at 16. Honestly, if you want Christian propaganda - read Chesterton.
DeleteMike
PS Tolkien is not that good either, but at least he has some actual merit and is not so blatant.
To affirm that the man that wrote the Cosmic Trilogy and Till We Have Faces has little merit and is fighting strawmen seems to me pure absurdity.
DeleteThe only thing I would grant here you is that he's first and foremost a theologian rather than a fantasy author. I wouldn't categorize most of Lewis' fiction as fantasy.
Some people still think it’s cool to dislike Christianity - a sort of teenage rebellion stage extended into late-middle age. Admitting that Lewis is a good writer or had any prescience would undermine their fragile New Atheism. So you still get this knee jerk response to him.
DeletePS It’s not worth taking this ‘Mike’ character at all seriously - I think he just posts here to try to get a rise out of me and/or regular readers.
DeleteLeigh Brackett had plenty of two-fisted spacemen; Margaret St . Clair/Idris Seabright is an interesting case because her protagonists are usually male but a powerful female force is not too far away. Andre Norton, James Tiptree Jr. and other undercover female authors of course did not tip their hand. Given the largely male readership of the era it's not hard to guess why this tilt existed.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, of all the overtly and covertly women writers in F/SF - at least, in the 20th century - it might be a harder task to find one who wrote a majority of *female* leads without being an explicitly feminist writer like Joanna Russ. Anne McCaffrey, I recall, had mostly - but not all - female protagonists riding those dragons.
Yeah, I see what you mean about the male readership point. Now the position has flipped, of course.
DeleteLeGuin, certainly, up to the mid-70s.
ReplyDelete-Joel Sammallahti
C.L. Moore and Leigh Brackett!
ReplyDeleteThe only thing coming to mind is a man writing a novel with the two main characters being women: Orual and Psyche in C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces (which, along with Perelandra, is one of Lewis's two best books).
ReplyDeleteLeGuin, seems fairly obvious here.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how often is often, but Ursula Le Guin's Ged comes to mind (and has a very different arc compared to the female Tenar).
ReplyDeleteBujold's Vorkosigan saga. Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master Trilogy, Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, Shelley's Frankenstein, some of McCaffrey's Pern books (say Dragonflight).
ReplyDeletePiranesi, by Susanna Clarke. A masterpiece.
ReplyDeleteUrsula le Guin of course, with the Archmage Sparrowhawk/Ged from the incredible and excellent Earthsea tales sequence, springs immediately to mind, although Ged is really only a proper protagonist in the first 3 books; from Tehanu onwards the protagonist switches around between his quest companion Tenar and many others. Simon Tregarth from Andre Norton's Witch World is another.
ReplyDeletePatricia A McKillip wrote The Riddle master of Hed trilogy which is very good.
ReplyDeleteKatherine Kurtz!
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like something my wife would love to read. Can you recommend a starting point?
ReplyDeleteMine is an omnibus edition which is just called Ealdwood. There are four novellas collected in it.
DeleteThanks, David.
DeleteThen there is the George Eliot phenomenon. I read the hyped, “A Mirror for Princes” by Tom De Haan in the 1980s, thinking throughout in Beatty-esque terms, “there is something wrong with our bloody ships today”. It seems Tom was a nom de plume for a female author.
ReplyDeleteIf one is looking for a first rate female author who preferred male protagonists my choice would be Mary Renault with her Alexander [the Great] trilogy beginning with “Fire From Heaven”.
Good shout.
DeleteA funnier example of this is the brief career of Sam Nicholson/Shirley Nikolaisen. She had a brief career in the late 1970s to 1981 or so with multiple short stories in Analog, a fix-up book based on the short stories and one novel, all under the name Sam Nicholson. The short stories were largely about the adventures of Captain Schuster, a borderline parody of a John Campbell hero - a practical, capable hero who was a cultural reactionary with little concern for laws or intellectuals and a relaxed attitude toward incidental deaths. There's a suspicion she deliberately tailored the character to suit the tastes of Analog at the time. She disappeared as a writer and no one know what happened to her since.
DeleteI'd add Susanna Clarke's previous work, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which has almost entirely male protagonists, until the female characters claim some agency in the last 100 pages or so.
ReplyDeleteAlso a foundational work of the mysterious fae/northern England/Georgian gentlemen genre, which I believe you've expressed interest in previously on the blog
I came here to make the same recommendation. It's a great book, and I seriously considered running a game in this "world"
DeleteAlso Katherine Kerr and her Deverry series feature several important male protagonists.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I've enjoyed about male protagonists in books written by Cherryh, Le Guin, and McKillip is the combination of strength with honest, vulnerable, even raw emotional depth. They just make much more believable and thus relatable characters than more cardboard fantasy action heroes written by some others.
ReplyDeleteCherryh has always been one of my favorites, since youth. It is her (fairly early, I think?) Morgaine cycle books that somehow stick in my mind as 'archetypal Cherryh,' even though they weren't close to the first books of hers that I read. Gate of Ivrel, Well of Shiuan, and Fires of Azeroth are quite worth the reading. That being said, two quibbles: in those earliest books, Cherryh regularly used a maddeningly broken form of archaic English 2nd-person address that gets subjects and objects mixed up, with "thee is" consistently appearing in place of "thou art". The other thing that sometimes grinds my gears about Cherryh's fiction is, paradoxically, those interesting male protagonists. I find them compelling and edgy and interesting, taken singly. After reading many, many, many Cherryh books, however, one can tire of different flavors of pre-Emo emo dudes all gloomily struggling with alienation from their surrounds and regrets from their broken homes yet somehow straining to find a new way forward with the aid of a strong matriarchal protectress figure/possible love interest. :-) Nothing wrong with that per se, of course -- and even compelling once, even thrice or more, but as a pattern seemingly on autoplay it feels much less fresh.
Yeah, I love the Morgaine books. And I know what you mean about the pattern of pre-emo emo guys and the love of a good woman - I hadn’t thought about that up to this point but you’re right!
DeleteRobin Hobb is the recommendation I always make, very enjoyable trilogy of trilogies starting with the Farseer Trilogy which has a first person male protagonist and then the Liveship Trilogy which jumps around viewpoints and then I think it's the Tawny Man Trilogy that goes back to the original protagonist. There is another trilogy after that AFAIK but I was so happy with the ending of the third trilogy I didn't want to read further.
ReplyDeleteMoving up to the 80s, there's R.A. MacAvoy and Barbara Hambly. If you're willing to stretch to historical fiction, Lindsey Davis has her Marcus Didius Falco series.
ReplyDeleteMore generally, I wonder if a side effect of working in a male dominated genre is that female writers pick up a better sense of the male psyche simply through osmosis.
Bujold's Penric & Desdemona series I keep finding them enjoyable reads with a great sense of fantasy religion/theology. And a male protagonist of course.
ReplyDeleteFinder (Most of Library 1 and 2, plus all of Third World) by Carla Speed McNeil.
ReplyDeleteFaery in Shadow is my favourite alltime book of Cherryh's. Such a rich mythic self contained treasure trove.
ReplyDelete(it was also quite helpful for me at the time to get into Changeling)
And she answers correspondence :)
--Mattie
Lauren Beukes. She writes men who are convincing to me (as a man). I really liked Broken Monsters by her but will happily read all her works (most of them do have female protagonists though - does she still count?).
ReplyDeleteCongratulations , you discovered the obvious. %))
ReplyDeleteIt's Caroline Bloody Cherryh - of course she's bloody fantastic. Certainly better than Lewis or Rowling, and in my opinion _much_ better than Tolkien. About on par or a bit weaker than Wolfe, I think.
And there are/were many female authors who frequently written about male protagonists. You should at least remember about Margaret Weis, you heathen. ;) Also, of course, Barbara Hambly, who's Cherryh's friend so you should also already hear about her. She unfortunately stopped writing fantasy some years back. An Tanith Lee of Nightmaster fame. She's of older generation, but she's very good and she had written quite good male protagonists several times. And I honestly don't know what you deserve for forgetting about Leigh Brackett. Burned at the stake, probably? ;)
Mike
Late to the party, but I wanted to give a shoutout to Rosemary Sutcliffe--not scifi fantasy exactly but Arthurian stuff and sword-and-sandal stuff.
ReplyDeleteHer depiction of the male mind was always pretty convincing to me--the Eagle of the Ninth made a strong impression on me, as I recall.
https://rosemarysutcliff.net/2020/11/23/rosemary-sutcliff-spoke-in-1977-to-bbc-radio-times-about-her-historical-novel-the-eagle-of-the-ninth-and-hero-marcus/
Would the Coldfire Trilogy by Friedman "count" as fantasy?
ReplyDelete