Thread by @seananmcguire

I am going to try to articulate something. It's hard, so please hold your shouting until the end, okay?

Urban Fantasy is one of the few subgenres dominated by female authors. There are probably others--if portal fantasy is a subgenre again, it's definitely got a lion's share of women writing it--but UF is the big one everyone has heard about.

And of course anything can write anything they want to, regardless of gender; there are male romance authors and female splatterpunk authors. I'm just talking about the ratios.

(And I am certain there are many non-binary authors who either haven't disclosed that fact or haven't fully realized that fact, working across genres and subgenres and everywhere.)

That being said, I find if very telling that when people are asked for urban fantasy recommendations, asked for quality, they almost always get a very short list consisting entirely of our male authors.

There is as much (excellently written) romance in the Rivers of London series as there is in the Jill Kismet series, but I only see one of those series dismissed as "paranormal romance," which is a romance subgenre that evolved in parallel with urban fantasy.

And there is NOTHING WRONG with paranormal romance! But just like October Daye is pretty shitty as cyberpunk or New Weird, Jill Kismet is absolutely PANTS as paranormal romance.

Male authors can have sixty page digressions about sexy sex demons who want to sexily sex you to Sexytown without their books becoming romances. Female authors allow a single on-page kiss and we're writing romance in the eyes of people who consider romance to be less.

It's consistent and persistent and exhausting. Male authors get better reviews for books which, if viewed on a pure craft level, are not consistently head and shoulders above their female peers.

So next time you're asked to recommend urban fantasy to someone, before you rattle off the same four men, pause and ask yourself why those are the only names springing to mind. If they're the only UF authors you've read, that may be a response to the reviews, to unexamined...

...preconceptions about female authors, to the fact that male authors tend to get larger advertising pushes (documented and Google-able) outside of the pure romance genre. UF is a big tent. Look at all the exhibits.

And here, to get you started...

HEROINE COMPLEX, @sarahkuhn. Superheroic urban fantasy with Asian-American leads.
WAR FOR THE OAKS, @coffeeem. One of the first great works of the genre.

BLOOD PRICE, @TanyaHuff. Tanya was key in shaping urban fantasy as we know it today. Her work is elegant and amazing.
FIRE AND HEMLOCK, Diana Wynne Jones. Formative for so very many of us in the genre.
BITTEN, @KelleyArmstrong. The beginning of the Women of the Otherworld.

Honestly, I could do this all day. There are so many options out there. And yes, the men who get recommended every time are doing fabulous work. This isn't "stop reading them forever." This is just "you can't eat nothing but fish fingers, you'll die."