Modern SF is for “Middle-Aged Women?”

First off: HAPPY 2008 EVERYONE! Here’s to another good year of fine Pinoy spec fic!

A while back, Kenneth Yu called our attention to an essay about magical realism. I must admit though that my attention was more caught by a comment on that post by Jego, who linked to another blog post by someone on the novel jury of the SFWA. The post is titled “A lament for science fiction,” and this passage stuck with me:

Science fiction has changed a lot, unfortunately, not for the better. It used to be adventure literature for young men, now it’s romance literature for middle-aged women. That’s why young men now play science fiction-based computer games instead of reading science fiction novels and so-called science fiction publishers churn out book after book about sexy vampires, seductive were-seals and strong independent forty-something single women looking for love in space.

Permit me to ask: where may i find this “romance literature for middle-aged women”? I probably won’t have enough time to borrow the representative titles from my favorite library here, but I’m curious.

During my stay here in New Zealand, I’ve come across at least two distinguished British scientists (one of whom is my Uncle Vern) who admitted to having been huge science fiction buffs when they were younger – specifically, when they were in their early teens, through to their late twenties. If I keep going around telling people that I like science fiction, I’ll probably meet more.

Uncle Vern still has a pretty impressive collection of titles bought during the 1940s and 50s. Having recently read Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis and Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley, I can safely say the target audience of the books he liked then were clearly male.

Please understand, I’m not offended – it’s a matter of fact that SF was written for boys during the golden decades of “the Old Guard.” I still remember reading “The Menace from Earth” by Robert Heinlein at my father’s recommendation, because he said it was “different” from other sci-fi stories. What made it different, I eventually saw, was that it was written from a female perspective. Moreover, the female in question was very… stereotypically female. It would probably be classified as “chick lit” in this day and age.

I’m trying to see any sort of gender-related fix in the contemporary SF works by writers that I know and admire (David Brin, Michael Swanwick, Dan Simmons, CJ Cherryh among them) and I’m really not finding it. I can see how people can say Dan Simmons effectively works in the testosterone, but I don’t really see it anywhere else. I suspect I’m just largely clueless about the trends in modern SF. Some education is perhaps in order.