romantasy – One Thousand And One Parsecs

ChatGPT writes a trashy novel that fits all the current market trends

So just for fun, I asked ChatGPT to list the post popular tropes in science fiction and fantasy literature right now, pick the most popular subgenre, and write up a novel synopsis that mashes up all of those tropes.

To no one’s surprise, the subgenre it chose was romantasy, but it also threw in dragons, dark academia, and time magic. Here is the complete synopsis:

Here is a tighter, sharper, more compelling 1000-word synopsis that follows the same outline but sells the story harder—maximizing emotional hooks, character stakes, and the high-heat romantasy appeal. Spoilers intact.

The Hundredth Life of the Dragon-Bonded

Rina Ashvale has always been ordinary—poor, unnoticed, unimportant. But on the morning of the Day of Choosing, she wakes with the unshakable feeling that she’s lived this day before. And died in it. Images flash behind her eyes: burning skies, a dragon’s scream, a prince’s hand dripping with blood. None of it makes sense.

Everything changes when Sereth, the most ancient and aloof of all dragons, chooses her as his rider. The bond hits like a lightning strike: thousands of half-formed memories, shards of forgotten lives, and a sense of wrongness in the fabric of the world. Sereth refuses to explain, and Rina finds herself thrust into the elite dragon war-college—completely unprepared, utterly overwhelmed, and lodged in the same wing as the kingdom’s most dangerous cadet: Prince Kael Vorian, heir to their nation’s long-time enemy.

Their first interaction is a disaster. Kael—brilliant, beautiful, and infuriating—sees Rina as an unworthy upstart bonded to a dragon she doesn’t deserve. Rina sees him as an arrogant elite who’s never had to fight for anything real. But whenever they clash in the skies, sparks fly far beyond anger. Something in the dragon bond won’t let them ignore each other.

As Rina trains, she slowly forms a found family with three other misfit cadets—gentle Jory, fierce Thalia, and quick-tongued Marek. Life at the academy carries surprising warmth: late-night mess hall confessions, shared exhaustion after flight drills, stolen pastries in the city. For the first time in her life, Rina feels like she belongs.

But then the déjà vu returns—harder, sharper. She predicts an ambush drill seconds before it happens, saving Kael’s life in a maneuver she can’t explain. When she confronts Sereth, the dragon finally admits the truth:

The world is trapped in a time loop. Ninety-nine times, humanity has fallen to the Void. Ninety-nine times, reality has reset to the beginning of this academy term. Dragons remember. Humans do not.
Except Rina.

Her growing memories mean one thing: she may be the first human in a hundred loops capable of breaking the cycle.

But the moment Rina begins changing events—saving lives that used to be lost, altering training outcomes—the Void adapts. Darker monsters appear. Missions that were once safe become fatal. Jory loses his arm. Marek nearly dies. And Rina realizes a horrifying truth: every change she makes doesn’t erase suffering—it only shifts it onto someone else.

Through it all, Kael remains her fiercest rival and most dangerous ally. Their tension spikes during a magical mishap that amplifies emotion, throwing them into a breathless near-scene neither can forget. During the annual Festival of the First Flame, in the chaos of a Void creature attack, they end up pressed together in a narrow alley, clinging to each other with equal parts fear and longing. When they finally give in to the desire they’ve been denying—an explosive, passionate moment in the dragon stables—they can no longer pretend what’s between them is merely conflict.

But Rina’s growing memories deliver an unbearable blow: in one of the previous loops, Kael burned her village to the ground to slow the Void’s advance. He admits it. He regrets it. He would do it again if it meant saving the world.

Their fragile connection shatters.

As the loop destabilizes, the world begins to tear. Rina slips into the Twilight Reach, the dream-realm dragons inhabit between deaths. There she meets the Hollow King, a godlike Void entity who has been feeding on the loop for centuries. He offers her a seductive bargain: sever the dragon bonds and the loop will end forever—no more death, no more suffering. But it would also mean the extinction of dragons, the world’s only memory-keepers.

Rina refuses. She will not save the world by erasing its heart.

Meanwhile, Kael uncovers a devastating truth: his father, the emperor, is planning a military strike to seize the academy’s dragons, a move that could break the loop catastrophically and hand victory to the Void. Kael offers to kill his father to prevent it. Rina stops him. Instead, she proposes a desperate ritual to jump the timeline forward—getting ahead of the emperor’s plan.

The ritual fails spectacularly.

Time fractures.

The academy splits into two overlapping timelines—the unchanged past loop and the altered timeline Rina and Kael created. Students flicker in and out of existence. Some have duplicates. Others appear as ghosts of who they were meant to be.

Rina’s squad members are caught between versions of themselves. With Sereth’s help, Rina merges their memories, giving each friend the best parts of both lives—even if it costs Sereth more of his dwindling strength. Every memory he surrenders feeds the growing collapse of the loop.

Rina finally understands: dragons carry the burden of memory, but they cannot change it. That’s why the loop always resets. Only a human mind—someone capable of holding all ninety-nine lives at once—can force time forward for good.

She volunteers to carry the full weight of the loop. Kael refuses to let her do it alone.

Together, in the Twilight Reach, Rina and Kael confront the Hollow King. Sereth sacrifices himself to shatter the loop, unleashing all his stored timelines in one final blaze. The Hollow King retreats—but not before warning that breaking the cycle will unleash consequences no one can predict.

Rina and Kael awaken in a world that has never existed before: one without resets, without second chances, without dragons except for a few younglings who survived the collapse. The academy is in ruins. Their nations have fractured. Rina’s village is gone in every timeline. Kael is disowned. The world is raw and wounded—but real.

With their surviving squadmates, they build a small dragon-rider outpost beside a river. Half refuge, half academy, it becomes the first place Rina has ever chosen for herself. Kael stays with her—not as a prince, not as a rival, but as the man who shared a hundred lifetimes of pain and desire with her.

For the first time, dawn breaks on a future that isn’t written.

Standing together in the new light, Rina and Kael speak the vow that binds them:

“We will be the dragons who remember.”

The loop is broken.
The world is reborn.
And their love—forged across a hundred lives—has finally outrun time itself.

So what do you think? Does it sound like something you’d actually want to read? Like something that might even be better than most of the trashy, trendy novels out there, even if it’s total AI slop?

I have no intention of actually writing this book, so if you feel like writing (or generating) it, knock yourself out. Just send me a link if you actually publish it.

Fantasy from A to Z: Z is for Zeitgeist

What is the future of fantasy literature? Where is the genre headed, based on current cultural trends?

For a long time, epic fantasy was basically Tolkien-light. There were exceptions, of course, but most readers wanted something that felt a lot like Lord of the Rings, and the most successful writers were the ones who gave it to them. There was a little bit of innovation, probably culminating in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, but if you picked up a random epic fantasy off the shelf, you could have a pretty good idea of what you were getting into.

Then, in the 90s and 00s, fantasy started to get dark and gritty, with writers like Joe Abercrombie and George R.R. Martin setting the tone. This new subgenre or flavor of fantasy, called grimdark, really came to dominate during this time, to the point where some were calling Martin an “American Tolkien” (though all that talk more or less died with the terrible finale of the show). Grimdark is still quite dominant, though an increasing number of readers are turning to “cozy” fantasy or slice-of-life in subgenres like litRPG. And of course, romantasy is taking off like crazy, though as we’ve already discussed, most romantasy is basically just porn.

So where are we going from here?

Our culture tends to pass through a cycle of seasonal turnings, where each season is the length of a generation, and the cycle itself is the length of a long human life. Reduced to its simplest form, the cycle follows a pattern like this:

Strong men create good times (first turning).

Good times create weak men (second turning).

Weak men create hard times (third turning).

Hard times create strong men (fourth turning).

We are currently living in a fourth turning, which is the period when all of the major wars and catastrophes tend to happen. In other words, the fourth turning is basically a grimdark world—or rather, when the full consequences of a grimdark world become manifest. But the grimdark subgenre really took off in the third turning, when dark and grim fantasy worlds resonated with the “hard times” that we all were starting to live through. This is also why dystopian YA became so popular in the 90s and 00s.

(As a side note, I have to say that I find it both perplexing and hilarious how so many zoomers think of the 90s as a simple and wholesome time, to the point where they think they experience nostalgia for it. Those of us who lived through the 90s remember it very differently, as an era of school shootings, political scandals, collapsing churches, teenage pregnancies, and ever-escalating culture wars. There’s a reason why Smells Like Teen Spirit was the decade’s anthem. Though in all fairness, I suppose that if someone from the middle ages were to visit our own time, they would find the nostalgic yearning on which the whole fantasy genre is based to be just as perplexing and hilarious.)

I believe we are on the cusp of a major cultural wave that is going to change everything, to the point of making our world almost unrecognizable to those who lived through the 90s and 00s. And just as the grimdark authors like Martin and Abercrombie rose to prominence by riding the wave in their part of the generational cycle, there are a lot of noblebright authors who stand to benefit from riding this next wave, which is only now beginning to break.

After all, there is another way to formulate the generational cycles. It looks something like this:

Complacent men create a spiritually dead culture (first turning).

A spiritually dead culture creates awakened men (second turning).

Awakened men create a spiritually vibrant culture (third turning).

A spiritually vibrant culture creates complacent men (fourth turning).

In the summer of 2024, I think we passed through a critical fork in the current timeline. If the generational cycle had followed its usual course, then our current crisis period would have ended with a period of unification under a new order, based upon the spiritual foundations that were laid during the 60s and 70s. In other words, the woke left would have won, and we’d be living under the sort of regime that would enforce woke values. Dissent would not be tolerated, because dissent is never tolerated in a first-turning world.

The second most likely outcome would have been a complete shattering of the generational cycles. In other words, we would have fallen into some sort of national divorce or hot civil war, with the United States splitting apart and the Western world completing its cultural suicide, which has been ongoing for several decades now. There has never been a time when such a major cultural rift has been accomplished by peaceful means. It is always accompanied by a terrible, bloody war.

But when President Trump survived the assassin’s bullet at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that’s the point where I think our timeline diverged—and it followed the least likely path, which has only ever happened once in the history of modern generational cycles. We skipped from a fourth-turning straight into a second-turning, skipping straight from crisis to revival.

The last time this happened was with the US civil war. Usually, after a culture survives an existential crisis, you get a period of national unity, which often results in a brief golden age (or at least, an age that is remembered as such, often by those who did not live through it). But after the civil war, there was no national unity. Instead, we skipped right to the second turning, which is typically characterized by a major spiritual awakening.

Whatever your opinions of President Trump, the fact that he survived the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and went on to win the 2024 election in a landslide means that we have (for the moment) avoided the first two scenarios. At this point, it’s difficult to imagine the woke left taking back the culture and leading us into a first-turning world in their own image. And though the US may yet fall into a hot civil war, from where I’m standing in flyover country that no longer seems quite so imminent.

Don’t get me wrong, though. We are not about to enter a period of national unity anytime soon. Certainly not a period of national unity whose foundations were laid by the previous spiritual awakening, which is what the generational cycle requires. At the same time, because President Trump survived the Butler assassination attempt (thank God), I think we avoided a hot civil war.

Because of all this, I think that we are about to experience a major cultural upheaval, the likes of which have never been seen in living memory. We will not get a period of unification. We will not experience a golden age period of material prosperity (though there may be a few years of plenty before the years of famine begin in earnest). But we will experience a cultural and spiritual revival that will burn through our culture until it has utterly demolished the woke worldview and values laid down during the 60s and 70s, and built something entirely new in its place.

What will that look like? And how will it affect the trajectory of fantasy literature?

Culturally, it will be a period of incredible dynamism. We will see an explosion of creative expression in every field, including in literature. Books and movies and games that are cultural mainstays now will be totally forgotten within a couple of decades, and everything that is popular now will feel dated and out of touch in the space of just a few years.

The authors and artists who will do the most to shape this new culture are today almost completely unknown, but they will become household names in surprisingly short order. Others will take decades to become known, but they will write their most important works in just the next few years.

The country will hold together. There will be no civil war, though there may be a global one. And there will almost certainly be an economic collapse, like the Great Depression, except much deeper and much longer. But all of this will only serve to fuel the spiritual revival, and the revival in turn will fuel the cultural dynamism, until the country and ultimately the world have been entirely transformed.

In more practical terms, I think we are going to see a lot of publishing houses fold, and a lot of popular authors fall out of favor. Many of them will keep their core group of fans, but they won’t be nearly as culturally relevant moving forward. New authors will rise from unexpected places to replace them, especially as the old institutions (publishers, conventions, magazines, review sites) collapse.

Romantasy will ultimately be recognized as the pornography that it is, though not until after it’s done great damage to the fantasy genre as a whole. The damage will be healed by a return to the genre’s spiritual roots. Grimdark will fade, and noblebright will rise, though it will ultimately take a different name and be recognized for other characteristics. It all depends on which of the thousand blooming flowers get picked.

LitRPG will mature into a long-term stable subgenre, and capture most of the innovation in the field. It may spin off into multiple long-term stable subgenres. Meanwhile, epic fantasy will return to its roots and grow as the spiritual revival takes hold. But instead of getting Tolkien clones, we’re going to see a lot of original and innovative work.

That’s the zeitgeist as I see it. The next few years are going to be a wild ride. Are you up for it? I hope that I am.

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Fantasy from A to Z: X is for eXpectations

What sort of books are fantasy readers looking for today? What are the expectations that readers have for the genre?

Overall, the fantasy genre is growing. Sales are up, both in traditional and indie publishing, and the big names in the field (like Brandon Sanderson) are doing quite well. It’s clear that the fantasy genre as a whole is robust and healthy.

When you break it down by publishers and subgenres, however, things start to look a little different. Romantasy is dominating the traditional publishing world, but most of it is little more than pornography for women, dressed up with fantasy trappings. And because of how traditional publishing now relies on a few big blockbusters to make most of their earnings, romantasy is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, making it much more difficult for debut and midlist authors in the other fantasy subgenres.

In the world of indie publishing, litRPG has begun to demonstrate some staying power. It was the new hot thing back in the early 2020s, but it’s attracted enough attention and developed enough of a following that it has become a major subgenre that is likely to endure for some time. I could be wrong about that, but from what I see, that’s where most of the innovative authors and whale readers (ie >1 book per week) are focusing their attention these days.

But because of the way that the algorithms tend to govern the indie publishing cycle (and the way that indie publishing has unfortunately turned into a zero-sum, pay-to-play game with online advertising), the rise of litRPG in the indie publishing world may very well be sucking all of the oxygen out of the room in the same way that romantasy is sucking it out of the traditional publishing world.

Both subgenres are also very gender-biased, with women gravitating toward romantasy and men gravitating toward litRPG. This reflects the broader social and political trend of men and women going separate ways, across a whole host of different metrics. So as the gender divide continues to widen in society generally, that will probably reinforce the divide between romantasy and litRPG, creating a positive feedback loop (or death spiral, depending on how you look at it).

Sword and sorcery continues to do okay, and has probably been given a boost by the recent release of Conan the Barbarian into the public domain. But most of sword and sorcery got siphoned off into grimdark back in the 00s—in fact, you could say that sword and sorcery reinvented itself as grimdark. And while grimdark has resisted the feminization of literature, standing as one of the few remaining bastions where male readers continue to feel at home, I think grimdark has already passed its peak. In a post-pandemic, post-Trump world, I think most readers are hungry for books that are less nihilistic and more uplifting.

Which brings us to epic fantasy. While Brandon Sanderson continues to dominate this subgenre, with his massive kickstarters and huge book releases, it’s debatable whether his readers are hungry for more epic fantasy, or just for more Brandon Sanderson. He’s kind of a subgenre all to himself. Recent streaming adaptations like Wheel of Time and Rings of Power have failed miserably, and Game of Thrones has fallen almost totally out of cultural significance, with George R.R. Martin’s failure to finish the last book (and Patrick Rothfuss’s failure to finish his own series) becoming something of a meme.

In fact, the failure of these two big-name authors to finish writing their books may have struck epic fantasy a mortal wound. Because of how they have been burned, a large number of epic fantasy readers are now unwilling to commit to a series until after it is complete. But very few authors can afford to write a truly epic series and release the whole thing at once. It takes several years to write a series like that—and what are authors supposed to do if the first one flops?

In other words, debut epic fantasy authors are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. If they release the first book by itself, it will probably sink into obscurity before they can write and release the next book. And if by some measure of hard work and tenacity they manage to write a whole series and hold back from publishing until they’re ready to release it all at once, if the first book still fails to sell, they’re SOL and all that hard work was for nothing.

This is also why traditional publishers are so unwilling to publish a new epic fantasy series from a debut or a midlist author. A bestseller like Larry Correia might be able to dip his feet in that pond (and do quite well—I highly recommend his Sons of the Black Sword series), they won’t do that for anyone else. Which is fine, except that indie publishing epic fantasy is just as hard—arguably more so.

For these reasons, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Patrick Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin have done more to kill epic fantasy than they have to grow it.

But this may actually have created an opportunity for those authors who are willing to drive into the smoke. After all, there’s much less competition if you can manage to break in and build a decent following. But how much hunger is there for epic fantasy, compared to other fantasy subgenres? And how can a newer/midlist author reach them, without a big push from a publisher or the algorithms?

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Interesting take on romantasy

TL:DW; It’s all just porn, and this is why we can’t have nice things.

This YouTuber has some very strong opinions. I don’t agree with all of her videos, but her arguments are always solid, so it’s always interesting to hear what she has to say.

On this issue, though, I agree with her almost completely. Almost all romantasy is porn, and its meteoric rise is a plague on fantasy books and literature.

Fantasy from A to Z: L is for Love

What is love? (Baby don’t hurt me…)

Seriously, though, what counts as “love” in fantasy these days? The romantasy subgenre is taking the field by storm, but much of it seems to be outright pornography, at least to me. Back when Twilight was all the rage, I at least understood the romantic angle, even if I didn’t particularly care for it. But now, there’s all this stuff about mate-bonding, consent/non-consent, something called “the omega-verse,” and a weird hierarchy of various forms of bestiality that I frankly cannot follow at all.

I should take a few steps back, and perhaps abandon romantasy altogether. I’m sure there are plenty of non-pornographic books in that subgenre—in fact, I’m fairly certain that one of my old college friends, Charlie Holmberg, was a pioneer in it. Everything of hers that I’ve read is pretty good, and also quite understandable, even to a dopey guy like me.

Outside of romantasy (and paranormal romance, which it appears that romantasy has more or less cannibalized), the love stories are pretty straightforward. Epic fantasy in particular tends to have at least a couple of romantic subplots in every book—which makes sense, considering how expansive the subgenre is trying to be. After all, if you’re writing a story where the world itself is a major character, you’ve got to have at least a few good love stories in there too.

But as the internet has continued to spawn narrower and narrower niches and subcultures, all existing in their own little subcultures, things on the extremes have gotten… weird. And as the gender divide appears to be widening with each subsequent generation, especially in areas like politics and culture, it’s beginning to seem like we aren’t even speaking the same language, even when it comes to something as basic and essential as love.

Now, male-coded romances are pretty easy to understand (though I could be biased… I am a man, after all). It starts with a boy who really wants a girl. Like, really, really, really wants a girl. He likes her so much, he spends the whole book trying to get her—and by the end, he either wins her, or he realizes that he doesn’t actually want her, he wants this other girl he met along the way. If things get spicy, it’s all very straightforward and everyone generally has a good time. If there are issues with rape or non-consent, those are generally separate from the romantic subplot

And often, male-coded romances don’t even include much spicy content at all. Even Robert E. Howard’s original Conan the Barbarian stories were pretty mild, in terms of spiciness. Yes, there was usually a scantily-clad female love interest, described in such a way as to increase Howard’s chances of getting his story featured on the magazine cover (and thus earning double the pay). But when it came to the actual, you know, kissing and stuff, Howard never went into graphic detail. The most he would do was hide behind euphemisms like “he crushed her in his arms.” All of the ejaculations in his stories were saidisms—as in, “look out!” he ejaculated, waving his hands wildly (and you would be shocked how often he used “ejaculated” as a saidism—seriously, I think there’s at least one in every classic Conan story).

(Side note: just because Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories were pretty mild on the spiciness scale, that does not mean that subsequent authors kept it mild. Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp tended to keep it more in the vein of the original, but Robert Jordan’s Conan was… let’s just say, it was too much for me.)

And it used to be that female-coded romances were pretty simple, too. An ordinary, boring girl somehow finds herself the object of attraction between two incredibly powerful (and incredibly sexy) men from the other side of fairy, who are positively obsessed with her. However will she choose between them both? Oh, look—now they’re fighting each other to determine which one gets her. Stop fighting, you sexy fairy men! But seriously, however will she choose?

Somewhere along the line, that morphed into a thing called “reverse-harem,” which (as I understand it) is where the girl throws up her hands and decides that she can’t possibly choose between them, so she chooses them all. Which meant, of course, that the love triangles quickly turned into love dodecahedrons—since if you’re going to have a harem, you might as well fill it up with as many sexy fair men as you can.

And then somehow, things got really weird—and also, really toxic. According to Malcolm and Simone Collins (who know more about this subject than I do), some of the more toxic behaviors that romantasy normalizes include:

Fated or “mate-bond” relationships that override consent,
Extreme male possessiveness portrayed as genuine love,
Drugging and public humiliation portrayed as romantic tension,
Huge age and maturity gaps between partners,
Serial betrayal framed as female empowerment and playing hard-to-get,
Intentional miscommunication, with heroines refusing to talk through their problems—again, often framed as female empowerment,
Violence rebranded as safety, since the love interest will never really hurt the heroine,
Wish-fulfilment with serial partners, often framed as a justification for serial betrayal mentioned above, and
Lazy trope stacking (eg “rich-fey-boyfriend,” scent/marking, etc) without confronting the darker implications of coercive and non-consenting relationships.

Sadly, it seems that all of these toxic aspects of romantasy are reflections of the current state of modern dating and relationships. For example, in a world of online dating where ghosting and fading is all-too common, serial betrayal is a bit of a power fantasy, as is wish-fulfillment with serial partners, since if “true love” doesn’t work out, there’s always another one just a swipe away. Similarly, because women who have taken multiple sexual partners find it difficult to pair-bond with any of the later ones, the concept of “mate-bonding” may have arisen as a way to recapture that lost sense of bonding that comes with the “first time.”

Call me old fashioned or out of touch, but I preferred it when things were simpler, and the traditional boundaries around sex and relationships were still very much in force. There’s something charming about the love stories that were written before birth control and the sexual revolution, where men had to woo their women and get them to say “I do” before any of the bedroom gymnastics became a factor. Of course, I’m totally biased, because my wife and I both have a “body count” of exactly one.

I think romantic love is one of the greatest things in the world. I think that sex is also a wonderful and a beautiful thing, especially when it is used to fulfill its primary purpose: to facilitate lifelong pair-bonding between a man and a woman. In my experience, this is an even more important purpose of sex than procreation, though of course that is a very important (and very fulfilling) secondary purpose.

I don’t read or write romantasy, so you won’t find any of those tropes in my books. You will find a lot of romantic love, though, especially in my sea mage cycle books. Rescuer’s Reward is probably the closest thing I’ve written to a straight up romance, at least in the fantasy genre. The Widow’s Child also has a strong romantic subplot, though it goes a little further than fade-to-black. And of course, the Soulbond King books are going to have a lot of romance, since the magic system requires a man and a woman to become bonded in love in order to unlock their unique magical powers. Those books are going to be a lot of fun to write.

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Fantasy from A to Z: F is for Female

We live in a time of deepening division—not just between political parties or social classes, but between the sexes as well. Of course, men and women have always been different, but those differences have grown increasingly stark in recent years, even as it becomes more politically incorrect to say so.

Across the Western world, men are drifting one way, women another. In politics, men are turning more conservative, while women—especially young, unmarried women—are growing more liberal. We can see this gap not only in US voting patterns, but in voting patterns across the world. In matters of faith, men are turning toward traditional, even ancient forms of religious expression: high liturgy, orthodoxy, duty, and structure. Meanwhile, women are leaving organized religion altogether in record numbers. Some are embracing a kind of therapeutic spirituality—mindfulness, astrology, crystals—but many are simply checking out.

It’s not hard to see this growing rift playing out in other areas of life: marriage, dating, education, employment. But it’s also playing out in fantasy literature, not just among readers, but also among writers and publishers.

Instead of sharing a common ground, men and women are building parallel worlds. Many male readers are flocking to grimdark, with its blood-soaked realism and morally gray protagonists, or to litRPG, which merges game mechanics with fantasy worldbuilding in a system-focused power fantasy. Meanwhile, women are turning increasingly to romantasy, a subgenre that often verges on outright pornography and has virtually no appeal to men.

A lot of this is downstream from the gender divide in publishing. Traditional publishing—especially in the U.S.—has become overwhelmingly female, especially in the editorial departments. Some of that is demographic; some of it is cultural. But the result is that the gatekeepers of traditional fantasy publishing are mostly women. Their tastes, sensibilities, and values shape what gets acquired, marketed, and celebrated.

This divide wouldn’t be so troubling if it were merely about preferences or taste. But it runs deeper than that. Increasingly it seems that men and women no longer understand each other—or worse, no longer even try to. And when even our fiction reflects that fracture, it becomes that much harder to bridge the growing divide.

That’s what makes the current state of fantasy so toxic. Not because romantasy or grimdark are inherently bad—every subgenre has its place—but because they have become echo chambers that silo the sexes off from each other.

Men and women were not made to live in separate worlds. We need each other—not just to perpetuate the species, but to challenge, balance, and refine one another. I know this from personal experience. Without my wife, I’d be a lesser man. She often drives me crazy (to be fair, I return the favor), but we have each grown so much since marrying each other that I think I would hardly recognize the man I once was. Together, we are far more than the sum of our two parts.

Our stories should reflect that truth. We don’t need more genre ghettos. We need shared myths. Stories where masculine and feminine virtues don’t clash with each other, but come together in harmony.

That’s what I’m hoping to accomplish with my epic fantasy series, The Soulbound King. When building out the fantasy world, I deliberately designed the magic system so that latent magical powers can only be unlocked through marriage—the “soulbond”—between a man and a woman. I did that largely in response to the growing gender divide, because I wanted to write a story that shows how men and women can overcome it. Hopefully it works.

Fantasy, perhaps more than any other genre, gives us the space to reimagine what’s possible. It allows us to explore not just what the world is, but what it could be. And right now, what the world needs is for the young men and women of the rising generation to come together and reinvent the world.

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