For decades, hordes of awful sci-fi writers have succeeded through their ability to gratify male tastes. Hundreds of mediocre yet commercial successful sci-fi

For decades, hordes of awful sci-fi writers have succeeded through their ability to gratify male tastes. Hundreds of mediocre yet commercial successful sci-fi movies and thousands of mediocre yet commercially successful sci-fi books owe their existence to male readers' appetites for boyhood adventure and manly exploits. By "feminization" of science fiction, I suspect the critic means the emergence of a new category of mediocre sci-fi entertainment that flourishes by gratifying female tastes in the same way. So now women are getting in on the act -- is this bad news? Five reasons why it isn't: 1. "Guy" sci-fi continues to thrive. I just watched the movie Banlieue 13, which is kind of sci-fi, and found it quite tolerable, even fun. I enjoyed it because I like guns, fighting, and cool parkour stunts. (Of course there was a "big idea" aspect, but it was embarrassingly thin and heavy-handed, and it should probably have been glossed over a little more lightly.) 2. Women never had any shortage of "chick" entertainment, so this isn't a new thing that will warp them in new ways. "Guy" entertainment hasn't made me crash my car through a glass storefront or go on a violent vendetta against people I consider bad, and "chick" entertainment won't turn worthwhile girls and women into shallow, catty, cheating bitches. If anything, this will mean that more women will see sci-fi as just another genre instead of a marker of loserdom. 3. "Feminization" happened long ago in the literary novel genre, and it wasn't the end of the world. Despite sales of literary novels being dominated by female consumers demanding stories of sex and shopping, to the point that novels in the "chick lit" genre don't bother pretending to be about anything else, it's still possible for writers like Chuck Palahniuk to become superstars. 4. "Big idea" science fiction will not suffer from changes inside the sci-fi genre, because the worthwhile stuff transcends and escapes the genre. The stuff that doesn't -- the stuff that seemed tragically, unjustly, and arbitrarily confined to a sci-fi ghetto when you were a kid -- often turns out to be embarrassing bad when you reread it as an adult anyway. It's great for stimulating kids and getting them thinking about big issues. I'm convinced I'm much smarter because the sci-fi I read as a kid taught me to think ambitiously about important things. But most "big idea" sci-fi is psychologically tone-deaf to anyone who isn't a callow adolescent, and the really good stuff has a history of succeeding in the larger marketplace, where "feminization" happened long ago. 5. "Big idea" science fiction will get better. "Big idea" doesn't have to mean big in scale. The personal is the political. Personal issues can be very big -- just think of society as a massively parallel machine solving billions of individual problems of love and survival. The OP's definition of "feminized" writing covers a lot of fertile ground. More "feminized" sci-fi ultimately means more good "feminized" sci-fi, which means a wider variety of good sci-fi for everybody to read.