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I don't believe in "100 best" lists and their like. If you browse any twenty of these lists you'll get twenty different ideas of the "100 best".
Most of the titles on the list I've never heard of; but that just proves I'm not bang up to date with the current f&sf.
If the original article had been about the 100 best crime, or even any 100 random well-known novels from the same period, the results would have been the same. Literature, including f&sf, exists in, and reflects, its own time. That is inevitable.
Male authors, by and large, produce books with male protagonists because, in part, men find it easier to write convincingly about men; women naturally tend to have female protagonists because they find them easier to write convincingly about women than men.
I wonder if our critic has read "100 best romance novels" of the same period (early 19th C to present day). Barbara Cartland is a study in gender imbalance.
But heigh-ho! The Guardian's clickbait sure worked!
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