What Is Science Fiction Romance?

Before We Begin…

While I love science-fiction romance, it’s also important to note that I regularly taught a college class, during my years in PhD-earning service, about genre—primarily High Fantasy. One of the class’s concerns was to distinguish between different formal and literary genres, and we explored the distinctions between subgenres of fantasy and science fiction, as well as their tropes and the sorts of stories they better enabled an author to tell. Some of my favorite questions (like, “Is Isekai Portal Fantasy?” [Yes, a sub-subgenre with its own tropes.]) still very much inform me today—a testament to the way that teaching, class discussion with students, and engaging in pedagogy can help one think through problems better than simply pondering or even writing on one’s own. This is not to credential-drop, but merely to say that I’ve thought about this and talked to students about genre a lot, and it’s something I care about. Genre is about more than just selling books; it’s about what the audience expects, the hidden conversations between authors and readers, and the parameters that allow authors to tell different kinds of stories—while finding their audience. Genre is how we find each other, and I want to be able to have some say over what sci-fi romance is and how it’s perceived.

Overview: An Annoyance

I’ve successfully been annoyed one too many times into feeling the need to make this post. As has probably become fully obvious to anyone subscribed to this newsletter and/or following me on social media, I write science fiction (primarily MilSF) and sci-fi romance, so this question is near and dear to my heart. I also get the overall feeling that people have an extremely strange and slanted understanding of what the genre even is, and therefore, what it is I write. This is not unexpected. People struggle with understanding the boundaries of popular genres and subgenres, to say nothing of niche ones. However, I’ve seen the subgenre and its expectations misidentified enough times that I feel the need to speak, both for myself and for other people dedicated to the subgenre (and science fiction generally).

First, a problem: Romantasy is incredibly popular, and I think there’s some idea that sci-fi romance is that but… maybe in space? Maybe with an alien? While certainly these sorts of books can and should exist, that’s not the general tendency of sci-fi romance, nor all that it is. Another problem is that fantasy has long been a male-dominated genre (in enjoyment and among its authors), and I believe there is a perception that romantasy “feminizes” fantasy; since science fiction is overwhelmingly male-dominated, I can see how the same perception—turned up to eleven—could dominate. As a game writer and Lore Maven in Starship Valkyrie, I’ve spent more than a decade in a male-dominated creative space among science-fiction war and strategy gamers, within the Valkyrie community and at Strategicon. I have strong instincts for the sorts of social science, politics, action, and space combat favored by our community, and the ways in which that community can and does enjoy the addition of romance and spice, while expanding the Valkyrie universe. I am not an interloper in the science-fiction space or in the gamer space, but very much an insider here.

A second problem is that folks come by their understanding of genre by what they see and read, which is fine; genre is all about expectations. However, that understanding can be limiting, and if one has only happened upon a few works, it can also be incomplete. I would say there are some romantasy books that I wouldn’t call properly fantasy, because they only use a fantasy setting—and setting does not a fantasy make. Genres are about more than simple setting. If they weren’t, Star Wars would be science fiction and not fantasy. (Yes, it’s fantasy. A farm boy receives his father’s sword from a wizard and goes on a quest to save a princess from an evil empire. Along the way, he encounters revelations about his bloodline, his magically corrupted father, and his long-lost sister. Quintessential fantasy story.) This caveat goes for any romance that is simply “set” in an apparently science fiction setting without concerning itself with science fiction matters, difficulties, world building, or tropes. In other words, if we’re not talking about societal upheavals, technological shifts, scientific discoveries, brave new worlds, the implications of dystopian society, or the differences between alien peoples, we’re not properly doing science fiction. And that’s a shame, because sci-fi romance, when done right, CAN walk and chew gum at the same time.

What Is Speculative Fiction?

Speculative fiction, first off, is the larger umbrella under which science fiction and fantasy exist, along with all the little niche genres and subgenres besides. I would class cyberpunk as speculative fiction with science fiction tendencies, but it’s so thoroughly noir and so thick with tropes and aesthetic expectations that it needs its own space; the same goes for steampunk, which often bridges fantasy and science fiction, being freer in its trope usage and firmer in its setting requirements. When you go to what used to be the SFF section at Barnes and Noble, it is and was essentially the speculative fiction section (but for the escapees who now have their own section—rightfully so). Speculative fiction asks a rather sweeping and world-altering version of the question, “What if?” A story’s general attitude (aesthetically, socially, technologically, phenomenologically, etc.) to that question determines where we sort from there.

I bring up this question first because there are some writers who linger maddeningly in the “in-between” where science fiction, fantasy, and other niche subgenres meet (cyberpunk, dystopia, space opera, planetary romance, et cetera). This is not shade; some of my favorite writers hang out in this zone, and I love it. C.J. Cherryh, Lois McMaster Bujold, and my friend Urna Semper all write speculative fiction, and shift between various modalities with a facility and deftness that should make you envious. This kind of flexibility and genre-bending comes from being well-read, certainly, and also needing to grab from amongst the different “bags” across the genres and subgenres of speculative fiction, depending on the kind of story they’re trying to tell, or the prompt to which they’re responding. This is why I call them “speculative fiction writers,” even when I would classify their larger projects as primarily science fiction.

Urna Semper, whose oeuvre I’m very familiar with, is going to have to serve as my example here. Urna is capable of utilizing the universe of Iphigenia for a wide range of story types, from a Barsoom-esque swashbuckling story with aliens that worship dark and terrible gods (“The Prince of the Red Ridges” in Moggies of Mars), to a tale of space freight workers fending off pirates in the scrappy style of Firefly (“The Wreck of the Cal-9” in Cutlasses and Corsairs), to a Conan-esque story about a blacksmith in a feudal society on another planet (“The Princess of Iniskent” in Daggers and Dark Powers). Burroughs-accented space fantasy, space pirates, future swords and sorcery… that’s an incredible range, and it’s all set in the same universe. (These don’t even get into Urna’s romance and detective stories.)

The larger world building project of Iphigenia, as you read it and understand its expansion, is science fiction in nature; we’re learning about the diaspora of humans from Earth after a technological and ecological disaster, and about the things humans do to terraform in different circumstances, how they deal with the Other (aliens, clones, and each other), and how their societies handle monumental shifts—all science-fiction questions and a larger science-fiction project. But the little stories of various characters in their eras and environments… all of those can and do align with different genres and subgenres, largely belonging under the umbrella of speculative fiction, but sometimes beyond. This is because the tropes, expectations, and story arcs of different genres emphasize different concerns and enable the writer to tell different kinds of stories. If the wider story of Iphigenia is science fiction, the smaller stories of its people exist over a number of modalities, as it should be.

What Do People Think Sci-fi Romance Is?

One of the reasons I get salty about this question is because a genre or subgenre’s erotic edges should not and cannot determine what it is, but in science-fiction romance, that seems to be the case. Imagine if all billionaire romance were classed as BDSM fantasies, or if all romantasy were classed as non-con elf erotica. Not all romance is spicy; not all spicy romance is extremely smutty; not all smut is or resembles erotica—not even the erotica in that category or subgenre. Sci-fi erotica is often what I would term “Monster Fucking Erotica” (with all the love in the world), because it typically concerns itself with humanoid characters engaging in intimacy with non-human aliens. To be clear, the subgenre is incredible and has quite a range, and there’s no shame in loving it. I’ve also noticed a strain of very spicy sci-fi romance (some clearly verging into erotica), where alien men (usually) are of the Alphahole/dominating variety, and shenanigans or dubcon/noncon unfold from there.

While the language of erotica can bleed into the spice of any given romance subgenre, romance and erotica are not the same thing. The primary kind of story romance tells is about two or more people engaging in a relationship with one another of a limerent variety; its main concern is romantic emotions, and it often uses sexual scenes to highlight or consummate those emotions. While erotica might deal some in these questions, romantic relationships are not its primary concern. Instead, erotica is about the erotic—not about romantic feelings, but about sexual feelings. This is not to put erotica down, because a proper exploration of the erotic is important to human life. This is where erotica excels, and it should be allowed to do so without getting confused with romance. The same goes in the other direction.

This is all to say that if you hear “sci-fi romance,” and your mind immediately goes to tentacle alien erotica, that’s not correct, and it’s extremely limiting. Not all sci-fi romance even includes an alien hero, let alone a non-humanoid alien hero. Out of all the sci-fi romance I’ve written, only one features an MMC who is even somewhat non-humanoid—and he is still classed as humanoid. Akardur of the Golden Steppe, the MMC of my upcoming story in Paws and Peril, is a canoid-humanoid, and more than 80% of the story is about escaping the frozen wastes of an ice moon, not about his junk or anything else. While I still think it’s one of the more audacious things I’ve written, it’s still not Monster Fucking Erotica by any stretch of the imagination. It’s about overcoming difference, two sapient beings working together to survive and keep each other alive in a difficult situation, and the kinds of feelings that can emerge in mortal peril. It also says something that, as a sci-fi/sci-fi romance author, this is the first time I’ve written about two people in a relationship who weren’t both strictly humanoid.

What Is Sci-Fi Romance?

In sitting down to write my prompt for the zine I’ll be editing with Tender and Tempting Tales later this year, Sapphics of Saturn, I knew it would be important to tell people what I meant by science-fiction romance. I’ve seen romance dressed up with some science-fiction goodies—an alien or two, maybe a quick trip to the moon—but that’s not science-fiction romance. Like proper fantasy romance, sci-fi romance must be both. It must be a romance not simply set in a science-fiction world, but one that is affected and inflected by the concerns of a science-fiction world. To highlight what I mean, I’ll use two examples. These two books are among my favorite novels, and they both stand as testaments to why I wanted to write sci-fi romance in the first place.

First: Urna Semper’s The Pearl Crucible. I just did a review about this book, along with the steady breakdown of my own perilous exhaustion with content, and you can read the full thing here if you like. The reason it stands as an example for us here is that it is a romance plot very much inflected by both a murder mystery and the concerns of a science-fiction world. It is a social-science fiction, exploring matters of biologically dictated class and servitude, the implications of a clone “made” wrong such that she is broken out instead of down, and then it explores a relationship between such a clone and a free man, as well as the relationship between that clone and another clone who is not broken. How a clone’s mind works, its differences from our own minds (and similarities), and the social system that has emerged on the planet of Iphigenia to help humanity survive are all under the microscope here, and they don’t just inform the romance; they form it entire.

Second: Lois McMaster Bujold’s first Vorkosigan Saga novel, Shards of Honor. I will always defend this novel as a science-fiction romance, and I believe it was one of the first I read and recognized as just that. Shards of Honor tells the story of Cordelia Naismith, a scientist exploring a new world, in her encounter with a human from another planet within the human-dominated portal map. Cordelia and Aral’s cultures are extremely different, but not so extreme as the planet where they’re trapped. Together, they must survive its weird and deadly dangers in order to contact their opposed cultures and avert conflict. Politics, strange flora and fauna, incredible technology, the separations of human cultures and wars between them as a result of space travel… all of these things inform Cordelia and Aral’s love story. Were I to chart it in something like Jenna Harte’s romance arc planning worksheet, I’d hit most of the beats, and it even ends with a thoroughly adorable HEA after much difficulty. If you want a sci-fi romance, that’s your first stop.

What the Hell Do I Write?

Starship Valkyrie is primarily Military Science Fiction, somewhere between Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek in inflection, and the stories it tells are mostly about the people who bravely fight and serve in the Earth Republic Star Navy. This means a lot of what I write, when I write romance, is about current and former servicemembers in the Star Navy, putting me in the even more niche genre of MilSF romance—or, as my friend Christian puts it, “Epaulet Rippers” when things get spicy (lol). When I wrote “Crimson Wake” and “Crimson Bride,” and in my writing of Crimson Tide, that’s very much the case; both the MMC and FMC are lieutenant commanders in the Star Navy. This is also the case for What Remains, my serializing novel, where Sora and Jase are current commissioned officers, and much of their shared history (told in flashback chapters) concerns their time at Star Navy Academy (and yes, I was writing this well before Star Fleet Academy). Reginleif: Infernal Machine, which I’ve been working on in the background, includes a romantic subplot between a human commissioned officer and a stranded Skelow (humanoid) contractor.

More recent sci-fi romance in the Starship Valkyrie world has started to branch out, however. The FMC of “Winter Sting” in the aforementioned Paws and Peril (now available for preorder) is a starfighter pilot aboard the ERS Odyssey, while the FMC of “Kor’lana Lights” in Fireworks and Flirtation (coming May 18th) is a former corporal in the Star Navy and a current attaché on an alien world, while the MMC is a mercenary humanoid alien and contractor with the Star Navy and for the consulate. It’s a lot of epaulets still, but there’s a range, and I am exploring the incorporation of more Alien Hero (a common sci-fi romance trope) and characters overcoming cultural and biological difference. Much of what I explored in the “Crimson” stories was overcoming adversity, introduced by social and technological upheavals, especially during interstellar war. In none of these cases do we have any alien tentacles—not that I’m against a story like that. My point here is just to show what a wide variety there can be in sci-fi romance, even in a niche sub-subgenre, and the sorts of amazing stories the subgenre can tell when the science fiction isn’t confined to set dressing.

Speaking of, I’m off to write more about the characters from “Kor’lana Lights,” hoping you’re zooming away to read Urna Semper or Lois McMaster Bujold. If you’ve made it this far, I thank you for reading my article/rant, and I hope it’s been interesting and informative. Until next time….

Earth Republic: United and Strong!