Science Fiction Romance Reading Challenge

If you'd like to explore science fiction romance, check out Rae Lori's SFR reading challenge. I just signed up to read 15 SFR books before the end of December and first up is S.L. Viehl's Stardoc, which combines SFR with xenobiology (now that's a great word). I'll be posting my reviews as I go.

Rae also provided this lovely image, which I've added as a permalink on the left.

Happy reading!

New Release!

Hooray! Today is the day my SF short novel The Antaren Affair is released. I'm really excited about it and am looking forward to hearing what readers think.

As I've written in other posts, I think that SF is entering a new era with the advent of ebooks. Romance has led the digital way, but I expect that SF niche publishers will emerge within the next ten years. I hope those niches include SFR and SFER (Science Fiction Erotic Romance). There's definitely a market for it, and I suspect that market is 1) largely untapped and 2) likely to grow as readers become ever more comfortable with technology and the concepts behind SF.

Since today is release day, I'm going to indulge myself and talk a little bit about The Antaren Affair. I've always been interested in how cultures construct gender and sex--i.e., how they understand and perpetuate "appropriate" roles for males, females, and those who are in-between.

So what if a highly intelligent woman from a sexist world meets a man from a world that has achieved equality? That's the fundamental conflict I deal with in the book. I make language the common ground between the hero and heroine. Language also enables the heroine to escape oppression to a certain degree.

Language structures how we think. Language establishes the conceptual limits for what is possible. To a certain extent, if we don't have a word for something, it's really hard to get our heads around it. As a writer, I think about language all the time and I had great fun devising grammatical principles for the Antaren language. I hope you enjoy the book!

P.S. If you do like it, let me know whether you'd be interested in reading Jhōltan's story.

Defining Science Fiction Romance

I'm confused. Confused by publisher labels on romance. And I'm wondering if the word "paranormal" is now being used for any romance that isn't a historical or a contemporary, including those romances that involve societies from places other than Earth. My guess here is that publishers think the term "science fiction" will scare away romance readers. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I could really use some help sorting out SF romance from everything else in the romance aisle.

I'm not a big fan of all the vampire, werewolf, were-jaguar, were-whatever books that have taken over publishing lately, but I certainly would agree that they're "paranormal." I'm afraid that some books that I would like, however, are hiding under the paranormal label. For example, I recently read Jane's Warlord, by Angela Knight, which I adored. It's described as a "sexy paranormal debut" by the publisher. But the hero is a soldier from the 24th century who time travels.

Sorry, but to me, that's science fiction. I'm pretty sure that I missed out on this book when it was first released (in 2004) because it wasn't marketed as SFR.

To me, science fiction involves at least two of the following: 1) the future (including the near future); 2) use of technology; 3) non-Earth peoples, societies or planets.

Check out a great interview with Heather Massey (of The Galaxy Express) here, where she defines SFR and talks about its recent publishing history. To Heather, SFR involves romance set in "technology driven settings." She includes steampunk in that category and since I know next to nothing about steampunk, I can't comment. But I totally agree that SFR must have some element of technological innovation that is not currently available in the early 21st century. But technology doesn't have to be the center of the story.

Jane's Warlord, for example, involves time travel, but the science behind it isn't directly relevant to the plot. After providing some basic principles of operation, Knight has convinced her reader that time travel is a reasonable technological development and structures her story around the resulting conflict.

My own erotic SFR requires space travel. It's a way for my hero, who is from a society descended from an Earth-based culture, to meet a humanoid woman from another planet. Most of the technological advances are implied; i.e., I don't get into the physics of space travel or explain how communications from the planet surface to the orbiting spacecraft function. My interest in writing SFR is in exploring social and interspecies differences, not in technology per se. But without the technology, there's a lot less to explore.

Science Fiction Romance

I've been thinking a lot about science fiction romance (SFR) lately, which appears to be a growing (sub)genre in publishing. The success of the film Avatar has taken SF romance mainstream and it's a trend that I hope continues. I like SF for the same reason that I like historical fiction--it takes me to a completely new world where the rules are different.

Some of my favorite SF has been written by anthropologists, who are trained to think about the details of cultural beliefs and behaviors. Authors such as Mary Doria Russell create entire civilizations with complex and vastly different cultures. This "world building" is what I find most interesting about writing SF romance; the challenge, of course, is to engage your reader in this world and make it believable and accessible while at the same time alien and "other."

My short novel, which releases on Wednesday, July 7th, focuses on gender differences between two societies--a topic ripe for exploration by SF romance writers. How do gender inequalities affect the relationship between the hero and heroine? How will future technological developments affect the ways in which men and women relate? What role will biological differences between males and females have in future societies? How do other societies construct sex and gender?

If you're at all interested in SFR, check out The Galaxy Express, which is run by Heather Massey. I found some new-to-me authors on her website as well as thoughtful and provoking posts that address everything from SFR book covers to the position of SFR in the publishing world as a whole.