CROSSROADS: Will You Be My Undead Valentine?

Since you have to be a member to comment on the amazing stories post, I thought I would comment here.

I have loved both instalments of your consideration of the border marches of romance and speculative fiction and think you have been very much on the money as you have considered the links and origins and drivers. As an old ‘Old Skool’ reader who has seen the evolution of the romance genre and loved my SF and fantasy reading alongside romance I wanted to make some observations:

1. The Old Skool rape/forced seduction romances were written and read at a time when good girls couldn’t be seen to initiate or have sex outside of marriage. Part of the power dynamic and negotiations around agency in these stories is that the heroine gets to have sex, to orgasm and to remain ‘good’ according to the cultural standards of the day. The heroine is never just managing or engaging in her personal relationship with the hero. The hero’s rape behaviour is constructed and never just his personal stuff. This means that heroine is always explicitly negotiating how she stands in her world through this individual relationship and finding power in the most difficult circumstances.

2. I would really recommend Pamela Regis’ text ‘A Natural History of the Romance Novel’ published in 2003 to anyone wanting to think about these topics. Her analysis of the literary history of the romance genre highlights how much is going on besides the ultimate HEA. One of the things Regis highlights is that these stories have a strong redemptive arc and are often about reconstituting community. I often wonder if the Vampire and Shifter stories are as much about wanting to create community as they are about the individual relationship because they are always about packs and clans or the heroine moving from isolation to having friends. I also think the notion of being made whole through love and connection; of the broken things inside a character being mended by the new relationships and possibility that love creates between the hero or heroine and their world is an important defining feature of PNR and perhaps SFR.

3. I read somewhere once, that Lois McMaster Bujold said that romance is a fantasy of relationship and SF a fantasy of agency. I wonder if that can be paraphrased as – romance is a fantasy of the power of community/connection and SF of individual power [to change worlds]?

4. I read most genres and the thing I have noticed as I have come to read more romance than SF lately is that I need to code switch between genres when I read outside of romance. My expectations of the characters and story need to be different in order to engage fairly with the story in front of me. I remember reading Thomas Harlen’s ‘Land of the Dead’ and waiting to see who Gretchen’s love interest would be before mentally slapping myself and code switching. It was fascinating to make that realisation because until then I had been reading the book and waiting for the real story to start.

5. I tend to categorise not on SF vs SFR or UF vs PNR but on whether a world needs to be made and/or saved or whether a story is about making your way in the world as it is. Sometimes the borderlines shift between these or one become the other but what is going on with personal power is examined and in play in quite different ways in each.

6. I do think many PNR and SFR writers often need to work on their world building skills, their focus on the relationship can be at the expense of plot and how the world shapes and alters the lives and possibilities of their protagonists. I want them to read books like China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh and write as well as that. I would recommend Martha Wells Raksura books to anyone who likes SFR even thought the romance is not conventional according to the genre. I love how the Queens are the alphas and that Moon codes as female according to genre conventions and that all is perfect and logical in the cultures and world Martha has created.