Heather Massey posted an interesting (by which I mean thought-provoking) article on The Galaxy Express the other day. Like most articles, it got me thinking about my approach and my little corner of the universe. The line that really got my juices rolling (and admittedly made me want to respond) was Lizzie Newell’s quote decrying the lack of SF in SFR today:
“It has romance books set in space but very few science fiction books containing romance. There is too much promotion of what I consider low quality books. These are low quality from a science fiction perspective.”
At first, I felt a little guilty. After all, I write Space Opera romance. I am part of the problem, as it were. I’ve got a background in the sciences, and certainly that informs many of the decisions I make when world-building, but I also grew up on Star Wars, Farscape and Firefly. These are shows that are science-fiction only by dint of being set in space. Lightsabers and giant, living starships are cool, but we don’t like to think too much about the practicality of them. Much as I love Hearts and Minds, I have to admit that when I wrote it I would occasionally handwave the science in favor of making a more exciting swashbuckler of a romance.
And that’s when it hit me – What is the story really about?
Am I writing a story about a hardened mercenary and her beta-to-the-core empathic boyfriend? Or am I writing a story about the trappings of science fiction? For me, the core of a good SFR story should be the romance. There needs to be emotional development between the characters, and I as reader need to believe that they can connect with each other and find a happily ever after somewhere. As much as I love science fiction, it’s not the part I’m as concerned about. I would not have liked Farscape as much, bluntly, had it not been for the romance between John Crichton and Aeryn Sun.
Do I still think that the Skiffy elements need to be thought about when writing an SFR? Absolutely. I would never argue otherwise. But I also think that good world-building should show through the characters rather than get in the way of them. I tried to think about the science in Hearts and Minds – it’s one of the reasons that, despite more lethal weapons being available, most shipboard firefights use weapons that fire ceramic flechettes. Hull-penetrating weapons would be dangerous to both sides in a conflict. I never talk about it in the course of the story, but it’s there.
I think this holds true of Science Fiction in general, but it holds doubly so for good SFR – the world in which the characters live should be the background, and their relationship to it and to each other should be the focus of the story. If not, you will lose the reader every time.
