“Sex and feelings…the elements of Romance.” I’ve decided this must mean the depiction of a full relationship: not just opportunistic, up-against-the-wall sex, but a relationship involving sex and love which reaches across divides. The divides could be physical, biological, cultural, religious, or political. And, SFF being what it is, those divides will be more numerous and varied than in other genres.

Romance, as defined, has blossomed in the recent vampire-centred novels and TV series and movies. I don’t know them well enough to give any detailed view, but their theme – the vampires’ isolation and alienness, their love for people who they’ll see grow old and die – was explored before in the movieThe Hunger (with Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie) and in the novel and movie Interview With the Vampire. Also in the Gary Oldman movie Dracula, which had the byline Love Never Dies. They explored it very movingly. I’ve always thought The Hunger was very underrated.

I know vampires aren’t strictly SFF, which is what this topic asks about, but they are close relatives of the genre. I’m reluctant to dig up (perhaps an appropriate phrase) the old arguments about genre, but what fascinates me is their genuine intention to focus on Romance as interpreted above. In fact, it’s arguably their main focus.

Is it treated similarly in SFF? Are there SFF novels where Romance – physical love and emotional attachment and relationships crossing all kinds of barriers – is treated in the same way? I love the genre, but I think the answer is Not Enough. I’d like to see more examples, because the ones there are, are very well done. And the relationships they describe – which, because  of the genre’s unique properties, will have so many different barriers to cross – are memorable and haunting.

Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is the first SF novel I can remember reading which I thought was mainly a love story. Or, at least, a story of a relationship which hovers between love and friendship. The politics and biology and sociology of the book’s universe are intricate and labyrynthine, but the book’s central part is the relationship between two people – beautifully and enigmatically drawn.

China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station depicts a relationship between a male human and a female half-insect/half-human. It works because the relationship is depicted as an everyday one, between two people who are equals and grownups. They treat each other with respect and are too busy living normal daily lives to keep contemplating each others’ differences. Their relationship isn’t the book’s entire focus, but it’s an important part of it. And it works.

In Strangers, by Gardner Dozois, the relationship is the focal part of the book – a relationship between a male human and a female alien. It depicts the feeling between them fully, but maybe not as intensely as LeGuin. (Nothing to do with this subject, but I also like something else Gardner Dozois wrote, with George Alec Effinger: Nightmare Blue, a lovely piece of SF detective noir.)

John Boyd’s The Last Starship from Earth is a multilayered and teasing and vividly-written book which I’ve always felt was underrated. The relationship between the two main characters, Helix and Haldane, is at the book’s very centre, and although it drives the events you’re never really sure where it’s going. But it is, again, a relationship of grownups and equals. The female half is as unpredictable, and as much of a prime mover, as the male half usually is in more conventionally-written relationships.

Elizabeth Bowen’s story The Demon Lover is something I’ve mentioned in earlier posts. In only six pages it describes the central character’s past lover; but what they had wasn’t just love, it was something larger and darker and more frightening. I could still feel it looming after I’d read it.

I know this is outside the genre, but Romeo and Juliet’s families, the Montagus and Capulets, are so different they might just as well be two alien races. Juliet sees it most clearly. After her first meeting with Romeo she knows their love is the real thing, but she knows too – given the differences of their families, who might come from different planets – that it will kill them. She says:

I have no joy of this contract tonight.

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden.

Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be

Ere one can say, It lightens.