TITLES AND TROPES, TAKE TWO

Titles and tropes. Romance and science fiction. Commerce and art. The same, but different. And a cover that sells. Sometimes it seems trying to balance all these things in a single manuscript is just impossible. It’s enough to send a writer off screaming into the wilderness.

I was fascinated by the same questions Greta encountered in the SciFi Romance Group Facebook discussion and those raised earlier in Sharon’s post this week. As it happens, I’d just come up against the age-old prejudice against the romance genre in an article I was reading in a national magazine about a curmudgeonly used-bookstore owner. Seems he just loved books. Everything except romance novels, which he called “trash.”

Right. So this half-naked guy is not acceptable.

I saw red. J.R. Ward does not write trash. Eloisa James does not write trash. Neither does Linda Howard, Nalini Singh, Linnea Sinclair or Susan Grant, to name just a few of the keepers on my shelves. These women write eloquent, complex, entertaining novels. And I haven’t even mentioned the mega-sellers like Danielle Steele or Nora Roberts, who do all that and sell millions of copies, too.

Part of this bias is due to the fact that women write and read romance. Period. Nothing to be done about that except call it out for what it is. Sorry, boys, we girls wanna play, too. And we are perfectly capable of kicking your butts.

But snobs like that bookstore owner will complain that romance writes to a “formula.” We all know that. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, happy ever after. Within that formula are well-known tropes, like the ones mentioned in the Facebook discussion—secret babies, poor little rich girl/boy, poor boy/girl makes good, friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, and so on.

But, hey, guess what? Every genre has a formula and its well-worn tropes. Thrillers have the aging spy brought back for one last mission and/or the race against the clock to stop whatever world-ending disaster. Mysteries have the world-weary detective and the classy blonde or the sprightly older nosy neighbor. Westerns have the square-jawed cowboy. Even the beloved dysfunctional family of the serious “literary” novel is itself a trope.

But this one is. Nice undies, dude.

We lovers of science fiction have a shipload of tropes ourselves, many of them dating from the Golden Age of SF: lone wolf space traders, maverick starship captains, pirates with a heart of gold, sexy aliens, lonely cyborgs, bad-guy slavers, tormented captive gladiators, evil alien races, teenagers with newly-awakened “powers.”

The problem is not the tropes themselves so much—because, really, who doesn’t love a maverick starship captain?—but how they’re used in a story, and whether you can put a twist on that trope to make it fresh. This challenge is what separates a mundane story from an exceptional one. Turning that trope on its head, and fleshing it out with real characters that draw your reader in, make for an unforgettable book.

Once you have story gold, why would you plaster it over with a trashy title? Search “science fiction romance” on Amazon nowadays and you get a disheartening mix of both worlds that sounds like one of those games where you discover what your title will be by taking one trope from the Romance column and one from the SF column and put “My” in front of it: MY ALIEN, MY LOVER or MY SECRET ALIEN BABY: SUPERMAN RETOLD, by Martha Kent.

From looking at the titles, it’s difficult to know how many of these books represent actual  trashy reads and how many are hoping to cash in on the familiar tropes their titles represent. The argument is made that some readers will jump on anything with sexy, cyborg, alien, slave, mate, or any combination of such titillating words in the title, especially if the book is illustrated with a naked male torso on the cover.

It’s hard to make yourself heard above all the circus sideshow clamor of this kind of marketing, particularly if your brand of SFR is, um, less given to excess. (Notice I didn’t say less sexy or less romantic. My books, for example, have plenty of explicit sex and a clear romantic arc, but I’ve gone another way with my titles and my covers. By choice.) 

But this is nothing new. Back in the early days of SFR, when sales were largely through digital publishing websites, it was almost impossible to find the plot-based SFR among the stacks of pure SF erotica (what I called “alien sandwich” stories, since so many of them were about two alien males abducting a human female mate).

I still think it’s a matter of visibility, of matching readers with authors. Science fiction romance, in fact, is a victim of its own success, attracting more and more authors and more readers who are still learning what the subgenre is all about. Many of those readers may be “coming over” from the romance side, rather than from the more “serious” SF side. That means they’re more familiar with the romance tropes that are reflected in those titles that make some of us cringe.

But if we’re lucky they’ll rapidly become more familiar with the SF side of things and begin to widen their search patterns. They’ll be looking for new twists on the tropes they know, bigger and better stories, deeper, broader characters. And that can only be good for SFR in the long run.

Cheers, Donna

WEIRD IN THE HERE AND NOW: CONTEMPORARY SFR

Always something strange in this THIS neighborhood.

Think for a moment of your definition of science fiction. I’ll bet you a Romulan ale 

the first thing that comes to mind is space, 

a starship, and an adventure set in the 

future. That adventure might be dark (dystopia) or hopeful (STAR TREK or 

STAR WARS), but the world you envision

is far, far away from the here and now.

But, of course, there is nothing in the actual definition of science fiction that requires a setting in the future or, for that matter, in space. Although my Oxford American dictionary does say SF is set “typically in the future” (my emphasis), it also says SF “deals with imagined scientific, technological or social developments.” Those could happen any time or place, it seems to me. The whole Steampunk subgenre imagines they happened in an alternate Victorian era, here on Earth. Alternate histories by authors like Phillip K. Dick and Harry Turtledove imagine those events happened in a completely different America and still fit the SF bill.

Mad scientists like the Dr. Frankenstein of the very first science fiction novel; Godzilla and his ilk arising from the nuclear testing wastelands of the postwar Fifties; Batman and Spiderman and Ironman—all qualify as science fiction without a space ship in sight. And, in fact, much of SF in the Fifties and Sixties dealt with the effects of science on the humans of Earth, as our technology outran our good sense in the headlines every day. Stories by authors Zenna Henderson and Theodore Sturgeon, television shows like THE TWILIGHT ZONE and THE OUTER LIMITS (and later, THE X-FILES and FRINGE) reflected this Earth-bound kind of SF. A lot of weird stuff can happen right in our own neighborhoods, as any fan of Rod Serling can tell you.

And in this one! Still no space ships unless you count UFOs.

As most of you know, I write this kind of “grounded” science fiction romance. In my Interstellar Rescue universe, the alien bad guys and others out there have the tech to get around in space, though this backwater called Earth does not. That makes us Earthers vulnerable and Earth the nexus of a lot of juicy conflict.

The problem comes when I try to describe the kind of SFR I write to a world that deals in “tags” and marketing concepts and simple one-line pitches. I don’t write “futuristic novels;” I don’t write “time travel;” I don’t write “dystopia” or “space adventure” (except for Book Three in my series, which might qualify for that particular tag). I’ve been calling my work “SF suspense romance,” but that’s a mouthful, and people look at me blankly when I say it. I tried borrowing Heather Massey’s descriptive “hearth and home” term, but that didn’t seem to fit, either.

So, as with Occam’s Razor, the simplest answer is always the best. I’m thinking I should just call it what it is: Contemporary SFR, meaning science fiction romance set in the here and now.

Gah! you say! Doesn’t that lump me in with small towns and coming-back-home stories? Or maybe big cities and millionaire mystery baby daddy drama? Or, to bring things completely up-to-date, barely legal kinky sex?

Well, whoa there, space rangers. First of all, if the term did link me with the contemporary romance crowd, I wouldn’t complain,’cuz, you know, those readers read A LOT of books. And straight, laser-shootin’ SFR hasn’t brought in nearly those kinds of numbers yet.

But there’s a reason contemporary romance has so many faithful fans: the stories play to themes of community and family and loyalty to core ideals. They may be fantasies, as all romances are, but they speak to familiar, and very human, qualities.

Paranormal romance has played off these key concepts quite well to attract the same kind of romance readers. Take J.R. Ward’s wildly successful Black Dagger Brotherhood series, for example. Over and over the books return to tropes of “fated lovers”, a good woman taming an alpha male, loyalty to the “family” of the Brotherhood, the small town of Caldwell NY and a central cast of characters that become known to readers of the series. None of this is new to contemporary readers. The only thing different is that these guys aren’t ranchers or small town bad boys. They’re kickass vampires.

I’m trying to take similar concepts of community, loyalty and core characters and give them an SFR twist in my Interstellar Rescue series. The bad guys (and some of the good guys) just happen to be aliens. And though my heroes and heroines may wander to an alien planet or onto a starship on occasion, it’s Rescue’s mission to protect Earth. The central focus of the series always returns home to this planet, in the here and now, where a close group fights together against a common enemy.

So now I can say that what I write is contemporary SFR, both in time and place, but also at heart. It’s short and to the point. Maybe it’ll catch on.

Cheers, Donna

FIVE THINGS I GOTTA HAVE IN ANY SFR STORY

Room for all, but you have to have an FTL drive and capable pilot.

Science fiction romance is a big spaceport. We have berths for all kinds of vehicles from space operas set in the wide galaxy to hearth-and-homes set here on Earth, mad scientists to alien slavers, utopias to dystopias, cyborgs to purple people-eaters. There’s no wonder we have such trouble defining who we are, what it is we’re writing and who we hope will read it. (If you are a member of the Science Fiction Romance Brigade and follow the Brigade on Facebook, you know we’ve been rehashing these old questions of definition again lately.)

Writers of paranormal romance have no trouble saying their stories must have an element of the supernatural along with a happy ending for the hero and heroine. Likewise, historical romance writers will gladly tell you one of their novels had better have an historical setting and an HEA. But if you had five SFR writers in a room, you would undoubtedly get 25 different answers to the question of what makes for a good SFR story.

Let me start a no-doubt rousing discussion by offering the five things I MUST have in any science fiction romance story to keep me happily reading.

--A hero and a heroine who are equals. A story may be written from anyone’s point of view—the hero’s, the heroine’s, even someone else’s—but in a romance, the hero and the heroine should find a balance in the story. If the heroine is constantly getting into trouble only to have the hero rescue her, or, conversely, is undertaking all the action only to have the hero hanging out waiting to, ahem, service her, then things are out of balance. From a writer’s perspective that often (but not always) means you have to write from both POVs, which makes things harder, but provides more balance in the story. No matter who tells the story, both partners should have talents, skills and qualities that come to bear on the external problems they face.

--A Happy Ever After or Happy For Now ending. This is my Number One requirement for a successful science fiction romance. And, in fact, I want the whole romantic arc: Boy meets Girl (or Boy or Alien Being, your choice), Boy Gets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl Back, Happy Ever After. Within that larger structure there are other well-defined moments: the meet, the declaration, the black moment, resolution. Romance readers (and I’m one of them) have been trained through years of reading experience to recognize those signposts on the road to true love. If they don’t see them, they grow, first, anxious, then frustrated. Deny them the HEA and you have a riot on your hands. This was supposed to be a romance, wasn’t it? What the . . .!  If, for some reason, you can’t bring yourself to write that happy ending, then please don’t market your story as a romance. It’s a story with romantic elements, or a love story set in the future or a friends-with-benefits-in-space story, but, by definition it is not a romance. Save your book being thrown across the room when a romance reader gets to the end and finds the lovers don’t end up together, as I recently did with an otherwise excellent book marketed as SFR.

--A great central idea or theme. This is the key to the SF part of SFR. To me, memorable science fiction always starts with an idea, something simple, yet so evocative it fires the imagination: terraforming Mars; alternate universes; sentient ships; interstellar slavers vs. an organization of abolitionists. This idea can be tied to a central theme—love as a unifying or healing force, for example—to give it even more narrative power. Without the Big Idea, however, or at least an interesting concept, a “science fiction” story is simply one set in the future, or in space, or with aliens. It’s a “futuristic” novel—not a bad thing, just a different thing, with a different marketing angle.

--Convincing, but judicious, worldbuilding. Nothing is more fun than being immersed in a totally new world of an author’s creation, being swept away by a sense of an “alternate reality.” But a little description goes a long way, especially in SFR. I appreciate knowing that we used an ion drive to get here, but the details of how it works are of no interest to me. Worldbuilding details are like spices in cooking. Not enough and the dish is bland; too much and it’s inedible. The amount of worldbuilding detail has an impact on marketing, too, and relates to the expectations of the reading audience. A futuristic novel would have much less detail (and a less demanding audience); a straight science fiction novel would have a LOT of detail (for a very demanding audience). An SFR novel, for me, would provide a balanced taste of the author’s world.

--And, last but by no means least, a compelling tale. Make it fresh. If it’s complex, find a way to make it easy to follow. Make it surprising and emotional and grip-me-by-the-throat thrilling! I read a lot. I’m not the only one. I will skip the stories whose blurbs promise nothing more than yet another “she was stolen . . . and now she must choose . . . ,” but I hate it when I find myself bored in the middle of a story with a promising premise. Use all your writer’s tricks to keep me reading—pacing, snappy dialogue, varied sentence structure, great characters, an unexpected plot twist and, yes, a sharp turn of phrase. If I keep reading, then others will, too.

Of course, all of these must-haves assumes the author already has the basics of good writing well in hand. Did I say this was easy? No, and it shouldn’t be. Not everyone has what it takes to rise above the sea of competition out there and be truly exceptional. But our genre is no longer in its infancy. It’s time for us to grow beyond baby steps and take bigger strides. We’ve been playing in our own little yard long enough. To do that we need the confidence of knowing who and what we are.

Cheers,

Donna