SFR: CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

Now that both Laurie and Greta have chimed in, I might as well add my two cents’ worth on the subject of recent trends in science fiction romance and how I fit in. No surprise, really, but I’m still surfing along on the outside curl of whatever market wave may be building for SFR. If that genre wave ever reaches towering proportions, I may get a decent lift and a fun ride, but I doubt I’ll see the inside of that monster “tube,” if it  comes.

I fell in love with SF back in the day of rockets and robots, but I was drawn to the eerie twists of Twilight Zone just as much as the unbounded space adventures of Star Trek. So it follows that my work reflects those twin fascinations. My head is in the stars, but my feet are solidly on Earth. It’s not the Earth that everyone sees, however. Things in my Interstellar Rescue series universe are just a little . . . different.

I have written the occasional space opera (all my early Trek fan fiction and my SFR Galaxy Award-winning Fools Rush In, Interstellar Rescue Series Book 3.) But most of what I do I call contemporary science fiction romance, because it takes place here and now. A lot of the action (though not all of it) takes place on Earth in the present day. Many, though not all, of the characters are human. In Unchained Memory, the first novel in the series, the true villains, the alien Grays, remain unseen for the entire book! Yet their actions have a profound impact on the heroine and her hero. It is, after all, a story of alien abduction, interstellar slavery, mind control, and, ultimately, the fight to overcome all those evils.

Contemporary SFR has a lot in common with its better-known counterpart, contemporary romance, since it has a familiar setting and timeframe. It also shares elements with romantic suspense, since the lovers must solve a mystery at the heart of every novel in order to reach their happily ever after. But, unlike shorter contemporary romance novels, my Interstellar Rescue books tend to be complex, with multiple subplots and points of view. I often take the reader off-planet with these subplots, exploring alien cultures or characters, or the villain’s POV, to give the books depth. 

Then there's the heat level. I tend to write a little sexier than the average contemporary romance or romantic suspense. Heck, I write sexier than the average SFR, too, unless you count SFR erotica. My books have a well-defined romantic arc; my lovers deserve a well-defined love life.

Recently another term has arisen to describe the kind of thing I do with my Earth-bound stories: cozy SFR. Author and long-time SFR booster Jacqueline Lichtenberg wrote an illuminating pair of articles last year on the subject, framing the concept using the characteristics of the “cozy mystery” for comparison. Lichtenberg argues that in these mysteries, the protagonist’s world is “cozy” (that is, comfortable, predictable, safe) to begin with, but is turned upside down by some event at the beginning of the novel which precipitates the action (eg. a murder in a small town). The protagonist (or the hero and heroine in the case of a romance) must act then to put the world straight/safe again (solve the murder, win the day).

Bilbo's cozy life is about to be disrupted!

It’s no stretch to apply this to SFR or fantasy. A precipitating event must always set the quest in motion (Gandalf arrives at the door of Bilbo’s cozy hobbit hole). In the case of Unchained Memory, my heroine Asia wakes up on a lonely country road, missing three hours. At home, a fire has taken the lives of her children. Her quest to find out what happened leads her to discover her world is not what she thought it was.

The idea that the world is not what we thought it was is central to the “cozy” novel, according to Lichtenberg. It’s also central to my Interstellar Rescue series. The setting may be familiar, but each of my heroines suddenly finds her worldview is transformed by what she learns throughout the novel. Nothing will ever seem the same.

This excerpt from my latest novel gives you an idea of what that might feel like:

Charlie stared into her mug, studied the greenish ring in the bottom that was all that was left of her third cup of tea? Her fourth? She’d lost track. Her mind was reeling, her body buzzing with caffeine, adrenalin and lack of sleep. She was working hard to comprehend the information she’d been given over the last hour or so, trying to reconstruct her world according to a whole new design, fighting to make her altered reality seem, well, real.

But she was failing miserably. To believe the galaxy was filled with inhabited planets. Beings moved easily among the stars through a system of wormhole-like “jump nodes” that had been discovered and mapped long ago. Bad guys—aliens—called “Grays” stole people, including humans from Earth, and used them as slaves. Good guys called “the Interstellar Council for Abolition and Rescue” fought the aliens, and sometimes returned the slaves to Earth.

And most devastating of all: the man she had just slept with was one of those Rescue agents, a fact he’d hidden from her despite their intimacy. She’d known as soon as the assassin had come through the door that she’d lose Rafe; she knew now she’d never had him in the first place.

Not Fade Away, Interstellar Rescue Series Book 4, is available for pre-order NOW on Amazon. 

Cheers, Donna

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

SCREEN ENVY: WHY CAN'T WE CAPTURE THAT SF MOVIE AUDIENCE?

The usual suspects dominated the screen this summer.

Another summer of screen blockbusters is nearly over and once again the multiplex has been dominated by comic book heroes, post-apocalyptic survivors and teen warriors of the future. Though romance has been generally lacking in these action-packed thrill rides, science fiction has certainly been featured, even in the speculative nature of disaster movies like SAN ANDREAS.

The small screen, too, is full of SF—from the SYFY Channel’s more traditional space opera KILLJOYS to ABC’s Earth-based THE WHISPERS. There’s even a soap opera about space (ABC’s THE ASTRONAUT’S WIVES CLUB, about the women behind the men of the Mercury space program).

Obviously Hollywood thinks SF sells. What’s so appealing about the genre for film and television?

--SF is visual. Spaceships! Monsters! Disasters! The end of the world! Superheroes and arch villains battling it out in the middle of cities, destroying everything! Cool tech and even cooler special effects and makeup. The guys (and, make no mistake, they are overwhelmingly male) on the technical side of filmmaking love this stuff and delight in one-upping each other. No other genre gives them the same opportunities.

--SF lends itself to simple plots. Good guys vs. bad guys. Monsters/aliens vs. humans. Superhero vs. super villain. Etc. The exceptions to this rule in the last few years can be numbered on maybe two hands—GRAVITY, INTERSTELLAR, HER, LUCY, a few others. They get lost in the avalanche of mindless fare at the multiplex and, with the exception of the first two titles, are seen by only a handful of dedicated SF film fans. Simple is best, especially on the big screen. More room for explosions. (Television fares better in this regard, since paying for big effects is a problem for TV networks. A show like DEFIANCE or PERSON OF INTEREST can focus on relationships and ideas and find a faithful audience on the small screen.)

--SF skews young. The majority of the movie-going audience today consists of teenagers and young adults. (People like me, who can remember when comic books were not an art form, but something you could buy for a dime at the corner drug store, tend to watch movies at home.) This audience is most likely to be drawn to stories and heroes taken from the media it is already familiar with—comics and graphic novels, television, retro movies, young adult science fiction bestsellers like The Hunger Games and its clones.

--SF skews male. Yes, I know, dear reader, many of you are female and love SF, too, but Hollywood doesn’t much care about that. The powers that be have convinced themselves that men drive the entertainment decisions—including what gets seen on date night and what is watched on TV or computer or tablet. Hollywood has decided (presumably by market research, but who knows?) that, with some exceptions,  “audiences” don’t want to see women in lead roles, they don’t want films by or about women, and they damn sure don’t want films in which women play the heroes. Science fiction, in which, traditionally, the men dominate, gives Hollywood what they think they want—and lots of it. The percentage of women starring in, directing, producing and writing movies and television has actually dropped since the 1990’s. We can only hope the success of films like MAD MAX:FURY ROAD (starring the mesmerizing Charlize Theron) will change some minds.

In the SFR community we have long hoped that the trending love for SF on the screen will open a door for us with both readers and the not-so-Invisible-Hand of the market. But that has not happened so far, and I fear it will never happen. The problem is that the science fiction we see onscreen--certainly the SF we see on the big screen, though to a lesser extent the SF we see on TV--has little similarity to the kind of SF we are writing. In general, our stories are much more diverse, female-centered, character-driven and complex than the majority of stories we see in the multiplex. Then, of course, there’s the romance, which is most often only hinted at in the theater.

We have assumed all along that the audience for SF on the screen is the same as the audience for SFR in readable form, or at least that there is a great deal of crossover. That’s based on the anecdotal evidence that lots of us like SF movies and read SFR, too. We need to determine whether the majority of the movie-going audience is really open to what we’re selling, and, if so, how do we reach that audience? If our basic assumption is not true about this film/SFR connection, then who are we really writing for? The answer has to be greater than “people like us,” lest we continue to sell books to only each other.

 

 I don’t have the answer to these questions. If I did, I’d be Number One on Amazon. But if any of you has some insight, I beg you to share.

Cheers, Donna