A few years ago, I proposed this column to meet a shift in SFF publishing, where the major SFF tradpub imprints—Tor, Orbit, even Harper Voyager—had begun to seem less shy about including kissing, sex, and central romance storylines in their books. The genre crossover already existed in romance, but here came a crop of new books from genre-savvy SFF writers (CJ Polk, Aliette de Bodard, Freya Marske) who happened to be genre-savvy in romance, too. As a fan of both genres, I was thrilled to see SFF finally accepting the joys of cross-contamination.
Then, uh, the landscape changed. Romantasy rode into tradpub on the coat-tails of Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorn and Roses series and Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series. Various writers have proposed ways of defining romantasy books, but I tend to ascribe to the Print Run podcast’s assertion that romantasy describes an audience rather than a group of books, which is why attempted genre definitions haven’t worked for me. You kind of know romantasy when you see it. Because of the sprayed edges. And the porn. (This is a joke; please do not yell at me.)
I believe these to be two distinct phenomena, arising from two distinct sets of trends. Thing 1 and Thing 2, if you will. The audiences for these books overlap, to some extent. But they’re not coterminous. What is now, and ever shall be, coterminous is the scope of each and every SFF imprint’s desire to get Sarah J. Maas money for the SFF romances they are publishing. They have all figured out that the path to that outcome, whether their books are Thing 1 or Thing 2 or some blurry place in between, is paved with the word romantasy.
I say that without judgment for anyone’s marketing department. Marketing books is hard. I have great respect for the people who do it well.
As publishers have rushed to capitalize on the success of Thing 2, the SFF section at the bookstore has suddenly gotten packed with titles aimed at audiences other than the usual segment of SFF readership. It’s led to a certain level of, let’s say, bemusement among segments of the SFF reading audience who have less familiarity with (or interest in!) the romance genre. As a lifelong SFF fan myself, but a more recent convert to romance, I thought I’d have a go at finding the point of disconnect.
Speculative fiction is a problem-proposing genre. It proposes problems like How shall we interact with monsters and How shall we navigate time travel, and then it dives in with relish, it gets its hands dirty, it reminds us that we are flawed and messy creatures who can no better answer how shall we travel among the stars than we do, in fact, answer how shall we manage world hunger. Piecemeal. Badly. With a lot of arguing. Maybe the problem will be solved in the end. Maybe in the end the problem will have gotten much much worse. Science fiction and fantasy aren’t making any promises about that.
As a result, SFF readers tend to conceptualize our genre as one that challenges readers to think creatively and in fresh ways about the world we live in and the other worlds that might be possible. I don’t so much disagree with that idea as I worry about the way it gets framed as morally superior to other genres or ways of reading. For one thing, I don’t accept that “being challenged” is the goal everyone should be pursuing every time we pick up a book. For another thing, proposing problems isn’t the same thing as challenging readers to think new and more interesting thoughts—that varies tremendously depending on the author and the reader.
By contrast, romance is primarily a problem-solving genre. The problem is how to sort out these specific characters, how to put them in happy relationships and lives they find fulfilling. Romance doesn’t need to propose the problem, because the problem is already here. How do we exist in relationship with other people? A given romance novel may concern itself with other questions, but the problem animating the plot is that of relationship, and the genre promises the reader that’s one problem that will be solved by the end. The answer is always the same; the answer is infinite variety.
At the risk of repeating myself, I want to emphasize that I don’t consider the pursuit of shared happiness to be a less important question than anything speculative fiction takes up. In romance, I’ve found some of the most nuanced explorations of emotional truth and the complexities of human behavior that I’ve ever seen anywhere. I want to be clear that I’m speaking here about the structure of what each genre is trying to do.
If you’ve read a romantasy that nebulously feels more like romance than SFF, it’s typically because the structure of the Thing 2 books tends more toward the romance side, the problem-solving side. Thea Guanzon’s Hurricane Wars series, for instance (Thing 2), cares most about these two people making it work, which they can’t do if the prince of the evil empire stays evil and the empire stays an empire. He loves her, so we know he’s going to have to start doing less oppression. CL Polk’s Kingston Cycle series (Thing 1) cares most about class injustice in Aeland, so each book in the trilogy builds on the work of the previous books to show us what a more just future for the country can look like (and the characters also kiss. It’s both!). You’re picking up on something real, but at the risk of drawing the wrong conclusion.
To draw the right conclusion, I encourage SFF to take a page from the romance genre’s playbook. For all the genre’s faults, and they are many, romance readers are pretty much always excited to welcome new readers into the genre. The path by which someone comes to romance just doesn’t matter that much. If they’re here, it’s something to celebrate, and Romancelandia has a thousand amazing, smart, diverse book recs to guide them to the best of what our genre has to offer.
I’d love to see speculative fiction taking a similar tack, rather than trying to redraw genre boundaries to keep romantasy outside our gates. We lose nothing by accepting that SFF is expansive enough to include writers and readers who came to the genre by different paths than we did, who arrived via Rebecca Yarros and Ali Hazelwood rather than CS Lewis and Orson Scott Card. Romantasy takes nothing from longtime SFF readers, but it does offer us a bright and golden chance to ensnare new readers in our genre nets.Thrillingly, marketing departments are already doing this (see above), by using the same term to describe Thing 1 and Thing 2. Did I personally dislike The Wren in the Holly Library? Yes. Will that stop me from joyfully telling its fans to read Lady Eve’s Last Con and The Scandalous Letters of V and J? Hell no. It has never benefited SFF to exclude writers like Nalini Singh and Kit Rocha and Alyssa Cole, and it won’t benefit us to exclude this batch of newcomers to our genre either. Whatever you think of the advent of romantasy onto the SFF scene, be assured that it isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s an opportunity.
The problem, though, is that it *does* take something from longtime SFF readers. Publishers have limited catalog space, marketers have limited budgets, and bookstores have limited shelving. As romantasy has ballooned, it has squeezed out genre works that do *not* include heavy romantic elements and impeded their discoverability. (Indeed I was amazed by a recent Book Riot article arguing, like this one, that there were still plenty of non-romantic fantasy books out there — yet it mentioned 7 distinct romantasy titles and *not a single non-romantasy one.* Begs the question, no?)
In fairness this is largely just the simple machinery of the market: each goldrush to the hot new fad naturally results in a period of bloating and oversaturation before levelling out. As a superhero fan, I can still lament for the moviegoer who has seen their own favorite genres largely vanish from the blockbuster calendar.
Likewise I certainly don’t begrudge romantasy fans their taste; I’m glad they are finally getting to eat their fill, even if I personally find the menu dull, not to say repulsive. But it is not quite fair to claim the rest of us have lost nothing from its colonization of our genre.
I think romantasy, like many genres, has very fuzzy, ill-defined boundaries. Where does science-fiction start and fantasy end? What, exactly, separates romantasy from urban fantasy? If one took a Harry Potter book and replaced wands with ray guns and magical creatures with aliens does it change genre?
I read and enjoy romantasy on occasion (like Legends and Lattes).
But ISTM that I am being forced to accept romance as a part of any SciFi . In most cases it adds nothing to the story except to further the plot. Dare I say it, a McGuffin.
Tell that to Lois McMaster Bujold and her many Hugos. Or even some Heinlein books. Or even at least one Lensman book. We all get that Grrl Cooties are Bad somehow. <G>
This has been around for a while.
Lois Bujold’s first novel, Shards of Honor. was a romance, hidden under MilSF trappings. I didn’t realize it until several years later.
Several others were the same, so I had been reading romantasy without the label.
But it’s plot driven romance, and therein lies all the difference. See also: Cherryh’s Morgaine series with it’s “blink and you miss it” romance!
I think that if it’s “Blink and you miss it”, then it is not a romance. It should be more “Stare with unrequited passion” for the romance aspect. “X-Files” and its “Will they/won’t they?” aspect qualifies.
And I truly love the Morgaine books, all four of them.
I would instead say that speculative fiction, on average, tends to be more plot-driven. While some authors and subgenres tend to have a bit more focus on character, the story… the problem, you might say, is the core.
Romantasy, OTOH, seems to be a lot more about character(s), specifically about their relationships. I get the feeling that any grand plot is more or less a formality.
I could easily be wrong, though. I’ve never actually read a book marketed as romantasy. And my current project is a cosy cyberpunk mystery…
The more I think about it, the more I see this as the next ‘stage’ of the big Paranormal Romance boom that we got some years ago. Where a lot of it was marketing– if there’s a guy in a hat and a long coat on the cover? Urban Fantasy. But if there’s a lady in leather pants? Paranormal romance. (And if there’s a dude with no shirt on the cover, it’s gonna get saucy).
But hey, if it brings new readers to the genre, I’m all for it.
For me the issue is that I just have no interest in stories that are only about Relationship. I’m easily bored and there just has to be something else other than “I wonder if s/he’s thinking about me?!?” and “they’re hot”. It’s not that I’m against Romance, but I have zero interest if that’s it.
My answer is simple: there’s not a “problem,” except insofar as it adds another artificial, marketeer-driven subdivision to genre. Financially, romance is a very important genre, with a large and loyal readership and some remarkably successful and prolific authors. I don’t read romance, not because of it’s too “character-driven,” but because it’s not “my thing.” I like character in my reading, and that’s certainly not something that’s antithetical to plot; definitely too much sf/f has characters that occasionally rise to one-dimensional.
When I want something with no characterization, I fall back on one of my technical books, like Knuth or Milne-Thompson
I worked at a used bookstore for many years so often faced this categorization issue on a daily basis. I also read extensively in both romance and sci-fi/fantasy genres and have since I was a teenager. I tended to keep things simple- if the main focus on of the plot is the relationship, then it is a romance, even if there is another aspect of plot like a mystery, sci-fi or thriller. If the main plot is focused on the resolution of the action, then it is a sci-fi/fantasy book.
To me, a true romantasy is when both plots are given equal place in the story. Now, are there books being marketed as romantasy even though the relationship has the main focus, yes. But I have read books that actually straddle both sides equally and well – Jesse Mihalik’s books come to mind.
While romantasy is dominating the market at the moment, that is because it is what is selling so that is what publishers are buying. I personally have seen a decrease in hard sci-fi books for a while and an increase in the fantasy side of things. To me, romantasy is just an offshoot. I don’t think one is coming at the expense of the other. The more profits publishers make, the more smaller books have room to be published and grow.
I have limited experience with romantasy, but I have read a decent amount of romance before going off it. My issue with the genre is that its central subject is relationships, specifically romantic relationships, and yet almost all of the romance I’ve read depicts romantic relationships in an inauthentic way. From the happily-ever-after imperative to the fixation on alpha males (I know this is not the whole genre, but it’s rampant, and all the romantasy I’ve read subscribes to it), these narratives lack emotional truth. Speculative fiction may feature a lot of imaginary elements, whether technological or magical, but it can still be emotionally truthful. Romance seems to me to be emotionally untruthful as a rule. It is women’s fantasies about how they wish relationships worked, rather than a depiction of how relationships work. I totally understand the desire for such fantasies–heterosexuality needs all the marketing help it can get–but to me they have the same relationship to real people that porn has to real sex. I lost interest in romance when I realized this about it.
I don’t care if the Romantasy genre exists but it needs to be labeled as such so I don’t buy it.
I love a character driven epic fantasy and the relationships they build as I learn a new magic system, how that world functions, and the politics that drives the action. I don’t love page sand pages of overly athletic hot sex that generally lasts hours. It gets in the way of the story for me and as a woman I am already familiar with power dynamics between sexual partners. I don’t need to solve that problem or read it playing out. If new readers love that then great but give them their own section (online and in stores) so I don’t pick a book I might want to read and find out in the summary that it’s likely full of sexual tension.
I wish publishers would stop being cagey about a book being Romantasy. Just label it so we can all get on with reading books that do match our interests.
if there is that much sex then it is not a romance but erotica!
The objections act like SFF was a monolith before now, as if there was one flavor of SFF and a homogeneous fan base that all wanted the same content, which is obviously not so.
If you’re very young, you may not have the perspective to realize that styles and trends in SFF have always been happening. You don’t have to like them all, and not everything has to cater to narrow tastes.
But when SF was *real* SF it had Manly Men and lots of fighting. (of course, we must ignore the romance in the Lensman books, but hey, they were written by a Manly Man so it was ok).
Anne McCaffrey’s books always had a romance element. Although not strictly fantasy as they are classed as science fiction. but without the preamble before Dragonflight explaining it was an Earth colony the Dragons would be viewed as fantasy creatures.
Mercedes Lackey also works in romance too.
In fact a lot of authors prior to the coining of the word Romantasy have put romance in their stories. It does not make the story any less enjoyable unless you are an adolescent male.
But we still have the problem of Girl Cooties among a certain segment of SF fandom.
Alas, true. Quite a few sf/f fans and authors were quite open in their bigotry in several years’ Hugo voting.
I want to be open and welcoming to romantasy, I really do (not least because I know some people are getting into SFF via that route as readers and I want to welcoming).
But what I’m struggling with is that for a solid half of the romantasy I’ve tried, the fantasy elements are frankly, sloppily written. In the sense that they’re full of things that beginning writers are regularly excoricated for (totally informed special abilities that are never demonstrated on page, deus ex machina world-building that is pulled out exactly when needed and then never explained, etc). My impression of these books isn’t that the genre is bad, these books all have really good premises and good characters and interesting concepts, but I come away from them wondering if anyone ever edited them.
And as a lover of fantasy its frustrating that these books seem to be held to a lower standard just because of a central romance. In my experience, most devoted romance readers are a picky, intelligent group. So its weirdly patronizing that there seems to be a growing correlation between the romantasy genre and sloppy, lazy fantasy writing.
As longtime reader of both fantasy and romance, what’s most interesting about the romantasy trend is that it’s usually a very narrow subset of book tropes. There’s a female lead, savior elements, hero as dark/mysterious/other, kingdoms at risk…which is all fine, but the repetitiveness of the most recent books labeled romantasy can be frustrating.
OTOH, there is some wonderful fantasy romance and romantic fantasy out there: Elizabeth Vaughan, Chloe Parker, Ilona Andrews, Grace Draven, Sharon Shinn, and Jeffe Kennedy immediately come to mind. These authors are well worth exploring. And including romantic elements in fantasy and SF has a long history: think of Anne McCaffrey, Melanie Rawn, Patricia Kennealy, Mercedes Lackey, Patricia A. McKillip, and Robin McKinley.
It took me a very long time as a fantasy/SF reader to realize the books that drew me in were ones that had strong romantic elements. What did it was becoming a romance reader and connecting the dots. And to this day, I’m drawn to paranormal romance, monster romance, SF romance, and fantasy romance because of my longtime love of fantasy and SF. There are so many writers combining the best of both worlds out there. If romantasy leads readers to those books, it would be amazing.
It’s been around for several decades, just under other names (paranormals, fantasy book with strong romantic elements, and so on).
Thanks Jenny for trying to make a more inclusive readership!
I find the confusion over the genre confusing. Romantasy is just a fantasy story where the Romance gets greater or equal billing to the setting/plot. Fantasy Romance is one where it doesn’t but is still a major aspect of the story. And “standard” Fantasy might or might not have a romance subplot at all, but if it does it’s far from the focus (which is usually the fictional setting, characters, and the dramatic doings therein).
Mostly genre is about the priority of storytelling, what the narratives “camera” focuses on the most, and treats as most important. It’s used as a marketing shorthand, but it’s read and written as a lens through which to view the fictional events. People seem to lose sight of this in discussions of these stories, or so it seems to me.
And I agree that it has felt like all that’s being pushed of late in Fantasy is stories where the Romance of the characters gets the most focus, rather than a world and plot fantastical in nature, where some people might be being romantical.