A lot of the time, I don't actually notice that some SFF is actually part romance in genre, because the romance isn't foregrounded. I don't like books that are "X and Y (or more) are falling in love, and there's all this other stuff happening too," but I'm very content with "X and Y (or more) are doing all this interesting stuff, and while they're doing it, they fall in love."
Romance is a fact of life. Sometimes, who loves who can change everything (this, for instance, is a very big thing in most Arthurian literature). I think one of the reasons people are making such a big deal about romance in SFF is that when it the genre began being a popular and clearly identified genre back in the early 20th century, it was presumed to be something men wrote for other men, especially young men, and romance was deliberately excluded by a number of writers, and considered "icky" by many fans.
SFF is all grown up now as a genre, and some authors put romance in, and some don't, whatever suits their style and the kind of SFF stories they want to tell. But somehow, if a writer, especially a woman, puts a lot of emphasis on the emotional relationships in the books she writes, it gets call "romance" and that still sounds like it's trivialising the work, and the writer.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-07-11 10:37 pm (UTC)Romance is a fact of life. Sometimes, who loves who can change everything (this, for instance, is a very big thing in most Arthurian literature). I think one of the reasons people are making such a big deal about romance in SFF is that when it the genre began being a popular and clearly identified genre back in the early 20th century, it was presumed to be something men wrote for other men, especially young men, and romance was deliberately excluded by a number of writers, and considered "icky" by many fans.
SFF is all grown up now as a genre, and some authors put romance in, and some don't, whatever suits their style and the kind of SFF stories they want to tell. But somehow, if a writer, especially a woman, puts a lot of emphasis on the emotional relationships in the books she writes, it gets call "romance" and that still sounds like it's trivialising the work, and the writer.