Planetary Romance - Planetary Romance and Science Fiction

Planetary Romance and Science Fiction

The publication of pulp science fiction magazines starting in 1926 (and becoming especially prolific in the 1930s) created a new market for planetary romances, and had a strong effect on later incarnations of the genre. Some pulps, such as Planet Stories and Startling Stories, were primarily dedicated to publishing planetary romances, while existing fantasy pulps like Weird Tales began to publish science fiction romances next to their usual horror and sword and sorcery fare. One of the most outstanding writers in this vein was C. L. Moore, the author of the Northwest Smith stories (1933–1947), featuring a rugged spaceman who finds himself continually entangled with quasi-sorcerous alien powers. There is very little swashbuckling adventure in Moore's stories, which focus instead on psychological stresses, especially the fear and fascination of the unknown, which appears in Moore as both dangerous and erotic.

In the 1940s and 1950s, one of the most significant contributors to the planetary romance genre was Leigh Brackett, whose stories combined complex, roguish (sometimes criminal) heroes, high adventure, the occasional love story, richly detailed physical settings with a depth and weight unusual for the pulps, and a style that bridged space opera and fantasy. Brackett was a regular contributor to Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, for which she produced an interlocking series of tales set in the same universe, but—with the exception of the Eric John Stark stories—with wholly different protagonists. Brackett's stories are primarily adventure fiction, but also contain reflections on the themes of cultural and corporate imperialism and colonialism.

There is an instructive comparison between The Enchantress of Venus, one of Brackett's Stark stories, and A. E. van Vogt's Empire of the Atom. Both take as their starting point the plot and situation of I, Claudius by Robert Graves. Van Vogt follows the plot somewhat more closely, concentrating his invention on the background of his empire while emphasizing the hero's vulnerability. Brackett introduces an Earthman who is struck by the romantic allure of the women involved in these intrigues. While both stories are space operas, only Brackett's is a planetary romance.

From the mid-1960s on, the traditional type of planetary romance set in the Solar System fell out of favor; as technological advances revealed most local worlds to be hostile to life, new planetary stories have usually been set on extrasolar planets, generally through the assumption of some form of faster-than-light travel. One exception is the Gor series, published from 1967 to the present. Gor is a Counter-Earth planet in a symmetrical orbit to Earth on the other side of the Sun (not at Earth’s L3 point). Gravitational effects and detection by terrestrial probes are explained away by “superior alien science”, a common conceit in planetary romances.

The planetary romance has become a significant component of current science fiction, though—possibly due to the term being perceived as a pejorative—few writers use the term self-descriptively. Given the cross-pollination between planetary romance and space opera, many stories are difficult to classify as being wholly one or the other.

Frank Herbert's Dune series, particularly the earlier books which are largely set on the desert planet of Arrakis, has all the characteristics of planetary romance (and some of "sword and planet" fiction), though they are used in support of Herbert's meditations on philosophy, ecology, and the politics of power.

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels can also be classified as planetary romance, since the focus remains firmly on the planet Darkover, though the galactic setting is never entirely limited to background. Similarly, L. Sprague de Camp's Krishna series of rationalized planetary romances are a subseries of his space opera Viagens Interplanetarias series.

Ursula K. Le Guin's earliest works, such as Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile are recognizably planetary romances; arguably most of her Hainish Cycle can be classified as such, though in later works fantasy elements are submerged, and social and anthropological themes come to the fore.

In Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985), editor and critic David Pringle named Bradley and Anne McCaffrey two "leading practitioners nowadays" for the planetary romance type of science fiction. McCaffrey's Pern novels generally limit the galactic setting to very short prologues. The reader's scientific world-view is important but the Pernese society has lost that.