In September of 2003, I was on a panel at the
SA Writers' Festival with the wonderful Lucy Clark, author of Mills & Boon
medical romances that have sold in their billions around the world. During question time, I commented offhandedly
that I should put more romance in my writing.
Lucy called me on that, inviting me a year later to give the opening
address to the Romance Writers of SA the following year, to see if I had made
any progress. The pressure was really
on. I can probably wing a dozen topics
in SF and fantasy--especially in front of a crowd as intelligent, good-looking
and above all forgiving as this one--but the romance scene was wholly new to
me. Naturally, I was terrified.
So what did I talk about? I'm not known for writing romance, or even
for being terribly romantic. I have,
however, published 20 novels and 60-odd short stories. Maybe this is a bold claim, but I don't
think it's possible to tell that many stories without using romance in some
form or other. People are people, and
falling in love is something people do--consciously or unconsciously, against
their will as often as not--and to ignore that aspect of humanity would be like
drawing characters who weren't afraid or never got hungry. It just wouldn't do.
In my short stories, I've dealt with issues
like obsession, messy break-ups, betrayal, sex, dysfunctional relationships,
holiday flings, and the grief of losing a loved one to death. These stories wouldn't have worked without
the assumption that people fall in love and desire each other. My first novel, METAL FATIGUE, has a classic
Hollywood-style romantic thread that plays right down the line, and my Books of
the Change recounts a developing relationship between two teenagers that I
can't help but think of as romantic, if in an underplayed, slow-paced way. And hell, I've written Star Wars novels,
which are riddled with romance...
But it is true that, in some of my novels and
series, romance has been downplayed to the point of invisibility. For Evergence, set 500,000 years in the
future, the sole titillating detail comes when two characters hold hands, right
at the very end. Not a ripped bodice in
sight. In others, such as the Orphans
series, romance is played as a back-up riff, like rhythm guitar in a standard
rock and roll combo. It keeps things
moving along, but isn't the core concern of the story.
I used to justify this by saying that writing
speculative fiction demands an awful lot of extra stuff crammed into the
mix. ...
As well as plot and dialogue, there's a
serious amount of worldbuilding going on, and sometimes things like romance can
be squeezed out. A lot of science
fiction is like that; there might be sex, but little that makes the heart
flutter. It's not that my characters
are inhuman; in fact, very few of my characters are alien, and none of them are
unemotional. It's just that romance
became sidelined for a while in my fiction--to its detriment, I think.
I'll come back to this later. Back to my original bold statement that I
was going to try to be more romantic.
It hadn’t come out of nowhere.
The idea had been bubbling away in the back of my brain for a
while. People had commented on the lack
of hot love in my books, and I myself found the fiction I produced slightly at
odds with the fiction I enjoyed reading.
People like romance; I like romance.
Why wasn't I writing it? What
was I afraid of?
I think, partly, I was afraid of looking like
a fool. Romance is, as I'm sure you're
all aware, very, very hard to write well.
If I tried and failed, I'd feel like a laughing stock.
But writers need to challenge themselves in
order to stay fresh. ...
If we stick to the same thing, to familiar
themes and modes, we grow stale. And
nothing kills an author (or a would-be romantic) faster than boredom.
#
Perhaps I should talk briefly about
romance--which Benjamin Disraeli once defined "as the offspring of fiction
and love"--or what I think romance is, at least. I wouldn't dream of portraying myself as an expert. I am lucky enough to have experienced love
in several different ways, in the real world, not just in books. I am fortunate enough to have fallen
instantly in love twice in my life. I
have loved briefly and shallowly, as well as deeply and long--and either way,
it's been a wonder for me, a nerdy shy boy who took a long time to work up the
courage to ask a girl out. I've learned
since that there are no rules, that notions of right and wrong don't really
come with the territory. Sure, we think
we know where the boundaries are, but when emotions run high, anything can
happen. We change, we alter, we
sacrifice, we demand, we yearn, we revolt, we beg, we aspire to greatness. In the grip of love, life is rich and
wonderful, and sometimes awful and overwhelming too. "Romance," as Elinor Glyn observed, "is the
glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze."
For me, it's a process. Whereas sexual attraction can happen in an
instant--and, let's face it, for men the whole show can be over in a few
minutes--love can take years to unfold, growing and evolving with the people
involved. Love can die, too, or return
from the dead. It comes from nowhere,
and can go back there in a moment, for reasons we don't always understand.
I think it's that basic mysteriousness that
draws romance to fantasy, or vice versa.
Magic and love aren't really so different, as our ancestors
understood. In some cultures, magical
ability is tied to a woman's virginity; lose one and you automatically lose the
other. Not for nothing is modern-day
magic--astrology, palm- and tarot-readings--so often tied up with finding and
maintaining relationships. Think of
village witches, and we think automatically of love potions. Or I do, anyway. Hopefully I'm not the only one in the room with those particular
wires crossed.
#
I said earlier that spec fic and romance can
be awkward bedfellows. Actually, that's
a barefaced lie. That was just an
excuse for feeling like it was okay to ignore romance. ...
In fact, spec fic and romance are old
partners, going back as far as Frankenstein, through Dracula, to modern-day
efforts like the X-Files, Bladerunner, the Princess Bride, and the underrated
Ladyhawke. I'm talking TV shows and
movies here, and there are plenty of famous couples: Flash Gordon & Dale
Arden, Buck Rogers & Wilma Deering, Han Solo & Princess Leia Organa,
Aragorn & Arwen, Buffy and Angel, etc.
And it's not just movies. The
printed genre is riddled with romance.
There are many novels and authors that
straddle both fantasy and romance genres.
Perhaps the classic example is Anne McCaffery, who went from being a
successful romance writer in the 70s to being a world-famous fantasy writer
with her Dragonrider novels, and others.
I devoured those books as a teenager, and not just because they had neat
telepathic dragons that could fly. The
relationships were what [clinched] it for me.
Every book had a new romantic dilemma--a pair of star-crossed lovers; or
strangers thrown together by chance that, although sparring at first, soon give
in to a mutual attraction; or, my personal favourite, the old friends who have
never considered each other romantic partners before suddenly looking at each
other in a new light and feeling the sparks begin to fly. This was romantic fantasy in its purest
form, and I devoured it.
Fantasy and romance have been colliding ever
since. Buffy and Angel showed how the
genres could feed off each other, and strengthen each other, by playing on
resonant themes. Sexual and emotional predation
take on a new kind of horror when vampires are added to the mix. We feel, in everyday life, that love has the
power to change the course of worlds, but what if that was literally true? Catching a stranger's eye across a crowded
bar takes on a whole new dimension in such a world.
Recent writers and works of romantic fantasy
include Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy trilogy, Lian Hearn's Tales of the
Otori, Kate Elliott, Kim Wilkins, Patricia McKillip, Celia Dart Thornton, Lyn
Flewelling, Robyn Hobb, even Whitbread Prize-winning author Philip
Pullman. The Anita Blake series by
Laurell K Hamilton treads the same sort of chick-lit territory as Janet
Evanovich, but with vampires and werewolves.
There's no end to it, and here's hoping there never will be.
#
The other thing I've been thinking about
romance--and why it's potentially damaging for a writer to ignore it--is that
everyone understands romance and relationships. They happen every day.
Only the most isolated person in the world would never develop a crush,
never feel their heart beat a little faster when someone particular walks into
a room, never blush at an inadvertent touch, or agonise over the meaning of it
all later on, well after it's over and nothing positively one hundred percent definite
happened again.
People have many opinions about what
qualifies as a good or acceptable relationship. You only have to look at magazine bylines to see that the world
is crying out for advice in this particular area. People dream about it, talk about it, gossip about it, commit
murders and fight wars over it. It's
everywhere.
On the other hand, not everyone can associate
with mortal fear, existential angst, or many of the darker or more complex
emotions often associated with thrillers, crime novels, speculative fiction,
and literary fiction.
Having spent at least three novels in this
kind of territory, I felt it was time to come back to romance and see where it
would take me. I knew it wouldn't be
easy, as I said before. Because people
have definite ideas about romance, it's very easy to see when it's done
badly. I don't mean falling victim to
clichés. I have nothing against clichés
at all; they're part of the writer's pallet, and they can be employed to great
effect in the hands of a skilled storyteller.
My three romance-free novels showed me that I
couldn't avoid these particular clichés or modes of writing and be completely
satisfied with my own work. I want to
be moved as much as my readers do--and the plain fact is that the stories that
have moved me most in recent years, to tears in some cases, have been
romances. These include the touching
fables of Hayao Miyazaki; the tragic space operas of Ian M. Banks; the majestic
fantasies of Tim Powers--hell, the best TV I've seen in recent years (and I
know it's a repeat, but I'm a slow learner) was Sense & Sensibility with
the smouldering Colin Firth. I sat up
until three in the morning, finishing off that particular show on DVD because I
was completely and utterly hooked by the romance of it all. Then there's SeaChange, The Time Traveller's
Wife, Garden State, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, etc etc etc.
So where to start? The one thing I knew is that, when it comes to storytelling, you
can't force anything. You may want to
write a bestselling thriller like Dan Brown's THE DA VINCI CODE (which has the
stink of romance to it too) but sometimes things just don't quite work out the
way you want them to. My novel THE
CROOKED LETTER is a case in point. It
was supposed to be a strange love affair between two identical twins and
a woman they meet in Europe, an affair which inadvertently brings about the end
of the world, but the story came out much darker than I had initially imagined
it. Why? I don't know, entirely. I
know that you can't write something if your heart isn't 100% behind it; you
can't put romance into fantasy just by thinking it'd be a good idea, just as
you can't put fantasy into romance simply by adding a few elves and a
dragon. You have to work at it, and
feel it, and invest in it, and take risks with it. And in the end I know that, particularly where romance is
concerned, my fiction is powerfully fuelled by real life.
#
A writer more famous than me once counselled
that we should "write on the edge of our emotions." There are few sayings in the craft more
powerful than this. In retrospect, I
can see my books echoing my love-life with uncanny accuracy, even when I wasn't
trying to. My second novel, THE
RESURRECTED MAN, featured a pair of star-crossed detectives forced into
physical proximity but remaining emotionally light-years apart. I wrote this novel shortly after ending a
relationship with a woman who lived in Texas, and with whom I had obviously
felt feelings of distance and isolation, albeit in a very different way.
The Orphans trilogy, which followed the
loveless Evergence series, dealt with a relationship that wasn't romantic at
all, but had a certain dependency to it.
The main character yearned for another character far away, while he
developed a bond for someone better matched and much closer. Again, not so different to real life.
In the Star Wars trilogy I co-wrote with
Shane Dix, our editors in the US kept pulling the rugs out from under us. Every time we set up a couple of characters
to get together, we'd be told to keep them apart--the literary equivalent of
prick-teasing. Nothing at all like real
life there, thank goodness, but it did leave me with a strong romantic urge
that had gone utterly unfulfilled.
At about this time, I went from one
relationship to another in real life, with something of a painful wrench. This pain is what clouded THE CROOKED
LETTER, I believe. A novel about the
end of a world is not so far removed, thematically, from a novel about the end
of a relationship, and I feel now, looking back on it, that I needed to get
that angst out of my system before I could finally get down to the good stuff.
#
That's where I was in 2003, when I swore to
put more romance in my fiction. I've
since finished two very different series.
One was the space opera diptych called Geodesica; the other was a
fantasy series called the Books of the Cataclysm. Both of them are riddled with romance--romance that feels honest
and fresh to me, not lashed together and forced into the story where it isn't
required.
I'll talk about Geodesica first. The first book, ASCENT, came out last year,
and the second, DESCENT, my twentieth novel, has just been published in
Australia. It's a sprawling space opera
filled with post-human characters and an interstellar empire in the
making. There are anti-privacy laws,
alien artefacts, conspiracies, big explosions--all the stuff I love so
much. And buried in the middle of all
that, driving everything in the book, is the story of two of the three main
characters, Dominic Eogan and Melilah Awad.
They have a long and painful history. It's the old story of two people who meet
and make an instant connection, one that defies good sense but can't be
denied. One is a colonist, the other a
traveller. Although they know it will
be difficult, they embark on a long-distance relationship that lasts forty
years, snatched in blissful moments between long absences. And for a while, it works.
["Dominic Eogan was a
dye that seeped into her," Melilah thinks at one point, "[a dye]
coloring everything. She saw the same
friends, did the same work, and went the same places. But now they all lacked him, as though she was seeing the
world through a filter that made it a darker, unhappier place."]
Inevitably, some might say, the relationship
ends badly. Eogan leaves without
explanation to embark on a career that will change him, turn him into something
she feels she cannot love. The pain of
separation is agonising for both of them.
The lack of communication only makes it worse.
["Sometimes she wished
that he had died, not just disappeared.
That would have been easier than coping with his utter rejection of
her--and the thought that he was still out there somewhere, imagining himself
free."]
Without proper closure, the memories fester;
emotions curdle.
150 years later, they meet again under
extraordinary circumstances, and are forced, finally, to resolve the issues
between them. Imagine what it would be
like to stew over a messy break-up for a century and a half! In science fiction, we can explore such
scenarios. How long would it take to
get over such an incredible silence?
Would it be possible, ever, to heal such a rift and begin the relationship
anew?
In extraordinary situations, people do
extraordinary things. That's one of the
strengths of fiction in general--not just science fiction: it can put us in
situations we might never experience first-hand--like taking a million years to
think things over, or literally adopting new identities when old ones have
proven dysfunctional. The existence of
such possibilities doesn't mean that love is going to get easier in the
future. Quite the opposite, I
believe. In this complex, modern world,
love faces challenges our ancestors couldn't have imagined: on-line affairs;
work taking a lover to the other side of the planet; the conflict for women
between reproductive and vocational urges; and so on. It's only going to get more interesting, I think. Given life-spans hundreds of years long and
a whole galaxy to play in, humans are going to keep on inventing new problems
and fumbling around in the dark for solutions.
["I'm not the same
woman," Melilah tells Eogan towards the end of DESCENT. Don't mistake me for her--the one who loved
you the first time around, then tried to hate you when that failed. I've changed, just as you have changed. We're extensions of who we were when we
first met, not continuations. ... It's
time to stop thinking about the dead and concentrate on living. Our relationship isn't something I want to
be a victim of; it's something I want to choose and work at. ... I don't know if we'll have a future together
at the end of it, but I'm willing to explore the possibilities. Are you?"]
#
That's Geodesica. It has kissing, and sex, and closeness, and heartbreak--and,
well, I won't reveal if it has a happy ending.
But I will say that from the very beginning I wanted these guys to get
together. It matters to me. It matters to me because they're drawn
deeply from my own life. Love at first
sight, long-distance cravings, working hard to make a dream a reality and to
patch up mistakes and misconceptions--that has been my life for the last few
years. It fuels my storytelling like a
fire under a cauldron.
Was Geodesica cathartic for me? Perhaps.
It was certainly a sometimes-painful expurgation of feelings that can be
hard to express in everyday life. When
Melilah agonises over "wrenching emotional dislocation, betrayal of
the worst kind--one that might have been avoidable had [Eogan] only talked
to her about it, or made a clean break", it's true that I've been on the
delivery end of such hurt, to my great regret.
When Dominic Eogan thinks that he "knew better than to call her. Forgiveness was not--and had never been--an
option. But he wanted to anyway. Even after so long, he still missed
her"--I can explore my own feelings of loss in a way that will, hopefully,
not bother anyone else or invade any private spaces.
Writing on the edge
of our emotions is a dangerous exercise.
Holding what hurts up to the light and examining its every facet, its
every flaw, risks teaching us more about ourselves than we'd like to know. But it can be rewarding. THE RESURRECTED MAN taught me about my
feelings for my father. The Books of
the Change were inspired by the children in my life, and dealt with my own
feeling of frustrated fatherhood. In
Geodesica I confront relationship issues I didn’t deal with as well as I should
have, allowing me to move on to a much better headspace.
#
Then there's the Books of the Cataclysm. The last three books in the series, THE
BLOOD DEBT, THE HANGING MOUNTAINS and THE DEVOURED EARTH, are all, once again,
steeped heavily in romance and love.
There are three main relationships.
Two of the characters, Sal and Shilly, began their relationship in the
Books of the Change, when they were teenagers.
Now they're in their twenties and their love is stronger than ever. That doesn't mean, however, that it's been
easy. When their friend Skender
comments that he's glad they're still together because "that's the
way it's supposed to be", they "were destined," Shilly
responds that that "doesn't make it any easier, believe me. We may look good now, but it's not always
been like this. We've argued and broken
up and sworn we'd never talk to each other again, just like any other
couple." Skender doesn't quite
believe her; he's on a romantic journey of his own, and everything looks full
of possibility and excitement. And Sal
knows the way he's feeling: "Love wasn't supposed to be painful; in the
stories he'd been told as a kid, it didn't seem to be. Yet there were times he'd thought that, if
he'd known just how vulnerable it would make him, he might have stayed in the
Haunted City with [his father] and devoted himself to a life of celibacy. He was glad he hadn't."
That's the core
relationship of the book. It's one
based on history and hard work. "Wait until you've
been with someone as long as us," Shilly tells Skender. "Then you'll know what it's like to
have scars no one else can see."
But neither Sal nor Shilly regrets the time they’ve been together;
they're not looking for anyone else.
Their relationship is as solid as a relationship can be, and I have no
intention of breaking them up. Ever.
The second
relationship is the one driving the story.
Sal possesses a complicated family history involving cuckolds,
kidnapping and death. His mother left
his genetic father, Highson, for a journeyman before he was born; while on the
run, Sal's grandmother stole his mother back, but couldn't find him; his mother
then died trying to escape, losing her mind by magic into a terrible place
called the Void Beneath. Highson, who
loved Sal's mother even though that love was never returned, has spent the
years since trying to find her, seeking ways to bring her out of the Void, even
though such an attempt might well cost him his life. What he ends up risking, quite by accident, is the life of his
son and the safety of the entire world, for the thing he brings out of the Void
is not his ex-wife at all, but something much more dangerous.
Is this romance? It's a love story without a happy ending, but I think it comes
from the same place. It's an
acknowledgement from me that people do crazy things for love. Sometimes they succeed; sometimes they
don't. Highson's quest is noble in its
own way, even when it's obsessive and selfish at the same time. Love is often selfish, and it sometimes
hurts the people around us when they get in its way. "When love conquers all," to quote the final book in
the series, "love itself must be conquered." It takes a greater and more terrible
sacrifice than Highson has already made to put things right again, and to heal
the rifts between him and the living, rather than him and the dead.
The third relationship in the book involves
Sal's teenage friend Skender and a girl Skender meets in the walled city of
Laure. He's a student Stone Mage and
she's a grounded flyer. He'd normally
be stuck in his father's school, on the other side of the continent. She would normally be aloft on a charmed
flying wing, looking for treasure in a magical canyon inhabited by
monsters. THE BLOOD DEBT throws them
together by chance, as so many unlikely couples have been, in fiction and real
life, and what seems at first to be prickly incompatibility gradually becomes
mutual respect and attraction. Skender
is a fish out of water. Chu is the
cocky local who needs him just as much as he needs her.
The push and pull of unspoken attraction, the
uncertainty of hints and assumptions, misunderstandings and awkwardnesses... Skender and Chu endure all the awful moments
I went through as a teenager. Earlier,
I mentioned my fear of calling someone for a date; that feeling is ingrained in
my mind, and poor old Skender is going through it now as a result.
"He froze solid
while saying goodnight, [wondering if she was] waiting for him to kiss
her. Part of him wanted to, very
much. The exhilaration of flying
together still thrilled through him, even in his exhausted state. His heart pounded.
"But he had
never kissed anyone before and didn't know what to do. What if he misjudged the moment? What if she wanted nothing more from him
than a chance to get her license back?
What if she thought he was nothing but a geeky kid?
"The moment was
gone as soon as it came. She wished him
sweet dreams, inscrutable as ever, and he kicked himself all the way upstairs
to his room."
Chu is the sassy heroine of the novel. She talks back; she's cool in the face of
danger; she gives Skender lots of shit.
But she's also a real person, and she pays a price for being the cool
one. She finds it hard to let her guard
down, and it takes time for her and Skender to get it together, what with his
lack of confidence on the other side of the balance. But they get there. The
culmination of their relationship is the happy ending I've always wanted to
write. In fact THE BLOOD DEBT ends with
a kiss, in the cheesiest and most wonderful way possible. Ah.
And it all goes downhill from there...
#
So there you have it. Geodesica and the Books of the Cataclysm
together amount to six novels, around a million words of romance-fuelled
story-telling. I don't think that makes
me a romance writer, but I do think I'm writing better fiction. I'm tapping into a part of me that has
languished in recent years, and I'm feeling happier for it. I hope that it will make readers happier in
turn, and I hope it will lead to more stories featuring romance in the
future. My new series, a dark fantasy
series for kids, has a key loving relationship that will develop as the stories
unfold. And Astropolis, my
gender-bending gothic space opera, will be full of sex. Maybe it will lead to more sales, but I
don't know about that, and in the end it doesn't really matter. I write for me, first and foremost. Everything else is secondary.
That sounds dangerously solipsistic, or
onanistic, and perhaps it is. "To
love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance," as Oscar Wilde once
said.
But rather than end on that dubious note,
I'll say that is nice to be in love with romance again. I hope it's a relationship that will last
for many more novels to come, and I hope it will continue to be fun. As Rose Franken said, "Anyone can be
passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly."