Love Is in the Air: Romance and Fantasy

0:04 Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and today we are in a romantic mood because we are fast approaching Valentine's Day and I wanted to have a look at the theme of romance in fantasy. So recently there's been the phenomenon of the romanticy and it's sort of reached ridiculous heights. It's like the main thing published by a lot of fantasy publishers and one of these sort of titles that really dominated is Rebecca Yarrow's The Fourth Wing and I think there's a second part as well.

0:52 She is following in a tradition that already existed. She didn't invent the genre but publishers have sort of packaged it as a particular thing. So why is romanticy so popular at the moment? Well, it is a blend of the existing love for the sort of kingdom love affair, the sort of elf prince, human woman. Sarah J. Mars has done quite a few books in this area where you get a similar thing but her romance originally in the 2010s didn't step into quite so explicit territory. What happened with Fourth Wing and why there was a new frisson of interest is that it sort of leaned more into a more explicit depiction of sex.

1:42 There is a readership out there, particularly sort of young women who came up through the Harry Potter reading, The Hunger Games, then Twilight and going on to the weirdly stepping sideways into the Fifty Shades. There is a sort of big readership out there for this and romance is a massive, massive part of the income stream for many publishers. People will read romances, romanticism one after the other, often as e-books, though Fourth Wing, of course, is a big paperback book as well. So, they have found a female audience really, I would say.

2:26 I'm not saying that men don't read it as well but when you think of a lot of the sort of hard-edge sci-fi or classic sci-fi, it doesn't tend to cater so much for a female taste or a female eye. Romanticism is doing that and women are more book buyers, more readers than men, so market forces are also behind it. And of course, the thing that you get is the exotic. There is plenty of sub-genres in romance. If you just want to find out how many there are, go and look at some sort of book aggregate system but you get things like Harem romances and Arab Sheikh romances and Regency romances and so on and so on and so on, pirate romances.

3:10 So, it fits well into this understanding that the background is going to be like this set dressing for a story which is powered mainly by a love story. Now, there's a lot else going on in Fourth Wing. It's also a coming-of-age story, a fairly sort of typical idea of the unregarded character who finds her power through discovering her skill as a dragon rider. But also, there's a sort of rebellion, that kind of edgy thing where there's a system that needs to be corrected. So, there's a lot of plot as well. So, very enjoyable but you have to also be ready for a certain sexual, certainly not younger YA sexual advance in it.

4:00 So, romanticy has found its readership. But if we dig back through where this all came from, I remember reading Anne McCathery. That's the first dragon rider story. She has a series called the Chronicles of Pern, first one being Dragonflight, which I loved as a teenager. Found it in the school library, I think. And I went back when romanticy sort of revived. I went back and read it and discovered that there, the sexual mores of that world are very much of that era. I think it was, let me just check here, it was published in 1969. There we go.

4:41 So, that's 56 years ago. And what we have here is a, I would say that the main female character is living in like a harem. So, she has all these dragon riders around her. It's like a Queen Bee idea. It's very 60s. So, you can see that the romance element in this fantasy is following the sort of ideas of what is sexually exciting in each decade. I found it quite difficult to read going back to it. What I found exciting and read without comment as a teenager, I now thought, oh, these relationships are all a bit skewed. So, I didn't enjoy it very much when I went back to it.

5:24 But there are, of course, we can't talk about romance in more recent fiction without mentioning Twilight. Now, I don't know how old you were when Twilight was around. I was a mother of a daughter of the age at which Twilight was sort of directed. And I remember my daughter was completely besotted by this series. So, I went and read it because I thought, why is she walking around the house holding Twilight? What is going on here? What's the secret sauce going on? And of course, you quickly see that it is a high school romance. It's got that breathless intensity of that crush that you get on the cool boy in the years above you.

6:09 Again, aimed at a female readership. And it's riveting. There's also, because of the vampirism thing, it reintroduces the idea of manners. So, if you think about a Regency story written like, say, Jane Austen, very small gestures have an erotic charge, you know, dancing with somebody. Or if you look at the film versions of Jane Austen, being handed into a carriage in Persuasion and Captain Wentworth takes one of the naughty little boys who's clambering over Anne off her back, relieving her of a load.

6:51 Tiny gestures which speak volumes about what's going on, the subtext of that relationship. Twilight does that through the metaphor of the vampire. How far can you go? Because the vampire might lose control because your blood is so tasty. And of course, the idea of blood and what have you, it's all very textual. And it has that element of danger. In modern times when anything goes, each to their own, it reintroduces an element of restrictions. And restrictions make for a better, tense relationship.

7:31 Because there are taboos and things you can't do and borders that are crossed, which are big in the relationship. So it was doing that. It was doing the high school, using vampire as this sort of coding for romantic rules. And, you know, there's lots of peril and attacks and drama. I can see why a teenage girl likes it. However, I do remember watching the film versions, taking a party of school kids, I think, you know, daughter's friends. I think it was the third film. I noticed that in the cinema, I and an adult, my dad, who'd come with their family, were both laughing at very different things from the girls.

8:18 Because I found it all a bit satirical. And I sort of laughed at a meta level, which I think wasn't really noticed at that stage by the audience. So if my daughter watched it today, she would pick up on those same signals. So what is a fantasy romance? Well, I think we first of all have to say it's not a fantasy with a romance in. So obviously, Tolkien, we all love Tolkien. There are romances in Tolkien. There's Aragorn and Arwen, Faramir and Erwin, Beren and Lúthien. These are romances, love stories, but they don't make Lord of the Rings a romance, because the main driver of the plot is that of friendship and sacrifice.

9:07 So it's not romantic love, it's filial, it's the love of comrades, the love for your country, it's that kind of love, the sort of love of the soldier fighting for what's right, or the person putting their life on the line. So exclude that. So if you're looking for a good romance in fantasy for reading over Valentine's Day or giving to somebody, I'm not into the very explicit version of this that you get in some romanticy. So I would not pick that myself, each to their own.

9:48 But there are some writers who've been around for a few years that I would recommend. So she's an older writer now, but I very much enjoyed Elizabeth Vaughan's War Prize trilogy. It starts with a book called War Prize. This one is the last in the series, Warlord. And it's really a story of what happens between a colonizer and a colonized and looking at how two cultures come together. And the romance is a way of showing that. Again, I would say it's a sort of YA upwards title.

10:28 But I very much enjoyed that. And I would recommend that. Again, it's an older book. So published in the early part of this century. And she's done others as well that sort of expand her world. And I very much enjoyed those. Another writer writing around the same time is Maria V. Schneider. The book I've got in my hand is Magic Study, but it starts with one called Poison Study, which has one of the best openings of any book, in my view. It starts with the main character, Yelena, who is in prison on Death Row. And she is dragged out after this awful experience.

11:11 She's dragged out and given the choice. You can either go to the noose, or you can become the food taster for the general who's in charge of this world. But of course, there's a high chance you'll die of poison. And I love that story. And it has a sort of slow burn romance that runs through the series. And the series expands from the first country in and goes into other nations, which is absolutely fascinating. So I would recommend that if you haven't read them already. And again, the world expands into other series alongside it.

11:51 Another series I like is Trudy Canavan's The Magician's Guild, which is a sort of tragedy. Sorry to spoil the end. But there's a tragic vein in this about Sonia, who's a trainee magician. Perhaps this is one of those ones which is evenly balanced, because in fact, the love story doesn't dominate. There's some other points of view. So it may actually be on the cusp, but it does definitely have a romance in it by the time you get to the second and third parts of the trilogy. I haven't actually really liked as much Trudy Canavan's other books in and around this one, but this first three I've really liked.

12:34 So I would recommend that. And of course, there is a huge world of books, which are primarily the sort of digital download Kindle world. Absolutely. Part of the landscape, which is chock-a-block with titles. There's a fascinating husband and wife duo who write as Elona Andrews. They have some very good books in that series, and the Kate Daniels series. And I've actually enjoyed some of the books she's written after, because normally you would expect romance to finish at wedding bells, but actually she's carried on, or they have carried on after.

13:19 And that's very enjoyable. It's quite a huge area. Talking about Mammoth series, another one, which is actually a detective story, is the J.D. Robb in-death series, which has a central couple who really are sort of the heart of it. But I think it's now into about 56 parts. And I have actually read all of them or listened to them over the years, but it's been running since the 90s. So yeah, I think they do about one or two a year. So if you like a sort of slightly futuristic cop romance, that's a good series. Though they do have the problem that when she started writing, it's actually Nora Roberts is the underlying writer.

14:03 There was, you know, 2050 felt a long way off and now we're catching up. So I don't know what she's going to do. Plus it's taking a very long time. J.D. Robb, life of the characters is going much more slowly than real life. So you keep wanting them to move a little bit further on with their relationship. So it's taking a while, that series, but enjoyable. The detective plots are always very entertaining and set in a futuristic New York. So yeah, catnip. So I've also written fantasy versions of romances.

14:45 And my first series writing as Joss Sterling was the Finding Sky series, which stretched to six books, which did very well for me back in the 2010s. And what I was thinking about was I was writing that is I wanted a sense of that intense finding the right person because often actually that's the heart of it. And this is where I'm going to rest on it is when you find the right person and you click together, that is such a big payoff. That is what we want. We want Elizabeth to find her Darcy.

15:26 In my case, you want your Sky to find her Zed. And that clicking together is why people read romances because it promises, and this perhaps is where it might be a bit of a fantasy, it promises there is someone out there for you if you just find them. So I hope this Valentine's Day that you have found that right person who clicks together with you, or if you've had one that didn't click that you're able to go on and find that person. So happy Valentine's Day and do pick up a good romantic fantasy and have some fun. Thank you very much for listening.