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Love Is in the Air: Romance and Fantasy · Mythmakers

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  Hello and welcome to MythBakers. MythBakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
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  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and today
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  we are in a romantic mood because we are fast approaching Valentine's Day and I wanted
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  to have a look at the theme of romance in fantasy. So recently there's been the phenomenon
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  of the romanticity and it's sort of reached ridiculous heights. It's like the main thing
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  published by a lot of fantasy publishers and one of these sort of titles that really dominated
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  is Rebecca Yarrow's The Fourth Wing and I think there's a second part as well. She
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  is following in a tradition that already existed. She didn't invent the genre but publishers
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  have sort of packaged it as a particular thing. So why is romance see so popular at the moment?
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  Well it is a blend of the existing love for the sort of Kingdom love affair, the sort of
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  elf prince, human woman, Sarah J. Mars has done quite a few books in this area where you get
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  a similar thing but her romance originally and the 2010s didn't step into quite so explicit
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  territory. What happened with Fourth Wing and why there was a new frisson of interest is that
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  it sort of leaned more into a more explicit depiction of sex which there is a readership out
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  there particularly sort of young women who came up through the Harry Potter reading, the
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  Hunger Games, then Twilight and going on to the weirdly stepping sideways into the 50 shades.
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  There is a sort of big readership out there for this and romance is a massive, massive part of
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  the income stream for many publishers. People will read romances, romances, one after the other
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  often as e-books though Fourth Wing of course is a big paperback book as well. So they have found
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  a female audience really I would say. I'm not saying that men don't read it as well but
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  where you think of a lot of the sort of hard edge sci-fi or classic sci-fi it doesn't tend to cater
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  so much for a female taste or a female eye. Romancey is doing that and women are more book buyers,
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  more readers than men so market forces are also behind it. And of course the thing that you get
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  is the exotic. There is plenty of subgenres in romance if you just want to find out how many
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  they are. Go and look at some sort of book aggregate system but you get things like
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  harry romances and arab-shake romances and reagency romances and so on and so on and so on, pirate
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  romances. So it fits well into this understanding that the background is going to be like this set
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  dressing for a story which is powered mainly by a love story. Now there's a lot else going on
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  in fourth wing. It's also a coming-of-age story, a fairly sort of typical idea of the unregarded
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  character who finds her power through discovering her skill as a dragon rider but also
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  there's a sort of rebellion that kind of edgy thing where there's a system that needs to be corrected
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  so there's a lot of plot as well. So very enjoyable but you have to also be ready for a certain
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  sexual and certainly not younger YA sexual advance in it. So romanticy has found its readership
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  but if we dig back through where this all came from I remember reading Anne McHathrey. That's the
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  first dragon rider story. She has a series called the Chronicles of Pern, first one being dragonflight
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  which I loved as a teenager found it in the school library I think and I went back
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  when romanticy sort of revived. I went back and read it and discovered that there the sexual more
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  rays of that world are very much of that era. I think it was let me just check here. It was published
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  in 1969. There we go. So that's you know 56 years ago and what we have here is a
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  I would say that the main female character is living in like a harem. So she has all these
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  dragon riders around her. It's like a queen D idea. It's very 60s. So you can see that the romant
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  element in this fantasy is following the sort of ideas of what is actually exciting in each decade.
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  I found it quite difficult to read going back to it. What I found exciting and read without comment
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  as a teenager I now have thought oh this these relationships are all a bit skewed. So I
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  didn't enjoy it very much when I went back to it. But there are of course we can't talk about
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  romance in more recent fiction without mentioning twilight. Now I don't know how old you were when
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  twilight was around. I was a mother of a daughter of the age at which twilight was sort of
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  directed and I remember my daughter was completely besotted by this series. So I went and read it
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  because I thought why is she walking around the house holding twilight? What is going on here?
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  What's the secret sauce going on? And of course you quickly see that it is a high school romance.
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  It's got that breathless intensity of that crush that you get on the cool boy and the years above you.
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  Again aimed at a female readership and it is it's riveting. There's also because of the
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  vampirism thing it reintroduces the idea of manners. So if you think about a regency story written
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  like say Jane Austen very small gestures have an erotic charge you know dancing with somebody or
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  if you look at the film versions of Jane Austen being handed into a carriage in persuasion and
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  captain Wentworth takes one of the naughty little boys whose clamoring over and off her back
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  relieving her of a load. Tiny gestures which speak volumes about you know what's going on the
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  subtext of that relationship. Twilight does that through the metaphor of the vampire? How far can
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  you go? Because the vampire might lose control because you're blood is so tasty and of course
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  you know the idea of blood and what have you it's all very textual and it has that element of danger
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  you know in all modern times when anything goes you know each to their own it reintroduces an
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  element of restrictions and restrictions make for a better tense relationship because there are
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  taboos and things you can't do and borders that across which are big in the relationship.
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  So it was doing that it was doing the high school using vampires this sort of coding for
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  romantic rules and you know there's lots of peril and attacks and drama and yeah you know
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  it I can see why a teenage teenage girl likes it however I meant I do remember watching the film
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  versions taking a party of school kids I think you know daughter's friends too I think it was a
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  third film that I noticed it in the cinema I and an adult were dad who'd come with their family
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  we were both laughing at very different things from the girls because I found it all a bit
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  satirical and I sort of laughed at a meta level which I think wasn't really noticed at that stage
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  by the audience so if by daughter watched it today she would pick up on those same signals
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  so what is a fantasy romance well I think we first of all have to say it's not a fantasy with a
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  romance in so obviously Tolkien we all love Tolkien there are romances in Tolkien there's
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  Argonne and Arwen Faramir and Erwin Barin and Lothian these are romances love stories
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  but they don't make Lord of the Rings a romance because the main driver of the plot
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  is that of friendship and sacrifice so it's not romantic love it's fiddle it's the love of
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  comrades the love for your country it's is that kind of love the sort of love of the soldier
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  fighting for what's right or the person putting their life on the line so exclude that
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  so I would if you're looking for a good romance in fantasy for reading over valentine's day or
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  giving to somebody I'm not I'm not into the very explicit version of this that you get in
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  summer and fantasy so I would not pick that myself each to their own but there are some writers
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  who've been around for a few years that I would recommend so she's an older writer now but I very
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  much enjoyed Elizabeth Vaughn's wall wall prize trilogy it starts with a book with wall prize this
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  one is I think the last in the series warlord and it's really a story of what happens between a
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  colonizer and a colonized and looking at how two cultures come together and the romance is a way
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  of showing that again I would say it's a sort of YA upwards title but I very much enjoyed that
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  and I would recommend that again it's an older book so published yet published in the
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  early part of this century and she's done others as well that sort of expand her world and I
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  very much enjoyed those another writer writing around the same time is Maria V Schneider this
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  the book I've got in my hand is magic study but it starts with one called poison study which
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  has one of the best openings of any book in my view it starts with the main character Yelena
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  who is in prison on death row and she is dragged out after this awful experience she's dragged out
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  and given the choice you can either go to the noose or you can become the food taster for the
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  general who's in charge of this world but of course there's a high chance you'll die of poison
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  and I love that story and it has a sort of slow burn romance that runs through
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  the series and the series expands from the the first country in and goes into other nations
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  which is absolutely fascinating so I would recommend that if you're looking if you haven't read
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  them already and again the world expands into other series alongside it and another series I like
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  is Trudy Kanavan's the magician's guild which is about it's a sort of tragedy sorry to dispolly
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  in but there's a tragic vein in this about Sonia who's a trainee magician perhaps this is one
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  of those ones which is evenly balanced because in fact the love story doesn't dominate there's
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  some other points of view so it may it may actually be on the cuss but it does definitely have a
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  romance in it by the time you get to the second and third parts of the trilogy I haven't actually
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  really liked as much Trudy Kanavan's other books in and around this one but this first three I've
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  really liked so I would recommend that and of course there is a huge world of books which are
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  primarily the sort of digital download Kindle world absolutely at part of the landscape which is
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  chock-a-block with titles there's a fascinating husband and wife duo who write as Ilona Andrews
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  they are some very good books in in that series and the Kate Daniels series and I've actually
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  enjoyed some of the books she's written after because you normally you would expect romance to
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  at wedding bells but actually she's carried on or they have carried on after and that's
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  very enjoyable it's quite a huge area talking about mammoth series another one which is actually
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  a detective story is the JD Rob in death series which has a central couple who really
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  sort of the heart of it but I think it's now into about 56 parts and I have actually read all of
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  them or listened to them over the years but it's been running since the 90s so yeah I think they've
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  do about one or two a year so if you like a sort of slightly futuristic cop romance that's a good
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  series though they do have the problem that when she started writing it's actually Nora Roberts
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  is the underlying writer it there was if you know 2050 felt a long way off and now we're catching up
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  so I don't know what she's going to do plus it's taking a very long time JD Rob please note
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  because it's been stretched over years the actual life of the characters is going much more
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  slowly than real life so you keep wanting them to move a little bit further on with their
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  relationship so it's as I it's taking a while that series but enjoyable the the those detective
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  plots are always very entertaining and set in a futuristic New York so yeah catnip
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  so I've also written fantasy versions of romances my first series writing as Josh Sterling
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  was the Finding Sky series which went stretch to six books which was did very well for me
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  back in the 2010s and what I was thinking about was I was writing that is I wanted a a a sense of
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  that intense finding the right person because often actually really that's the heart of it and this
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  is when I'm going to rest on it is when you find the right person and you click together
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  that is such a big payoff that is what we want we want Elizabeth to find her Darcy in my case
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  you want your sky to find her z and that clicking together is why people read romances because it
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  promises and this perhaps is where it might be a bit of a fantasy it promises there is someone
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  out there for you if you just find them so I hope this Valentine's Day that you have found that
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  right person who clicks together with you or if you've had a one that didn't click that you are
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  able to go on and find that person so happy Valentine's Day and do pick up a good romantic fantasy
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  and have some fun thank you very much for listening
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