Sci-mance

Recently I read two interesting books- The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegge and The Host by Stephenie Meyer. Both are science fiction by female writers featuring a Love meets Sci-Fi approach. They are both novels that focus on a heterosexual romance as the main tension and make this trite approach more compelling by interweaving science fiction (for Time Traveler, obviously it was a time traveling male lead, for The Host it was an alien female protag). Now, if we wanted to be really simple we could imagine this new/revived/niche brand of books as

the romance novel + the science fiction novel= sci-mance
OR
a traditionally female genre + a traditionally male oriented genre

both with lower class/taste associations (trashy paperbacks, either one) but with enormous fan cultures. This hybrid breed of rom-sci or the scimance could possibly be linked with the success of Lost, as Brilliant Brandy points out. or Battlestar Galactica, a futuristic melodrama. I enjoyed Lost a lot more when it focused on the emotional relationships of the survivors and less on weird smoke monsters. But it's an interesting clash of two gender associated genres.

It brings to mind Buffy, but I think there's a gender difference between magic/fantasy and science fiction. Which is the reason I'm not going to talk too much about Meyer's Twilight Saga. The vampire myth is very much still rooted in the gothic romance rather than the futuristic science stuff I'm talking about here.

But back to my original point: TTW vs Host. My problem with the Time Traveler's "wife" was that it wasn't really about wife/Clare at all. Once again, we have a woman waiting while the action goes on around her. She really does nothing at all, has no growth, makes no interesting choices. Now, I did not hate the book. I actually give it a B+ for originality and trying to give equal shares to both Henry (the typical male action-maker, who travels constantly through time) and Clare (the literal "stay at home" or "stay in time" wife). But did the sci-fi stuff save it from presenting a sort of traditional Peter Pan-esque tale of courtship? No. At the end, Clare is clearly a version of Wendy, old and wrinkled, waiting at the window for Pan to visit her before she dies. She has chosen to grow up and old, to give up hectic age defying maneuvers and the chaos of constant action seeking.

But The Host was cool. I think that's exactly the right word. I enjoyed it so much, both academically and on an escapist level. It's about a breed of aliens that take over the bodies of whoever they invade. For example, they might live in seaweed on oceanic planet or in the bodies of dolphins or humans. In this case, it was a female alien named Wanderer who took over a human female body. This female presence was the protagonist- it was her journey, she was the different one, and it was her story. Her male romantic figure sort of followed her about and provided interest to the story. This is not a "great" novel: it is very fun pulp fiction, in a Veronica/Buffy way. The sci-fi frame was a great way to explore what it means to be human, to have a soul, to have different ideas about living- and dual personalities!

Point being, The Host was refreshing in the way it actually let a female be the true protagonist. It is a love story, and a science fiction novel, but it is also a book that sets the stage for a female figure to go on a voyage of self discovery.

So the scimance has a new mission:

To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no woman has gone before.