Planetary romance

Planetary romance (other synonyms are sword and planet, and planetary adventure) is a subgenre of science fiction in which the bulk of the action consists of adventures on one exotic alien—often technologically primitive—world, characterized by distinctive physical and cultural backgrounds. Some planetary romances take place against the background of a future culture where travel between worlds by spaceship is commonplace; others, particularly the earliest examples of the genre, do not, invoking flying carpets, astral projection, or other methods of getting between planets. In either case, it is the planetside adventures that are the focus of the story, not the mode of travel.

Prototypes and characteristics

As the label itself implies, the planetary romance extends the late-19th- and early-20th-century adventure-romance and pulp traditions to a planetary setting. Popular adventure fiction by writers such as H. Rider Haggard and Talbot Mundy placed bold protagonists in exotic milieus and "lost worlds"—for instance in still-unmapped regions of South America, Africa, or the Middle East and Far East—while a parallel variant was set in imagined or historical locales of antiquity and the Middle Ages, trends that also fed into the modern fantasy genre.

In planetary romance, the narrative energies of space opera are applied to the popular adventure mode (note that in English romance here denotes heroic, mythic, and allegorical narrative rather than the realist novel). The stalwart adventurer becomes a space traveller, often from Earth, which functions analogically as the modern Western world and North America—centres of technology and (self-conscious) colonialism. The other worlds—very often, in early examples, Mars and Venus—replace Asia and Africa as the exotic elsewhere, while hostile tribes of aliens and their decadent monarchies take the place of stock Western images of "savage races" and "oriental despotism." Although the planetary romance has been used to voice a wide spectrum of political and philosophical positions, a persistent subject is first contact—encounters between alien civilizations, the difficulties of communication, and the frequent disasters that ensue.

The expression "planetary romance" is attested at least as early as 1978, when Russell Letson, in his introduction to the reissue of Philip José Farmer's novel The Green Odyssey (1957), described the tradition explicitly:

The major tradition is the subgenre which may be called the "planetary romance". This subgenre is distinguished from its close cousins, the space opera and the sword and sorcery fantasy, by its setting (an exotic, technologically primitive planet), although it shares with them the adventure-plot conventions of chases, escapes, and quests.