Books Ships in the Night How Do You Solve a Problem Like Romantasy By Jenny Hamilton | Published on May 15, 2025 Photo by Theo Crazzolara [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Theo Crazzolara [via Unsplash] A few years ago, I proposed this column to meet a shift in SFF publishing, where the major SFF tradpub imprints—Tor, Orbit, even Harper Voyager—had begun to seem less shy about including kissing, sex, and central romance storylines in their books. The genre crossover already existed in romance, but here came a crop of new books from genre-savvy SFF writers (CJ Polk, Aliette de Bodard, Freya Marske) who happened to be genre-savvy in romance, too. As a fan of both genres, I was thrilled to see SFF finally accepting the joys of cross-contamination. Then, uh, the landscape changed. Romantasy rode into tradpub on the coat-tails of Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorn and Roses series and Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series. Various writers have proposed ways of defining romantasy books, but I tend to ascribe to the Print Run podcast’s assertion that romantasy describes an audience rather than a group of books, which is why attempted genre definitions haven’t worked for me. You kind of know romantasy when you see it. Because of the sprayed edges. And the porn. (This is a joke; please do not yell at me.) I believe these to be two distinct phenomena, arising from two distinct sets of trends. Thing 1 and Thing 2, if you will. The audiences for these books overlap, to some extent. But they’re not coterminous. What is now, and ever shall be, coterminous is the scope of each and every SFF imprint’s desire to get Sarah J. Maas money for the SFF romances they are publishing. They have all figured out that the path to that outcome, whether their books are Thing 1 or Thing 2 or some blurry place in between, is paved with the word romantasy. I say that without judgment for anyone’s marketing department. Marketing books is hard. I have great respect for the people who do it well. As publishers have rushed to capitalize on the success of Thing 2, the SFF section at the bookstore has suddenly gotten packed with titles aimed at audiences other than the usual segment of SFF readership. It’s led to a certain level of, let’s say, bemusement among segments of the SFF reading audience who have less familiarity with (or interest in!) the romance genre. As a lifelong SFF fan myself, but a more recent convert to romance, I thought I’d have a go at finding the point of disconnect. Speculative fiction is a problem-proposing genre. It proposes problems like How shall we interact with monsters and How shall we navigate time travel, and then it dives in with relish, it gets its hands dirty, it reminds us that we are flawed and messy creatures who can no better answer how shall we travel among the stars than we do, in fact, answer how shall we manage world hunger. Piecemeal. Badly. With a lot of arguing. Maybe the problem will be solved in the end. Maybe in the end the problem will have gotten much much worse. Science fiction and fantasy aren’t making any promises about that. As a result, SFF readers tend to conceptualize our genre as one that challenges readers to think creatively and in fresh ways about the world we live in and the other worlds that might be possible. I don’t so much disagree with that idea as I worry about the way it gets framed as morally superior to other genres or ways of reading. For one thing, I don’t accept that “being challenged” is the goal everyone should be pursuing every time we pick up a book. For another thing, proposing problems isn’t the same thing as challenging readers to think new and more interesting thoughts—that varies tremendously depending on the author and the reader. By contrast, romance is primarily a problem-solving genre. The problem is how to sort out these specific characters, how to put them in happy relationships and lives they find fulfilling. Romance doesn’t need to propose the problem, because the problem is already here. How do we exist in relationship with other people? A given romance novel may concern itself with other questions, but the problem animating the plot is that of relationship, and the genre promises the reader that’s one problem that will be solved by the end. The answer is always the same; the answer is infinite variety. At the risk of repeating myself, I want to emphasize that I don’t consider the pursuit of shared happiness to be a less important question than anything speculative fiction takes up. In romance, I’ve found some of the most nuanced explorations of emotional truth and the complexities of human behavior that I’ve ever seen anywhere. I want to be clear that I’m speaking here about the structure of what each genre is trying to do. If you’ve read a romantasy that nebulously feels more like romance than SFF, it’s typically because the structure of the Thing 2 books tends more toward the romance side, the problem-solving side. Thea Guanzon’s Hurricane Wars series, for instance (Thing 2), cares most about these two people making it work, which they can’t do if the prince of the evil empire stays evil and the empire stays an empire. He loves her, so we know he’s going to have to start doing less oppression. CL Polk’s Kingston Cycle series (Thing 1) cares most about class injustice in Aeland, so each book in the trilogy builds on the work of the previous books to show us what a more just future for the country can look like (and the characters also kiss. It’s both!). You’re picking up on something real, but at the risk of drawing the wrong conclusion. To draw the right conclusion, I encourage SFF to take a page from the romance genre’s playbook. For all the genre’s faults, and they are many, romance readers are pretty much always excited to welcome new readers into the genre. The path by which someone comes to romance just doesn’t matter that much. If they’re here, it’s something to celebrate, and Romancelandia has a thousand amazing, smart, diverse book recs to guide them to the best of what our genre has to offer. I’d love to see speculative fiction taking a similar tack, rather than trying to redraw genre boundaries to keep romantasy outside our gates. We lose nothing by accepting that SFF is expansive enough to include writers and readers who came to the genre by different paths than we did, who arrived via Rebecca Yarros and Ali Hazelwood rather than CS Lewis and Orson Scott Card. Romantasy takes nothing from longtime SFF readers, but it does offer us a bright and golden chance to ensnare new readers in our genre nets.Thrillingly, marketing departments are already doing this (see above), by using the same term to describe Thing 1 and Thing 2. Did I personally dislike The Wren in the Holly Library? Yes. Will that stop me from joyfully telling its fans to read Lady Eve’s Last Con and The Scandalous Letters of V and J? Hell no. It has never benefited SFF to exclude writers like Nalini Singh and Kit Rocha and Alyssa Cole, and it won’t benefit us to exclude this batch of newcomers to our genre either. Whatever you think of the advent of romantasy onto the SFF scene, be assured that it isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s an opportunity.[end-mark] The post How Do You Solve a Problem Like Romantasy appeared first on Reactor.