At Åcon 14 in Mariehamn
recently, there was a panel on "Romanscify": by analogy with
"Romantasy", is there a subgenre that provides both a satisfying
romance and a satisfying SF story? The answer is "yes" of course, but
the panelists didn't seem to have many recommendations from outside
the relatively well-known SF space (Bujold, McCaffrey, The Ministry
of Time) and so I thought I'd mention some more here.
(I don't love the term, but at least they didn't spell it
"romansify". As the former Science Fiction Channel discovered after it
had committed to its new name and logo, "sify" is Polish slang for a
particular class of disease.)
There's always been SF with romantic elements of course, though
usually it's fairly "soft"; the stereotype of a hard-SF reader regards
Girls as a problem to be solved in much the same way that one might
try to escape from a damaged spacecraft, and too many later writers
regard women as set dressing or prizes, but this is hardly a problem
unique to SF.
But a specific recent trend that I've encountered is books that are
romance in genre (the primary narrative is about the formation of a
lasting sexual and emotional relationship) but SF in setting (and
often there is a secondary narrative of adventure). Often this is
written by authors primarily known for romance, or romantic fantasy;
for example, Jessie Mihalik's Consortium Rebellion, starting in 2019
and following the modern romance convention of a group of female
friends (in this case siblings) who will be paired off one per book in
largely independent stories; and Jennifer Estep's Galactic Bonds
(starting in 2022) which is an ongoing adventure story that gives much
of its time to the development of the central romance (and some other
ones).
There's also Michelle Diener's Class 5 series (starting in 2019),
which, yes, does have kidnapped Earth women falling in love with hunky
aliens, but also includes sapient AI battleships and how to educate
them in ethics.
Of course, the elephant in the room is J. D. Robb's …in Death SF
police procedurals, which started in 1995 and to which she has added
more or less two per year ever since (in among the writing of multiple
mainstream romances per year as Nora Roberts). The actual meeting,
wooing and marriage of the lead couple was most significant in the
early books, but their love for each other and how they negotiate
difficulties continues to be a major thread even now. One has to admit
that the worldbuilding is sometimes shaky; some cars can casually "go
vertical" but apparently not fly for any distance, off-planet exists
mostly as a place where the harshest sort of prison happens, it's not
clear whether there's FTL flight or not, there are robotic beat cops
and domestic servants but somehow no robots in any other job, and so
on. But Robb is at least trying not simply to transplant a modern
procedural into a stage with SF backdrop; some at least of the crimes
are specifically things that are only possible because of
technological or societal changes.
And there's Jayne Ann Krentz (sometimes credited as Jayne Castle),
another writer mostly of romances set in the real world, and her
Ghost Hunters series starting in 2000: again the SF is more flavour
than gritty detail, and the psi powers and alien not-cats could easily
have been magical instead, but this is a setting that was colonised
from Earth via an interstellar teleporter, which suddenly stopped
working. Like Anne McCaffrey's Pern it could have been told as a
fantasy, but the author chose not to.
I don't think any of these settings has so much as a star map, and
only one even has spaceships that go at different speeds (the
Consortium Rebellion, since its hyperdrives have a cool-down period,
and our heroes' ship has one that can cool down faster.)
I suspect some "real" SF readers may look down on this romance-first
(or police-first romance-second) style, and it does not give me
everything I look for in SF; but nor does any other single book, which
is why I read widely.