First of all, I’d like to thank Christie for letting me come on
her blog and blab about all kinds of random stuff. As you guys know, she’s
really quite awesome!

Next, I’d like to do the actual blabbing.

You see, my readers sometimes ask why I chose to write sci-fi
romance instead of going the more accepted paranormal route. After all, they
know that some of my favorite authors include Lara Adrian and Karen Marie
Moning – whose books are the embodiment of the PNR genre.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the simple truth of the matter is
that I love sci-fi romance just a tiny bit more. And, since you guys are
reading this on Christie’s blog, I assume you don’t hate it either :).

I read my first science fiction romance when I was eight years
old. **Okay, I think I just heard someone gasp. Please, relax, there were no
sex scenes there!**

It was actually Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars. Despite the lack of sex scenes, it was a
wonderful book that captured my imagination and made me fall in love for the first
time – in love with the love story of John Carter and Dejah Thoris. (And, no,
the recent John Carter movie didn’t do their
romance justice at all. Why are books always so much better than movies?)

Anyways, I digress.

In my mind, paranormal and sci-fi romance have always been
somewhat interchangeable. After all, is there a big difference between a
handsome vampire and a gorgeous alien? To me, they were both a lot of fun to
read about. As a teenager, I stalked my local library and spent hours at a nearby
Barnes & Noble in search of books that would satisfy my craving for
exciting romance (as defined by my teenage self to be anything with a fantasy
element). Unfortunately, in the pre-Twilight days, paranormal OR
science fiction romance was quite difficult to find. There were maybe a handful
of authors who specialized in the genre (Dara Joy and Amanda Ashley come to
mind), but they were nowhere near prolific enough to satisfy this voracious
reader.

Thankfully, Twilight burst on the scene,
causing the paranormal romance category to multiply so fast it was as though
vampires were breeding with werewolves (oh, wait, that was actually happening). In any case, now you can find PNR with
every possible variation of shapeshifter, dragon, sparkling and non-sparkling
vampire, and fairy. Sci-fi romance, however, remains very much a niche – though
growing quite nicely with the proliferation of indie authors such as Christie
and myself.

So why do I like sci-fi romance more? In a nutshell, it offers a
more believable setting that still lets you get lost in a world that’s quite
different from our own – a world where you can have the equivalent of miracles
and characters/situations that would be unacceptable in regular contemporary
romance.

In my mind, it is unlikely – but feasible – that a superior
alien race planted the seeds of life on Earth and helped guide human evolution
(shameless plug for the Krinar Chronicles 🙂 ). It is less plausible that
fairies exist. And, for some reason, the “less plausible” part seems to disallow
my brain to make that leap – the leap that says something like this *could*
happen to me. 

So, to cut a long blog post short, I love sci-fi romance because
it’s removed from the everyday world and thus works as an escapist fantasy, but
it’s just plausible enough to make the fantasy seem real.

If you’d like to find out more about aliens who created the
human race (and don’t mind explicit sex scenes!), you can check out my website
at http://www.annazaires.com.