A friend of mine, Monalisa Foster, recently released Lineage, her third in the Ravages of Honor series.

When talking about it, the concept of “space regency” came up. Which wasn’t at all how I’d thought of them, but I can kinda see the framework when I turn my head sideways, and squint past the explosions, swordplay, space battles, and bioengineering.

Monalisa enthused that there ought to be enough space regency books to make it a full subgenre of scifi, and another friend, CV Walter, enthusiastically agreed.

I wasn’t planning on writing it myself, but I like both MonaLisa’s and CV’s books, so I’m interested in where this is headed, creatively speaking. I was never a fan of regency romances, so lacking the original source material and quite reluctant to go read it, I asked CV if there were other current examples of books that could fall in that subcategory. She tossed three titles at me, and I downloaded samples, then tried the first one.

Now, I knew what I was getting into. All three were Romance subcategory SciFi,  not Science Fiction Genre, subcategory regency romance. (For the former, think a book with a cover best described as “Dude, where’s my shirt?” The latter arguably includes A Civil Campaign by Lois Bujold.) The tropes are different, the pacing’s different, the plot beats are different, but… there are still some very good stories in the romance genre, as long as you’re willing to read them as the romance they are, instead of trying to judge them by a genre they are not.

This one… the writer was very good at her craft, as she could compel me to keep turning the pages. Even when I start wincing, and going “That makes no sense! That’s tactically past stupid and on to suicidal! Economically, that’s not feasible. Wait, what? Are you mad? No, a concubine and a mistress are not interchangeable terms!”

This book, by the way, is higher in the Kindle store than I have ever reached. It’s emotionally satisfying and visually delightful while completely insubstantial, the mental equivalent of cotton candy at a festival. For readers who are stressed out and exhausted and want to apply zero mental thought to their entertainment, and have a happily ever after, all the customer reviews agree it’s delightful.

Unfortunately, I can’t stop looking behind the curtains and inside the access panels, and judging the work based on that. So, naturally, I was ranting to CV Walter about all the shortcomings in worldbuilding and plot, up to and including my allergy to using “Failure to talk to each other for 5 minutes like adults.” to set up 5 years of melodrama.

She giggled. And then she allowed as how she was well aware, and had started her own response novel to it. And challenged me to a bet, on who could write a response to it by LibertyCon.

My backbrain completely ignored the due date, dropped the story I was working on, and dove into worldbuilding. By the time I’d fixed some of the economics, and jettisoned the cultural bits that made no sense, as well as the idiot-ball plot, I was left with two people who were supposedly competent, a small empire formed in a star cluster, and… that was about it.

Then my brain started deciding this was the time to play other tropes straight, with sarcastic commentary. At least, that’s what I’m blaming for the Not A Love Triangle, to say nothing of the Kraken. Whose attempts at giving mating advice are wildly species inappropriate, and whose fashion sense is… also species-inappropriate.

I hit 20K on this thing yesterday. Apparently we’re still going to have balls, and tea, and Court, and… CV is giggling because it’s going to meet the letter of the bet and violate every single romance trope it encounters, as I write a MilSF thriller.

And still end up having a romance subplot anyway.

What can I say? Give me elites and all those class-conscious comedy of manners possibilities, and I’ll still turn out something more like John Van Stry’s Summer’s End instead of Regency In Spaaaaace!

I refuse to apologize for the puns.

What are you working on?