Planetary romance

Planetary romance is a subgenre of science fiction or science fantasy story in which the bulk of the action consists of adventures on one or more exotic alien planets, 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, and invoke flying carpets, astral projection, or other methods of getting between planets. In either case, it is the planetside adventures which are the focus of the story, not the mode of travel.

As the name of the genre suggests, the planetary romance is an extension of late 19th and early 20th century adventure novels and pulp romances to a planetary setting. The pulp romance (of writers like H. Rider Haggard and Talbot Mundy) featured bold characters in exotic settings and "lost worlds" such as South America, Africa, the Middle or Far East; a variant type took place in real or fictional countries of ancient and medieval times, and eventually contributed to the modern fantasy genre.

In the planetary romance, space opera transformations are applied to the pulp romance genre: the bold adventurer becomes a space traveler, often from Earth, which itself stands in for modern Europe and North America (understood as centers of technology and colonialism). Other planets (often, in the earlier history of the genre, Mars and Venus) replace Asia and Africa as exotic locales; while hostile tribes of aliens and their decadent monarchies substitute for Western stereotypes of "savage races" and "oriental despotisms". While the planetary romance has been used as a mode for expressing a very wide variety of political and philosophical thought, an enduring subject is the encounter of civilizations alien to each other, their difficulties in communicating, and the frequently disastrous results that follow.

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