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ROMANCE

                               September 8, 1993

In the interests of openmindedness,
I read a romance novel.  I think it
was by Johanna Lindsey.

The writing was pretty awful, but I
could get used to it.

The main character was entirely
useless, completely passive.

I mean, this is a plot:
"No, no, no, no, no-- yes!"?

I heard Dawn Friedman make an odd remark
recently about how they should do a
convention panel discussion on the subject
of what SF can learn from Romance novels.

  (1) I thought: yeah right, you can do an SF
  novel about an entirely passive character who
  just sits around saying "No, no, no... yes."

  (2) Except you could actually do that.  A
  character could be in control of something
  extremely valuable... a resource, an industry,
  an alien race, an alien artifact... and
  various factions could come up offering
  deals that keep getting rejected.

  (3) Actually, this is what
  "Season of the Mists"
  is about, isn't it?

                                                VILLAINOUS_MASK
    And I suppose this is the
    opposite of my old idea of
    translating the appeal of           That notion: the central
    male-fantasy fiction (e.g.          characteristic of
    Detective stories) into             male-oriented adventure
    women's fiction.                    fiction is contrived
                                        situations in which
                                        prohibited behavior is
                                        justified.  Spider-man
                                        never has any difficulty
                                        finding bad guys to beat
                                        up when he needs to.

                                        So the female analog would be
                                        something like situations in
                                        which playing the whore would
                                        be required by circumstances.



                      Possible Examples:

                      The female spy who lures men to
                      their dooms with her body,
                      strictly for patriotic reasons.



              In the early Marlene Dietrich
              movie "Blonde Venus", the
              wife becomes a rich man's
              kept woman to pay for her
              husband's expensive cure.

                            Ayn Rand's first novel "We the
                            Living" is about a woman who
                            sleeps with a Soviet official
                            to obtain medicine required by
                            her lover.







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