50 pages • 1 hour read
Ruby DixonIce Planet Barbarians
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Science-Fiction Romance
Science-fiction romance is a subgenre of romance that contains sci-fi elements. By combining the generic rules of romance—traditionally a more realist genre—with sci-fi elements, sci-fi romances often create allegories to question concepts of identity, attraction, power structures, and the meaning and purpose of love and sex for the individual and society. Like romance in general, sci-fi romance is often written by and marketed to women and has been seen as a way to adapt the predominantly male-centric traditional narratives of sci-fi for a female readership.
Texts in this genre follow the “golden rule” of romance, which dictates a happy ending, often known as a “happily ever after,” or HEA. Some works in the genre contain a more temporary element as part of the plot progression, known as “happy for now.” The HEA is usually related to some form of romantic attachment between two or more people but is often not restricted to that romantic attachment. HEAs often contain elements of other forms of satisfaction, such as finding personal meaning in life, reconciling with family, making new (non-romantic) connections, or working to process past traumas. Unlike the romance narrative, which must be fulfilled by the end of a work, these non-romantic HEA elements may still be in progress when a novel or series concludes.
Sci-fi romance combines various conventions of the sci-fi genre with this core romance narrative. Some prominent elements of sci-fi romance include suddenly finding oneself on a new planet (as in Ice Planet Barbarians), time travel, space opera, and alien invasion or visitation. As in Ice Planet Barbarians, the love interests in a sci-fi romance are frequently non-human, which allows the genre to explore questions of personhood in non-human characters, presenting an allegory for human identity and cultural perception. The trope of the traveler in an unfamiliar land often draws on elements of real historical exploration and cross-cultural interactions in order to draw these parallels. The alien settings, jeopardies, and obstacles of these narratives also provide opportunities to explore and challenge accepted ideas of self-determinism, control, and consent, including sexual consent, sometimes in ways that may be controversial and/or disturbing. Sci-fi romances are often sexually graphic and marketed as “erotic” literature; the sexual content of these narratives rely on sci-fi fantasy tropes including exoticism, fetishization, sexual violence, and the disruption of clear sexual consent boundaries. As a result, some works in this genre have been met with critical controversy around their presentation of sex and consent. In the case of Ice Planet Barbarians, this can be seen partly in the redaction of some graphic sexual assault material from Berkley Book’s print version when compared to the self-published original text.
Science-fiction romance can tend toward long serialization. The Ice Planet Barbarians series, for example, contains 22 novels and several novellas and has spurred two lengthy spin-off series; Grace Goodwin’s Interstellar Brides series, similarly, has more than 20 installments in its main series, as well as several spin-off series. In these long series, each installment typically focuses on a different couple (or polycule), with subplots that arc across installments.
Cultural Context: Kindle Unlimited, Digital Publishing, and Serial Romance
The 2000s and 2010s saw a significant rise in digital publishing, including opportunities for authors to self-publish directly to online audiences, i.e., to publish outside the traditional publication methods and through self-funding or other sponsorship. Although the self-publishing market was initially driven by blogs and internet communities, a number of corporations entered it to consolidate audiences and capture revenue. In 2014, Amazon launched its Kindle Unlimited (KU) platform, which functions as a subscription service for readers. KU members paid a monthly fee, during which they could “borrow” unlimited titles per month, akin to a paid digital library. Writers who used KU gave the platform exclusive publication rights for the duration of the contract and received monthly royalties based on the number of times their books were “borrowed.”
This was the KU protocol when Ice Planet Barbarians was first released in 2015. It essentially incentivized writers to create shorter installments: A 50-page story, for example, paid out the same as a 500-page epic. The six parts that now make up the novel were released in a serialized format, so readers had to borrow six titles, gaining the author six royalty payments. These installments were released over time, similar to 19th-century popular print serialization. When Amazon switched to a per-page payment metric for authors starting in 2016, Ice Planet Barbarians was re-released as a single novel; subsequent novels in the series have been published as single volumes with a more traditional chapter structure.
Despite the shift in payment structure, KU’s past prioritization of the serial shaped the genre. Many long-running sci-fi romance series (and other long romance serials) remain on the platform, often with shorter texts and rapid publication times. Dixon, for example, released eight titles in 2023, compared to the one or two that an author would likely release per year via more traditional publishing methods.
The non-traditional nature of KU and other peer-to-peer digital publishing platforms significantly disrupted the traditional nature of fiction distribution. For the first time, it was possible for any writer to publish without following the traditional steps, such as finding an agent and a publication book deal or incurring significant up-front costs. Because Amazon KU does not accept legal or reputational liability for the content published through its site (although the company will investigate complaints, especially of copyright infringement), content is not vetted or altered to the same degree as traditional publications. These shifts may be perceived in the nature of the work, which is often more informal and may show the lack of traditional editorial processes. The body of work is also different in character than the patterns of works that pass through establishment routes of assessment and categorization, often driving generic and thematic innovation. For the same reasons, online works may also be more niche, extreme, experimental, or graphic and may contain more potentially offensive content. While some critics consider that peer-to-peer forms of publication generate lower-quality content than traditional methods, many others perceive it as a democratization of the market for both authors and readers and as a dynamic creative revolution. Many traditional publishing houses now use peer-to-peer platforms as a means to assess the marketability of new works and authors.
