Inter-species Love Stories in Science Fiction
As I prepare my second book for publishing, I find myself thinking about this topic quite a bit. As if I needed an excuse to think about alien dudes banging.
My story is an m/m xenophiliac love story between a humanoid reptilian and a synthetic human. Silas, the synth, loses the only home he's ever known and is thrust into a terrifying universe of hostile creatures, hungry tentacle monsters, and mind-boggling social conventions. The reptilian people aren't fond of humans. What little peace there is, is tense as fuck and preceded by thousands of years of wars and widespread willful ignorance. So when Loc, a big, grumpy lizardman, encounters this small, seemingly helpless human man, he's wary, to say the least.
What follows is a tumultuous love affair that spans planets. The odds are against them, and so are all the damn people, but Silas and Loc will not go down without a fight!
I am a massive fan of xenophiliac romances. If you know anything about me, that probably doesn't come as a big shocker, but for those of you that don't: hell yeah, bring on them tentacles and big sexy Reptilians and weird-multi-mouthed-oblong-headed-murder-machines. Okay, maybe "Alien" was more horror than romance, but that's what fanfiction is for, right?
My favourite example has to be the Mass Effect game series. I'm not sure that it even really occurred to me before that? I mean, besides the obvious — I will neither confirm nor deny that I've read my fair share of tentacle monster hentai mangas… But Mass Effect was the first time I ever saw something like an inter-species alien romance treated seriously. Like not just ridiculous porn, and I fell in love with the concept. The whole romance aspect of that game played a big role in the inspiration for my book, in fact!
The Shape of Water (2017 film) was another outstanding example of inter-species romances done right. I'm not sure the creature in that movie is an 'alien' exactly, but it's close enough. Xenophilia and Teratophilia are so fucking closely related, the lines for me are blurred into a gradient. The love story is the focal point of that movie, and they've even got a sex scene or two that was super awkward for me, because I had watched it with family. But had I watched it alone, it would have been right up my fucking alley.
I don't know what it is about it. Maybe it's the taboo nature of an interspecies romance, or maybe it illustrates a feeling some of us live with daily, where we don't feel quite human. Maybe we feel like aliens and monsters in a way: Misunderstood, cast out, rejected by convention, or hidden parts of us would be if we let anyone catch a glimpse of who we really are. Perhaps it's the exotic nature of it, something completely different and outside of our realm of understanding, yet safe to project upon or escape into.
What are your thoughts? I am woefully lacking any proper m/m alien romance examples, so if you know of any good ones, throw em at me!