Planetary romance (other synonyms are sword and planet, and planetary adventure) is a subgenre of science fiction in which the bulk of the action consists of adventures on one exotic alien—often technologically primitive—world, 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, invoking flying carpets, astral projection, or other methods of getting between planets. In either case, it is the planetside adventures that are the focus of the story, not the mode of travel.
Prototypes and characteristics
As the label itself implies, the planetary romance extends the late-19th- and early-20th-century adventure-romance and pulp traditions to a planetary setting. Popular adventure fiction by writers such as H. Rider Haggard and Talbot Mundy placed bold protagonists in exotic milieus and "lost worlds"—for instance in still-unmapped regions of South America, Africa, or the Middle East and Far East—while a parallel variant was set in imagined or historical locales of antiquity and the Middle Ages, trends that also fed into the modern fantasy genre.
In planetary romance, the narrative energies of space opera are applied to the popular adventure mode (note that in English romance here denotes heroic, mythic, and allegorical narrative rather than the realist novel). The stalwart adventurer becomes a space traveller, often from Earth, which functions analogically as the modern Western world and North America—centres of technology and (self-conscious) colonialism. The other worlds—very often, in early examples, Mars and Venus—replace Asia and Africa as the exotic elsewhere, while hostile tribes of aliens and their decadent monarchies take the place of stock Western images of "savage races" and "oriental despotism." Although the planetary romance has been used to voice a wide spectrum of political and philosophical positions, a persistent subject is first contact—encounters between alien civilizations, the difficulties of communication, and the frequent disasters that ensue.
The expression "planetary romance" is attested at least as early as 1978, when Russell Letson, in his introduction to the reissue of Philip José Farmer's novel The Green Odyssey (1957), described the tradition explicitly:
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction mentions two caveats as to the usage of the term. First, while the setting may be in an alien world, if "the nature or description of this world has little bearing on the story being told," as in A Case of Conscience, then the book is not a planetary romance. Second, hard science fiction tales are excluded from this category, where an alien planet, while being a critical component of the plot, is just a background for a primarily scientific endeavor, such as Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, possibly with embellishments. Allen Steele writes that while the label "space opera" has been posted on any story away from Earth, it stands apart from "planetary romance", which he describes as a "close cousin" of "space opera".
Early examples in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Among nineteenth-century prototypes of the form—mostly set on Mars—is Across the Zodiac (1880) by Percy Greg, which employs "apergy" (a speculative form of antigravity) to reach the Red Planet. A significant precursor of the genre is Edwin L. Arnold's Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905), in which an officer reaches Mars by magic carpet and undertakes an adventure with a princess, a theme later developed more successfully by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the same vein are Gustavus W. Pope's "Romances of the Planets": Journey to Mars (1894) and Journey to Venus (1895).
In the early twentieth century, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) by David Lindsay is often read less as straightforward science fiction than as a philosophical novel, using the alien world principally as a vehicle for exploring philosophical themes.
Edgar Rice Burroughs and "sword and planet" stories
The first writer to reach a wide market for this kind of story was Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose initial Barsoom (Mars) tales appeared in the pulp magazine The All-Story in 1912.
Burroughs's Barsoom presents a colorful, heterogeneous mix of cultures and technologies that is typical of classic planetary romance. Among its futuristic devices are the "radium engine" and aircraft sustained by the "eighth ray," which provides buoyancy. The setting features Martian cavalry and a dynastic social order of emperors and princesses.
The content of the Barsoom saga is steeped in swashbuckling adventure: frequent duels, arena combats, hairbreadth escapes, and clashes with monstrous creatures; for these works, the retrospective label "sword and planet" has often been applied.
These novels belong as much to science fiction as to fantasy, although elements of "pure" fantasy and the supernatural are minimized or given in-universe explanations: on Barsoom, faculties such as telepathy operate machinery by thought in A Princess of Mars, while cults and supposed deities are unmasked as superstition or imposture within the narrative.
The Dune universe created by Frank Herbert and Star Wars by George Lucas both draw on this fusion of the futuristic with the quasi-medieval—knightly orders, principalities, and codes of honor reframed through technology.
Thanks to Burroughs's success, numerous imitators followed, including Otis Adelbert Kline, who consciously adopted the adventurous planetary romance pattern in his Venus trilogy (the Grandon of Venus books) and later his Mars duology (the Swordsman of Mars novels). Burroughs himself revisited the formula with the Venus series (Carson of Venus) in the 1930s. In 2007 the American publisher Paizo launched the Planet Stories imprint to reissue classics of science fantasy and planetary romance, including new editions of Kline's Martian novels.
The pulps and the codification of the form (1926–1939)
The rise of specialized science fiction pulps from 1926—beginning with the launch of Amazing Stories in April—opened a new market for adventure tales set on other worlds, a market that expanded markedly through the 1930s.
Among the new periodicals, Planet Stories (from 1939) stood out, being designed to publish exclusively adventure-centered interplanetary fiction. In the same year Startling Stories (Standard/Better Publications) also debuted as a sister title to Thrilling Wonder Stories, with a one-complete-novel-per-issue format. In parallel, established fantastic-fiction magazines such as Weird Tales had, from the outset, alternated weird-science and scientific detection with the more familiar fantasy and horror.
One of the leading writers in the mode was C. L. Moore, with the cycle about the adventurer Northwest Smith, inaugurated by the story Shambleau in Weird Tales (November 1933). In Moore's stories the swashbuckling action recedes before psychological tension and the push-and-pull of fear and fascination for the unknown, often with an explicitly erotic component.
Robert E. Howard engaged the form with Almuric (1939), a three-part novel with strongly adventure-forward plotting set on an alien planet dominated by tribal societies and a hostile environment, where physical conflict and survival take center stage. The book translates into a planetary frame the narrative models of heroic and pulp fiction, with a terrestrial protagonist asserting physical superiority in an exotic, primitive world.
Stanley G. Weinbaum contributed A Martian Odyssey (1934), often cited as an early planetary romance that advances a more articulated imagining of alien otherness: Mars is not merely an exotic backdrop but the site of encounter with a radically different being, described with biological and cultural attentiveness—anticipating concerns central to the more mature genre.
1940s and 1950s: consolidation and maturation In the 1940s and 1950s, one of the most significant contributions to the mode came from Leigh Brackett, a regular in Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, who honed a controlled, adventure-forward strain of planetary romances often set on a Mars cognate with Burroughs's. Within this period fall the three short novels in the Eric John Stark sequence that ran in Planet Stories: The Secret of Sinharat (originally Queen of the Martian Catacombs, Summer 1949), People of the Talisman (originally Black Amazon of Mars, March 1951), and Enchantress of Venus (Autumn 1949).
In parallel, Startling Stories published key texts: in August 1952 Philip José Farmer's The Lovers and in September 1952 Jack Vance's Big Planet. The Lovers, later expanded to book length in 1961, made Farmer famous for its joint treatment of sexual and xenobiological themes and won him the 1953 Hugo as "most promising new writer." Big Planet provided a long-running science-fictional model for the planetary romance: an immense world poor in metals, which fosters low-technology societies. Much of Vance's later SF belongs to the mode: the sequel Showboat World (1975); the Alastor cluster trilogy; the Durdane trilogy; the Cadwal Chronicles; the four-volume Planet of Adventure (also known as the Tschai sequence, 1968–1970); many of the Magnus Ridolph stories; the five-volume Demon Princes; and stand-alone works such as Maske: Thaery (1976) and the story The Moon Moth (1961).
Among writers active from the 1930s through the 1950s was Murray Leinster: his The Forgotten Planet (1954) assembled, as a fix-up novel, material originally published between 1920 and 1953. In the same time frame, C. S. Lewis issued his Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945).
The Survivors (1958) by Tom Godwin is an epic about four thousand human colonists abandoned to die on a cold, hostile world. The Forgotten Planet (1954) by Murray Leinster—whose first two chapters were published as stories in 1920 and 1921—relates the fortunes of a small group of humans regressed on a world only partially terraformed.
From the 1960s onward
From the mid-1960s onward, the traditional Solar-System planetary romance waned in popularity as space exploration revealed the hostility and desolation of nearby planets—most notably with the 1965 Mariner 4 images that dramatically altered the popular and genre perception of Mars. In parallel, writers increasingly shifted their stories to exoplanetary settings, breezily invoking conventions such as hyperspace or other faster-than-light devices to justify interstellar travel.
An exception is the long-running Gorean sequence by John Norman, launched with Tarnsman of Gor (1966): the cycle is set on a Counter-Earth that shares Earth's orbit, located on the opposite side of the Sun near the system's L3 point. The astronomically problematic premise is presented without real physical justification, a convention long tolerated within the subgenre.
At the same time, a self-conscious retro revival of sword and planet emerged. Lin Carter inaugurated the Callisto cycle with Jandar of Callisto (1972), an explicit homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Martian scenarios. Michael Moorcock, under the pseudonym Edward P. Bradbury, offered his own Martian trilogy featuring Kane of Old Mars (1965). In the same years Kenneth Bulmer, chiefly as Alan Burt Akers, launched the expansive Dray Prescot cycle set on Kregen, explicitly conceived as a Burroughsian pastiche, published for decades by DAW Books and later continued with installments that first appeared in German translation.