Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

July 2005

"Do You Suppose It Really Is All About Love?"

At this writing, I have just been informed by our Sime~Gen publisher, Meisha Merlin ™ Publishing Inc. that they will be reissuing the omnibus Sime~Gen: The Unity Trilogy in Fall 2005 and following that with the all-new Sime~Gen: To Kiss Or To Kill in June 2006.  (All about Sime~Gen Novels)

So I must turn in Sime~Gen: The Farris Channel soon. My beta-readers inform me that in the first draft, I only sketched the romance thread, which is in fact a crucial plot element. So I’ve been thinking hard about "love" and how to answer the question, "What does he/she see in her/him?" and "What is love?"

These questions seem to be growing in public consciousness.

http://news.bookweb.org/news/  is a website of the American Booksellers Association that carries monthly statistics on the total sales of books across the country. For Feb and March 2005, the trend was distinctly down. But Romance is becoming more and more high-profile.

On Tuesday, October 26, 2004 author Sue Miller chose Brian Morton's A Window Across the River (Harcourt, $13) to be read by NBC Today Show's Today Book Club. Miller and Morton discussed the selection, which explores the balance between romance and creative temperament.

That balance is no mystery to students of Astrology. Neptune rules both creativity and romance.

For me, perhaps the best explanation is in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Catch Trap which I have reviewed in this column – Marion was indeed a student of astrology. (go to simegen.com and use the site search on "Catch Trap")

So "romance" we understand fairly well, but so very often "romance" does not lead to "love" strong enough to support a lifelong committed relationship such as I must depict in my novel.

The divorce rate in this era is pushing 50% -- people seeking to assuage a heart’s hunger wake to find themselves starving in a smothering relationship and leave. Why? Why isn’t "romance" a reliable path to love? Why do we so want it to be reliable?

Is that yearning the real reason why one of the best growing fields of fiction is Romance? Romance is a branch of fantasy which can be the healthiest form of recreational reading. The Romance genre tends to depict what "success" at fulfilling your heart’s hunger would be like. Visualization is one of the most powerful and productive magickal exercises. Reading romance novels is not a waste of time, it’s an invocation, maybe a form of prayer.

Think for a minute. Can you visualize a band of terrorists sitting in an empty rented house plotting a coordinated series of explosions and discussing romance novels they’ll buy as soon as they get paid? Arguing favorite romance writers?

All this year, we’ve focused on the search for the next myth that our society may embrace as described in the article on the Hero Myth at http://www.herowithin.com/HeroTranceCampaign.html  .

Is it possible that the next "myth" to govern our lives will be that a great lover does not a husband make?

In The Visitor, Barbara Raffin has her female lead character, Rebecca, insist that life is all about love. It is said with such authority and in such context that it arouses an "of course" response from the reader. Rebecca articulates an assumption as deep within our society as The Hero Myth.

The Visitor is one of those apparently trivial novels that is actually vastly profound.

The Visitor is a novel that might become a blatant remake of the film Starman which is one of my all time favorites – a classic right up there with The Day The Earth Stood Still. Both of those films are sf-romance made before "mixed genre" or "intimate adventure" was allowed. Now that they’ve paved the way, Raffin was able to create for us The Visitor. I would really love to see this one as a film!

This novel is set on the shore of Lake Superior, not in Wisconsin as Starman is. But the old house could be a clone of the one where Starman starts. Both stories start with a woman thrown into paralyzing depression by the recent death of a much beloved husband. Both stories start where an alien from outer space appears in a burst of light, cloning the dead husband’s body. And both slowly reveal just "who" is living in that cloned body.

The director of Starman, John Carpenter then takes us into a cross-country road-movie love story filled with Indian Jones style chase/stunt scenes. In the Romance Novel format, Raffin is free to keep us tied to that interesting old house, small town, and the threat of in-laws nosing into Rebecca’s business.

Rebecca asks her Starman: "How can you know for certain that no one can take you away from The Bluffs?"

And he answers, "Because I am authorized to kill anyone who tries to make me leave." And we know this is not at all like the film Starman.

Leaving out irrelevant "action" lets Raffin focus on the pure "intimate adventure" where trust and emotional honesty are the heroic battles to be won during truly relevant action scenes while she examines the truths of love.

Raffin also rings in a couple of tributes to Star Trek notably:

He gazed past her through the open garage doors, his brow creased with thought. "The needs of the many supersede the needs of the few."

In Rebecca’s point of view, we learn from her internal dialog that she feels she failed her deceased husband by being a "clinging vine," never feeling she’d had enough attention. This time, she resolves, she won’t be that way, but she doesn’t do any "head work" or pathworking to achieve this change. So we know she’s not going to make it.

Reading this novel, you come to the question, "What is it that Rebecca is missing here? What is the difference between romance and love?"

I think we can find a major clue set out for us by most of the Paths readers of this magazine follow. But here is one cogent explanation that landed in my mailbox this morning from Chabad, the organization that runs the best Kabballah seminars I’ve ever seen. (find a local Chabad at http://www.chabad.org/centers/  )

Maybe love is not something we get – but something we give?