Genres
Planetary romance
A science fiction subgenre in which the bulk of the action consists of adventures on one exotic alien planet.
Planetary romance is a subgenre of science fiction in which the bulk of the action consists of adventures on one exotic alien planet, often technologically primitive, with a distinctive physical and cultural background. It descends from the lost-world adventures of H. Rider Haggard transposed to other planets: Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom novels (from 1912) found the first wide market and spawned the retroactively labeled "sword and planet" mode, and C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series carried the form forward. After the 1965 Mariner 4 Mars flyby, settings shifted toward invented exoplanets.
For writers, the genre is a single-world discipline: one deeply mapped planet, its cultures and its ecology, rather than the multi-world sweep of space opera. Its personal-scale adventures run on the same engine as sword and sorcery, with the crossing from Earth borrowing the portal fantasy beat.