Author Spotight - Michelle Levigne talks about her passion for writing Science Fiction Romance

I just like the flexibility, the extra possibilities available in the whole SF genre. I guess I write romance because relationships are important in the stories. One of my friends pointed out that my stories were very "domestic," meaning the relationships were a large partof the story.

There are more "toys" to play with, writing SF. More things to do, more places to go. But the important thing is to make sure that the "toys" and the otherworldly settings and situations are integral to the plot -- if you took them out of the story, the story would fall apart, it couldn't be written without them. If you can take away the ray guns and the spaceships and have the same story without a hitch, then maybe it really isn't an SF story, you know? I'm working on a series of short stories where I take faerie tales and turn them into SF romances. This is possible, maybe even necessary, because of the "unearthly" elements in faerie tales -- the magic, the creatures, the strange landscapes, the curses, the quests, the characters -- it translates well into SF settings and characters. The genie can turn into a sentient computer. Goblins turn into aliens. The Beast turns into a hero infected with a mutating disease. Beauty is the intrepid doctor who works to cure him. On and on.

A classic example is a story idea I had, where a rich, powerful, ruthless man, kidnaps a young woman who turns out to be his daughter. He couldn't get away with it for long in our modern world. However, put the story in a star-spanning civilization, where every planet has its own laws, and communication and tracking people isn't easy between worlds, suddenly it's very possible. And the daughter he kidnaps was originally bred for him for a specific purpose, for possible genetic gifts that will make him even more powerful. If he can get her to think like him.

So the possibilities are broader and more convoluted in SF, and you can have all sorts of tools and toys and settings and sidekicks that you can't find in our modern world that has become so very small and familiar.