One difference between my old house and my new place is that I no longer have a separate “library” room. Now, my bookcases are in my living room, which means that when I sit on the sofa (actually a chaise, as I don’t have room for an actual sofa) to watch TV, read, or work on my laptop, I’m looking at my book collection. That’s led to me getting the urge to reread books that catch my eye.

The one I’m reading right now is Promised Land, by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice. Back in the 90s, these two authors teamed up for several books that are essentially science fiction romances. They have a lot of the tropes you’d expect from a romance novel, but they take place in science fiction worlds.

Promised Land is basically a Hallmark movie set on another planet. We’ve got the city girl ending up in the country when she inherits a ranch, complete with the trope of her being entirely inappropriately dressed for the environment in high heels and a short skirt. She even has a purse dog (or something like one). Then there’s the local guy she has to be married to for a year or they’ll both lose their land. Except it’s all on another world. It’s a backwater planet colonized fairly recently, and that’s the reason for the weird inheritance laws to keep the land with colonists rather than speculators. They found that the size of the plot they were given wasn’t enough to make it viable, so neighbors combined theirs, and to ensure that the plots stayed together, they married their children, with the marriage becoming legal upon the death of the last of the original owners. The heroine was sent off to boarding school on another planet and hasn’t come back. Oh, and the “purse dog” is a bug-like alien creature.

Then they throw in some trappings of historical romances. There’s a “wagon train” across this planet to get to the ranch, only the wagons are being pulled by solar-powered vehicles rather than oxen. I got on a weird kick about the westward expansion last summer, and I recognize some things in this book as being related to some specific incidents from history. Knowing how Connie Willis does research, I bet she read the same accounts I did, or at least read about the same incidents. And then there’s the “settling in the homestead and learning how things work while having to work as a team with the husband she didn’t initially want” part of the story, which is right out of historical romance.

However, it doesn’t really read like a romance, even though it’s absolutely a marriage of convenience romance (there’s even a “there’s only one bed” situation). The emphasis is more on the heroine getting over herself to recognize the good in her situation and in the husband she hasn’t seen since they were children, and the attraction is much more emotional and mental. There isn’t the emphasis on sexual tension that you’d get in a genre romance.

The funny thing about this hitting all the Hallmark movie tropes is that this book was published when “Hallmark movie” meant “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” so award-winning literary adaptation starring actors who usually work on the big screen rather than on TV, not cheesy romance. A lot of these same tropes did tend to come up in some of the Silhouette romance novels, which were fond of “save the ranch” type stories, and I think some of those “show up in the country in high heels” bits came up in rom-com movies (though the one that came to mind came out more than ten years later).

Still, if you like those “city girl has to go to the country and meets a hunky farmer” type stories, but you wish they involved spaceships and aliens, you might like this. There’s kind of a Firefly space western vibe (there’s even a character mentioned named Kaylee) but this was several years before Firefly. I’m having a lot of fun reading it. No one writes screwball comedy-style chaos in novel form like Connie Willis does.