issue 19 // volume 43

Romance and relationships in speculative fiction

> Exploring the boundaries of the human capacity for love

Caroline Ho Arts Editor

I: unrealistic and forced; it’s kinky and occasionally uncomfortable; it’s just plain weird. Romantic plots and themes in fictional worlds—whether in books, games, movies, Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, or anything else—might seem fun to read and useful for enriching a story, but completely unbelievable and inapplicable to real life. However, romance and relationships that don’t even faintly resemble anything you'd see on Earth can still be incredibly powerful and often better than realistic fiction for illustrating a lot of real-world issues.

In every society on Earth, there are institutional structures and power dynamics that very much dictate how we interact with one another, romantically or otherwise. In a large part of the world, monogamous heterosexuality is seen as the default, and although we've made a lot of progress as a society in confronting and deconstructing these norms, some limitations are still very prevalent. That makes it all the more liberating to inhabit, at least within the space of a shared imagination, a world where these structures and stigmas are challenged or entirely reversed.

Single-gender worlds are one way that writers and worldbuilders question our ingrained assumptions of gender and sexuality. Patrick Ness’ young adult sci-fi Chaos Walking trilogy takes place ona planet inhabited only by men and boys, after a disease has killed all women. Female-only worlds are more common in literature, and there’s an entire subgenre of feminist utopia/ dystopia fiction with stories such as Carnival by Elizabeth Bear, which features the matriarchal and primarily lesbian society of New Amazonia.

Speculative fiction also allows a writer to transpose issues like interracial relationships to a far more provocative level. Stories about romance between real- world cultures are invaluable in bridging societal divides, but shipping humans and non-humans is even more subversive. Whether it’s aliens (video game series Mass Effect), the undead (zombie romcom Warm Bodies), elves, immortals, or any other pairings, attraction between two people from entirely different species highlights the artificiality of a lot of cultural taboos about romance.

Virtual reality is another arena for exploring the dynamics of a relationship. Meeting and dating someone online hasn't yet reached the level of fully

immersive VR, but a viewer can still be immersed in media like the light novel and anime Sword Art Online, where characters fall in love while trapped indefinitely in a video game. It’s another take on the trope of falling in love with the mind instead of the body. Going a step further, what if there is no body at all, but only the virtual mind? As we develop increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence in the real world, we're faced with the question of what truly distinguishes our human intelligence from an intelligence created by humans. If one major distinction between the two is the ability to feel complex emotions such as love and affection, the notion of a romantic relationship with an artificial mind becomes especially thought-provoking. From anything as silly as Sheldon Plankton’s computer wife Karen in SpongeBob Squarepants, to the critically acclaimed film Her— in which a man falls in love with his intelligent personal assistant operating system—there is something uncannily fascinating about probing the gap between artificial and real emotion. There are many more ways to challenge and reject the norms around which we structure our romantic relationships. The power of speculative

Get ready for a downpour

> ‘Risk of Rain’ video game review

Lauren Kelly Editor-in-Chief

Rs of Rain is a side-scrolling,

platforming, roguelike action game.

It was the brainchild of two students

from the University of Washington, and

after receiving funds on Kickstarter,

it was slowly rolled out across various

platforms, from Windows in 2013, to

OS X and Linux in 2014, and finally, to

PS4 and PS Vita in 2016. With the game

recently on sale for $3.99 down from

$9.99 on the PlayStation Store, grabbing

it was an easy (and rewarding) choice. Although you can play by yourself,

it’s definitely best played with a few

friends on your couch or online. Many

websites, and the game information

itself, report that you can play with

two offline, and up to four online, but

we've had no problems connecting

three controllers offline, with room for

a fourth. For online, however, you can

only connect with one other player, and

you can both bring ina guest. This is

technically four people, but it’s much

less flexible than allowing you to connect

with a few friends in different locations. To start with, there are three

difficulty modes—Drizzle, Rainstorm, and

Monsoon. If you're looking for casual play,

Drizzle is a great place to start, as it’s still

difficult, especially at the beginning. You

can't unlock everything on this, though, so

if you're a completionist or just want more

options, you'll have to go with Rainstorm.

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For each run through the game, you can choose from one of 12 characters with different moves and stats, only one of which is unlocked at the beginning. Levels are large and involve a lot of platforming, and you spend your time searching them for chests with random upgrades and for the level’s teleporter to move forward.

This may sound simple, but stages are littered with enemies with different strengths and weaknesses, and, left unchecked, any of them can kill you.

This is a real issue when death means restarting the game, even if you're on the final level. To make things a little easier, in co-op, as long as one player makes

it through the teleporter, everyone will revive to start the next stage. Clearing the teleporter, no matter how many players are alive, is another challenge—you

need to survive a go-second enemy wave

complete with bosses, and then kill every remaining enemy in the level to move on.

As time progresses in your run, the difficulty goes up, which means if you camp out in a level to get more upgrades, the game will respond by levelling up as well. I’ve found this is usually worth it, though—with enough upgrades, including basic things like upping attack speed and health regen to more extreme things like shooting a Cyclops-esque optic blast after using enough abilities, the game definitely gets easier. Monsters can only handle so much, and a deluge of missiles fired by your five drones can be tough for them. Alternatively, with enough health regen abilities, it can be tough for them to get in enough damage to chip away at you substantially.

While it can be frustrating to lose, the gameplay is incredibly fun,

Image via ‘Risk of Rain’

arts // no. 7

aT 23

SRONTIES ANOTHER.

fiction is the ability to deal with concepts we basically take for granted and throw them in an entirely different context. Such stories might not be realistic

(yet) but that makes them all the

more powerful in demonstrating and challenging what it means to love.

and rewards your improvement with lots of new unlockables, including the aforementioned characters, new and better upgrades, and artifacts that drastically change the gameplay. Overall, I’ve had a blast with it, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants a fun, and sometimes ridiculous, challenge. This isn’t to say the game doesn’t have its issues. With the PlayStation version, we've run into numerous technical issues in the two weeks we've been playing it. Luckily, these have all come about in online multiplayer, so any of you who just want to take advantage of some good ol’ couch co-op are safe. However, the glitches are substantial. A few times, items and characters we unlocked during an online game, although available until we closed the game, had disappeared by the next boot up. Stranger still, we’ve desynced near the end of the game, with both of our games having a “ghost” of the other person still playing—but not doing anything the other person was actually doing on their end. After an hour-long, teamwork-filled run to the end this is really disheartening and disappointing. Still, it’s worth a go. This game is deep and impressive, especially coming from such a small development team. My heart lies with couch co-op and always will, so supporting games like these to keep the genre alive is an easy choice for me, even if the game does have a few issues. And for the low price tag, you're getting way more than your money’s worth.