In Love Galaxy (May), the first in a new series from DAW, Sierra Branham layers a political murder mystery into a dating show romance in which a trash collector from a forgotten planet competes for the chance to marry one of the royal twins who could inherit the empire—if she isn’t murdered first.
How did you adapt reality dating shows for a far-future world?
I wrote this book for my sister, who specifically asked for a book with a dating show like The Bachelor. I tried to keep a lot of parallels to the dating shows in our world, and then go just a few steps further. The show is run by an authoritarian government. How do they exploit it for narrative control? How do they use it to appease the populace?
What was your biggest challenge writing Love Galaxy?
The dating show. No shade to people who love and read romance, but we’re very different readers. I tend to lean towards more political, heavy, epic SF or fantasy as a reader, and that’s what I had written up to this point. I wasn’t as interested in the dating show aspects of the book, and I had to do a lot of research. I think it’s one of the weaker parts of the book, but on a very surface level, I learned the term wifey from my editor and watched that show The Unreal, which was fun to look at and see how producers are manipulating narratives under the surface.
Do you think there will still be dating shows in the far future?
I think there probably will. Our brains are programmed to compare; we want to know what these other people who are like us are doing. I didn’t push the boundaries of current dating show formats in Love Galaxy, but they could be pushed by other authors. Reality shows blow up. They’re huge. And we keep going back to them, even when we know they show things that are dramatized and overblown and aren’t super real.
Love Galaxy masks government propaganda as a dating show—how did you determine each contestant’s political beliefs?
Every draft I did went deeper. The first draft asked, “What’s the framework?” I got down the main relationships. The side contestants were pretty flat in the first draft. Then, later drafts asked, “Who would be competing in the show?” To make a romance engaging for me as an SF writer, I decided to make it a murder mystery. Who might have a motive to kill contestants? That’s where I started to develop some of those side characters. Whenever they did show up on-screen, I wanted there to be a reason, and I wanted them to feel and look distinct. Through each brief moment we have with them, I wanted to get across this idea that they have their own reasons for being on the show, whether they’re politically motivated or not.
