Ten More #SciFi Romance Weddings

Note: This post first appeared in the Roswell Daily Record…

June is the month for weddings and many sci-fi romance (SFR) stories lead to weddings — not all, some end with claiming a mate, pair bonding, becoming partners, cohabiting in the spaceship/space station/alien world, etc. Typically, the happy couple is contending with many more complications than the ins and outs of planning a wedding. I asked my friends at the Facebook SFR Brigade group to suggest some stories with weddings from their own pages.

Warning: There may be spoilers for the novels or series ahead.

Aurora Springer is an SFR author who does amazing worldbuilding and her books came to my mind when I decided on this topic. Grand Master’s Mate (Grand Masters’ Galaxy Book 3) has two weddings (different couples). The author explains: “Grand Master’s Mate is the culmination of a trilogy where empath Violet Hunter achieves her full powers and weds her Grand Master Athanor Griffin. The book opens with an abortive wedding and ends with the marriage of Violet and Athanor Griffin. Along the way, the powerful couple befriended a variety of aliens and destroyed their enemies.” Only in scifi romance does a bride have items like that on her To Do list.

Stephanie West shared details from two of her of her books’ weddings. “In Nameless Fate (Fated Mate Book 1)it’s almost like a shotgun wedding the hero has just fought his nemesis (an alien werewolf) for the heroine, and for the alpha nemesis to save face the main characters have to get hitched. The MCs are at the center of the pack in a grand hall reminiscent of a Moroccan bazaar and there they pledge their love, as two married elder Lupercalia bind their wrists to each other. The H then “claims” the h publicly sealing the deal. In my tale Warrior’s Pain (Cadi Warrior’s 4) there’s a mating too, where the gruff Cyprian (the traditional alien military man) mates Riley (a goth scoff-law artistic human) and unbeknownst to her had human music and dancing and it finishes with him singing as he dances with her. She’s tough and always thought the song was sappy, then end-up in tears in his arms.”

In Marie Dry’s Alien Redeemed (Zyrgin Warriors Book 7), the bride has to travel to an alien planet to marry the emperor – no pressure!

Astrid Sharpe says the wedding in The Hunter’s Heart (Love After Earth) involves “giant flowers and crystals – very hippie!”

Linda Graf’s hero and heroine in A Talent for Trouble marry under tense conditions: “Since my crew of folks are outlaws they were on guard during the ceremony.”

Great van der Rol ends her Iron Admiral series with a wedding in the book Deception, and the author shares: “Just about the last scene in the Iron Admiral books is Allysha’s marriage to Admiral Saahren. It’s unusual for lots of reasons, not least because the ceremony is conducted by the alien Ptorix. It was as close as anyone could get to a Ptorix-human marriage. As Allysha mused to herself, she’d been divorced for—what?—two minutes before her marriage.”

Also mentioned was Hope’s Folly (Dock Five Book 3) by Linnea Sinclair. The book blurb states in part: “A man who feels he can’t love. A woman who believes she’s unlovable. And an enemy who will stop at nothing to crush them both.” And the wedding, as explained by the reader who shared it as a favorite, “Philip and Rya get married in the middle of a pretty dire situation, with what everyone trying to kill them, inside and outside their spaceship.” Intense!

Weddings along the way in Lois McMaster Bujold’s classic military SF series Vorkosigan Saga were mentioned by several people, mostly in the vein of how the ceremonies resolved the romantic and professional character arcs for various favorites, including Miles Vorkosigan.

In my Badari Warrior series, the genetically engineered soldiers of the far future were created using alien predator DNA to some extent, so they have mates, not wives and there’s privately done claiming, after which their goddess marks both mates with a golden circle tattoo. In one book, however, Landon, there’s also a human wedding ceremony, arranged in a rush due to the bride’s ill health. The Badari and their human allies were kidnapped by the alien scientists, escaped and are on the run, but among their number is a man who was captain of his own ship. The bride is terribly anxious for the ceremony to be legal in the Sectors as well as on the Badari planet so the former captain marries them. It seems there’s a loophole in the Sectors’ laws that allows him to do so if the humans have formed a colony, which in a way they have. No one’s going to argue!