10 Times Sci-Fi & Fantasy Went Looking for Love Outside Our Species

The Shape of Water, by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus
Both a truly magical film and a forthcoming novel, The Shape of Water is essentially a love story between a mute, timid woman and an amphibious man-shaped creature captured from the Amazon and brought to a research facility in cold war-era Baltimore. Elisa, unable to speak since childhood, works as a custodian in the highly secure facility and begins communicating with the creature through sign language and music. When she learns that the “Asset” will be killed in order to study its internal biology, she resolves to rescue him, putting herself and her friends into mortal danger and leading to a very real, very tender romance between her and the creature. It’s a powerful story that explores fantastic SFF concepts while hitting you right in the feels, prompting you to not only root for Elisa and her aquatic beau, but to ponder what, exactly, defines “real love.”

Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
If you had to choose, would you want your insectoid lover to have the head of a bug and the body of a person, or the other way around? Mieville went with the former in crafting the khepri, removing at least one major roadblock to romantic bliss between scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin and the bug-headed (as in, her entire head is a bug, not the head of a bug) Lin. But that leaves plenty of other challenges, like the fact that her main mode of communication is through smell. That this romance is one of the least interesting aspects of Mieville’s New Weird epic tells you all you need to know about the book—although fans of happy endings might not want to emotionally invest in this one.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers
There are several interspecies romances in Chambers’ delightful debut novel, including one between the nominal main character Rosemary and the reptile-like alien Sissix—who overcomes her distaste for the way humans smell—and a one-sided love affair between a technician and the AI that runs their ship. Chambers assumes that if you cram numerous sentient biological—and, er, non-biological—entities onto a ship together and send them on an extended trip across the stars, eventually, love will find a way. We have to agree.

Libromancer, by Jim C. Hines
In his Magic Ex Libris series, Hines creates a universe where things are made real from the pages of books. One of them is Lena, a Dryad—aka a wood nymph—who sparks a romance with the protagonist Isaac. What’s interesting, aside from the fact that this is a human-dryad romance, is that Lena sprang from the pages of a novel that depicted her in what is sadly a stereotypically male-oriented sexualized way. Lena herself is aware of the fact that she’s the embodiment of a male fantasy, and struggles with overcoming the limitations of her origins. It adds layers and layers to her relationship with Isaac, and makes this one of the more interesting interspecies romances out there.

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
You want to talk about elf-human romances, you have to start with Tolkien. While no one would describe the author as a firebrand of the sexual revolution, he certainly had little trouble imagining that an immortal elf might sacrifice her endless existence in order to marry a scruffy-looking mortal who, on more than one occasion, had been mistaken for a vagabond. While the exact physical differences between elves and men can’t be all that huge, considering how littered fantasy novels are with the scions of human-elf pairings, the fact that you more or less have to die in order to consummate your love ranks them with the most romantic—and tragic—romances ever conceived.

Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
Citing Twilight might seem obvious, and it’s certainly not the only vampire story to involve a real romantic feelings between a human and a vampire. But it’s certainly become the best-known, and since more or less the whole point of the series is Bella’s relationship with Edward, it’s become the ur-example of vampire-human love. The fact that Edward and his family are “ethical” vampires of a sort is what makes the relationship possible—as long as you don’t contemplate the squick factor of a creature who is more than a century old creeping on a high school girl.

The Xanth series, by Piers Anthony
Anthony’s infamous—and apparently endless—Xanth series is filled with slightly off-color allusions to sex and stuffed to bursting with lovers, but what really lands it on this list is the fact that in Xanth, every example of a human-creature hybrid is the direct canonical result of two completely different races getting hot and heavy. Centaur? A horse and a human definitely slept together at some point. A harpy? Some revolting vulture and some—presumably revolting—human definitely had an interesting night. All of this means Xanth may be the freakiest fantasy universe of them all.

The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, by Cassandra Rose Clarke
At the core of this heartbreaking, low-key sci-fi gem is an unusual romance between a human woman and a robot. Catarina is five years old the day her father returns home with an android named Finn, the first of his kind. There have been automata and AI in this scorched, rebuilding world, but Finn is unique—more and less human than anything that came before. As Cat grows, her relationship with Finn shifts from guardianship to friendship to something resembling love, though a love that strictly violates social norms and creates emotional upheaval for both woman and robot. We already emotionally invest in digital avatars, virtual pets, and entire virtual communities, so once we have robots that resemble humans physically and emotionally, it’ll only be a matter of time before we start falling in love with them, right? After all, we already have an official robot citizen.

King Kong, by Edgar Wallace
In every single version of the King Kong story, the gigantic ape gets all googly-eyed about a human woman. Whether or not this counts as romantic love depends on your imagination; it’s always possible—and heavily implied—that Kong just thinks of the lady in his palm as a pretty pet that he’s jealous protective of. In other versions of the story, though, there’s a clear indication Kong does have feelings for the woman he’s carrying around like a precious jewel. Sure, the mechanics of that relationship are… troubling, to say the least; still, this is one of the most iconic pairings in the history of SFF interspecies love.

Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
Gaiman’s sweet, slender novel is your standard love story: a half-human, half-faerie (but unaware of his parentage) boy meets literal fallen star-turned-girl who he intends to gift to his human crush—but he falls for the star instead story. That this is a multi-layered interspecies (?) romance isn’t surprising, considering that Gaiman wrote it, and buried soundly in the tale is a central theme of a man who views women as objects and goals and then slowly realizes they are people with their own stories and agency. It’s enough to make our hearts flutter just thinking about it.
What’s your favorite romance that involves more than boring old human beings?