Alien Romance: Ice Planet Barbarians Started Something

By Emily Conway · Dragon Dildo®

Ice Planet Barbarians was self-published in 2015. It found its audience quietly for years, and then BookTok found it, and then several million people discovered simultaneously that alien romance had been waiting for them the whole time. The genre did not begin with that book and it did not end with it, but the moment it broke through is worth understanding, because the reason it resonated so widely is the same reason the whole category exists.

The appeal is not the blue skin. The appeal is what the blue skin represents.

What Radical Otherness Actually Offers

Human romantic fiction operates within a set of shared assumptions about how attraction works, what it looks like, and what it is supposed to lead to. Those assumptions are so embedded in the genre that most readers do not notice them until a book removes them entirely.

Alien romance removes them entirely. The figure at the centre of the story does not know the social rules, does not care about status hierarchies, has no cultural framework for playing hard to get, and experiences attraction as a direct, unmediated fact rather than something to be negotiated. The resonance this produces in readers who have spent their lives in a world full of social performance is not difficult to explain. It is extremely easy to explain. The alien simply does not do any of that, and it turns out a significant number of people find that extraordinarily appealing.

The Anatomy Is Part of It

Alien romance is unusually honest about the physical dimension of its appeal, which is part of why it attracted so much attention when it went mainstream. The genre does not pretend that the physical differences are incidental. It describes them with some care, because they are central to what the fantasy is offering.

A form that was not shaped by human evolutionary history produces different physical details - different texture, different structure, different proportion. Those details are interesting in fiction because they go somewhere that nothing constrained by the usual rules can go. The imagination, given permission to work outside those rules, tends to arrive at things that are genuinely unlike anything else.

That is also what the pieces in the Riftscar collection are built around.

The Riftscar

Within the Known Realms, the Riftscar is the storm territory in the north-east. Something tore here and did not close it. The violet light that runs across this territory is not weather - it is the rift discharging, and it has been doing so for longer than anyone has kept count. The ground either side has never settled back into anything you could call stable.

What lives in the Riftscar does not belong to the Known Realms. It arrived, and the local rules have been accommodating it ever since. This is the one realm whose creatures cannot be explained by the land that holds them - because they did not come from it. Alien and cosmic-horror forms belong here and nowhere else in the range.

The Riftscar collection is the physical extension of exactly this fantasy. The shapes in this collection have never shown much respect for the number of limbs a creature is supposed to have, or the number of eyes, or the general principle that a body should agree with itself. If Ice Planet Barbarians was the book that made you realise what you had been looking for, this is where that leads.

Everything is made from 100% platinum-cure silicone. The broader dragon dildo range covers the other realms if a different weight of the fantasy is what you are after.

Emily x

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