After watching Heated Rivalry all the way through twice in one week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of romance as speculative fiction. 

If the Heated Rivalry fever hasn’t reached you yet, it’s a Canadian TV series (based on a Canadian book series) that tells the story of two rival professional men's hockey players who—secretly, over the course of nearly a decade—fall in love. It’s sexy, sweet, and overall a brilliant work of art.

As someone who reads a LOT of speculative fiction, but who’s been (almost subconsciously) avoiding dystopian stories for a while now, Jenka Gurfinkel's take on why we're collectively so obsessed with this show right now really resonated with me. 

In Heated Rivalry Is Anti-Dystopia Art, Gurfinkel says:

Reality has become Black Mirror.

Heated Rivalry might not be science fiction, but it, too, is a fantasy set in a speculative universe. 

This framing makes me want to actively seek out more stories that make joy in the future seem plausible. 

After I finish my third Heated Rivalry watch-through, of course.

The story I'm recommending this week is nothing like Heated Rivalry, but maybe kind of is? At least in my brain, because it’s also a love story and one of the first that comes to mind when I think of “anti-dystopia art”. 

You can read this story for free!

Thirty years after Elma York led the first expedition to Mars, she is retired and living in an established Mars colony. But now, she must choose between going on one last space mission or remaining planet-side with her terminally ill husband.

It's quite short so I won't say more, except that it's a gorgeous story that is tender, quiet, and more about long-lasting love and mortality than astronauts or Mars. 

It was also the first written—but is the last chronologically—in Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series, which consists of four novels and eight shorter stories. So if you like the universe, there's plenty more to explore.

That said, this novelette is a standalone, so you don’t need to read any of the other books before jumping in and it doesn’t really contain spoilers. 

It’s also my favourite of the stories in the series that I’ve read.