By Joshua Tyler
| Published 12 seconds ago
Romance novels come in many forms. Contemporary, historical, suspense, true crime, paranormal, fantasy, and a series of romance books based around donuts. The one genre you won’t find heavily represented in the romance section is science fiction.
But there is The Last Hour of Gann.
The Last Hour of Gann was written by R. Lee Smith, a prolific independent romance novelist. It’s also one of the most brutal, disturbing, depraved, traumatizing, messed-up, amazing science fiction books ever written, while at the same time still absolutely remaining a full-on romance novel.
You’ve never, never, read anything like The Last Hour of Gann.
It takes you to an alien planet along with Amber, an uneducated, pathetic loser of a woman. There it will drag you screaming through otherworldly dirt, kick you in the face with a clawed alien foot, and rip your entire worldview apart.
The plot seems pretty basic at first. Humans sign up to colonize new worlds, and a weak, corpulent half-prostitute named Amber signs up and drags her ungrateful, more attractive sister along with her. The trip goes wrong, the ship ends up crash-landed on a hostile alien planet. Things go insane.
Nearly everyone dies gruesomely, except for a few who trail Amber out of the ship’s burning wreck. What follows is an alien planet version of Lord of the Flies as Smith explores the depths of human depravity with psychological precision.
And then the lizard man shows up.
The planet is inhabited by a race of intelligent, medieval lizard people. They like rough sex, and they don’t want consent.
While the book details horror after horror being visited upon Amber, she finds strength within herself to become something greater. She embarks on one of the hardest-earned character transformations in literature.
What sets The Last Hour of Gann apart isn’t just its worldbuilding (though it’s dense, coherent, and fully realized). It’s the emotional brutality. This book is grim. It tackles assault, slavery, religious fanaticism, and survival with an unflinching gaze. It never NEVER flinches, even when you want it to. In the center of that darkness, somehow, it is one of the most compelling, believable, and also somehow horrible romances science fiction has ever pulled off.
Amber is fat, self-loathing, traumatized, smart, and deeply cynical. Most people around her think she’s garbage. Meoraq starts off as a bigoted, scaled zealot who sees humans as filthy beasts and prefers his women to be non-sentient. Their story is not cute. It’s earned. Painfully, slowly, brutally earned across every mile of scorched alien wilderness they trek.
At its best, The Last Hour of Gann is about belief systems colliding. It’s about pain and resilience. It’s what happens when you strip away everything—civilization, religion, speciesism—and ask what makes someone human.
Meoraq’s arc from arrogant holy warrior to someone capable of love is one of the best written in the genre. Amber pushes herself beyond what she thought possible and endures by using her one superpower: an unflinching ability to face reality. Somehow, that’s enough.
The Last Hour of Gann dares you to care about two beings who should have killed each other in chapter three. It succeeds. It’s sci-fi so ugly and twisted that it becomes beautiful. If you make it to the end, you’ll never forget it.
This is one of the very few full-on romance novels with a sci-fi focus ever written, but even if there were millions of others, The Last Hour of Gann would still be the greatest. It’s epically long, it’s deliciously dense, but it sticks with the style and feel of the romance genre to tell its tale. Whether you like romance, sci-fi, or just unique pieces of fiction, The Last Hour of Gann is a must-read if you’re strong enough to stomach it.
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